The Russians are coming
T.S. Warren
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Handsome George Zoritch and the gilded Nini Theilade in the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, 1939
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Fascinating film recalls when Ballets Russes ruled the dance roost
They came, they danced, they conquered... most of the time.They were the globetrotting Ballets Russes, featuring glamorous ballerinas courted by Hollywood. Yet even their dazzling presence couldn't charm the Ku Klux Klan in the American South. In the 1950s, the Klansmen frequently interrupted Ballets Russes performances, demanding that Raven Wilkinson - the first African-American woman to break big-league ballet's colour bar - be singled out. To a tutu, the Ballets Russes dancers refused, yet after six years of hostile receptions in the South, Wilkinson, who stoically recounts her story in the documentary Ballets Russes, was asked to leave the company.
Far more than a ravishing dance film, Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller's Ballets Russes is an en pointe chronicle of the 20th century as experienced by a flamboyant troupe of artists who lived through war and revolution to take ballet to the boondocks and capitals of the world.
Their dramatic tale is told through six decades' worth of extraordinary archival photos and vintage film clips, beginning with impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the original company of Russian dancers that took Paris by storm in 1909. Utilizing the talents of Matisse, Stravinsky, Picasso, Miro, Nijinsky and a very young George Balanchine, Diaghilev fused the avant-garde in music, movement and design, revolutionizing ballet in a manner that has never been equalled since.
On Diaghilev's death in 1929 the company folded, replaced by the Ballets
Russes de Monte Carlo with first Balanchine, then star dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine at its artistic helm. It later split off into the rival Original Ballets Russes in a heady period known as "the ballet wars."But the ballet politics, to which the doc devotes too much time, pale in comparison with the extant dance footage and the vivacious personalities of the surviving dancers, many of whom were interviewed by the filmmakers at a Ballets Russes reunion in New Orleans.
Charming, spry and flirtatious, these are individuals who devoured the 20th century, and in old age their appetites haven't diminished all that much. Many were still active as ballet teachers, historians and coaches at the time of the interviews. Among the surviving octogenarian stars are two of the three "Baby Ballerinas," (Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska), who along with Tamara Toumanova became stars at 13, 14 and 15 respectively. Like so many of the Ballets Russes's female dancers, they were the children of Russian émigrés in Paris who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. One gathers from their chatty reminiscences that pushy stage mothers played a large role in their pubescent career choice.
Recalling the Ballets Russes train that toured the United States in the 1940s, 90-year-old English-born dancer Frederic Franklin - who still performs character roles - wryly recalls how the train had 17 nationalities and eight mothers, "Russian mothers."
Franklin, who partnered the rival prima ballerinas Alicia Markova and Alexandra Danilova, makes a particularly juicy storyteller, recounting love affairs and clashing egos, as does the now deceased Mia Slavenska, whose blond beauty and confrontational sexuality recalled Marlene Dietrich.
They are an invigorating contrast to the bland, anonymous corps de ballet and remote stars that populate ballet companies today.
To see the footage of Franklin cavorting with the extraordinarily supple Danilova in Massine's The Gay Parisian or Slavenska's ghostly bird-woman apparition in the 1938 film La Mort du cygne ("The Dying Swan") is alone worth the price of admission.
LES BALLETS RUSSES
DIRECTED BY DAN GELLER AND DAYNA GOLDFINE
DECEMBER 9 TO 15
BYTOWNE CINEMA
| Film Review 101/Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller pull off the impossible (for me at least) in their staging of Les Ballets Russes |
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I liked this doc and I don't even like ballet. Trust me, that's huge for me. I can take modern dance in pretty much any format or style but actual tutu wearing ballet? I'm just not a fan. I respect it and the people who devote their lives to the artform but it has just never appealed to me. That being said, I liked this thing and I'll be the first to admit that I came in wanting to hate it. Drag me to a doc about a subject I hate? Good luck...and yet I can sit here and recommend it. I think "Les Ballets Russes" could have benefited from a bit more polish in the editing dept. but otherwise it was flawless and informative. If I could learn to like it I can't imagine what an actual ballet aficionado will get out of this.
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Pedro Eggers
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