GLR May-June 2023

achieved a kind of primitivism that re nounced “graceful poses ... no pirouettes or jetés , indeed nothing that would commonly be called dancing.” The piece also proved sexually shocking. Nijinsky as the faun was covered in a “fig-leaf body-stocking” de signed by Bakst. The faun, “lounging in a

ernist rabble-rousers, and a distracted public that was “from the beginning restless, laugh ing, whistling, making jokes.” Insults and snarky comments were “lobbed between factions” while laughter and “scornful clap ping” continued as the dancers performed “without flinching.”

DIAGHILEV’S EMPIRE How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World by Rupert Christiansen Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 373 pages, $35.

Focusing on Diaghilev’s career and personal life, Chris tiansen’s book necessarily packs a large cast of characters. Di aghilev’s lovers form a daisy chain of malleable youths who seem to know the sexual score. Nijinsky is dispatched after getting swept up by Romola de Pulszky, daughter of a renowned Hun garian actress whom he marries following a brief acquaintance aboard the ship that was taking the Russes company—without Diaghilev—to a South American tour. Needing to replace Nijin sky “both in his bed and on his stage,” Diaghilev lands upon Leonid Massine in the corps of the Bolshoi Ballet. Massine, a “cool customer,” submitted to the impresario’s “offers” despite his indifference to the sexual arrangement. Boris Kochno, a White Russian youth who fled Moscow in 1917, was eventually introduced to Diaghilev in 1920 by an older bisexual friend. He became Diaghilev’s loyal and lasting personal secretary and ad ministrative assistant, if not his permanent bedmate. After the Great War, when the company took its new base in Monte Carlo, the ambitious Patrick Healey-Kay, a middle-class English lad, briefly Russified himself as “Patrickieff.” He was signed up by Diaghilev after an audition in London. He changed his name to Anton Dolin and went off to Monte Carlo, “where Diaghilev took him under his wing and into his bed.” Years later, Dolin confessed that the impresario’s needs were “straightforward, rather adoles cent, and did not involve any form of penetrative intercourse.” Christiansen is excellent on the influence of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes following the master’s death in Venice in 1929. Just as the author has detailed the company’s rollercoaster of fi nancial ups and downs, and Diaghilev’s sometimes desperate coming up for air, the final two chapters, a kind of epilogue fol lowing Diaghilev’s death, trace the rivalries and internecine strug gles that took place, though the company managed for a time to remain intact. Even more engaging is Christiansen’s coverage of the various personalities in the field who kept ballet alive throughout the 20th century, a list that includes Vassily de Basil and his Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo; dancer and choreogra pher George Balanchine and his brief but notable Les Ballet 1933, financed by Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and Surrealist in fluencer Edward James; Ninette de Valois’ Vic-Wells Ballet, which would become the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and, finally, the Royal Ballet; the teacher Marie Rambert and her eponymous bal let company; and American Lincoln Kirstein, who inveigled Bal anchine to leave France and establish a ballet school—the School of American Ballet—as well as successive dance companies that culminated, in 1948, in what became the premier ballet company in America, the New York City Ballet. Every dancer of note in the past century makes an appearance in Rupert Christiansen’s love letter to the ballet, including the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the delightful drag company that both does not take itself seriously but takes ballet and its his tory for gospel. Christiansen has written a most engaging valen tine to his favored addictive drug: the classical dance in our time in all its variety, melodrama, excess, and pathos.

rocky landscape,” spies a group of nymphs seeking to bathe. He zeroes in on one of them, but she rejects his advances and drops her shawl as she flees. The faun snatches and caresses it “before laying it on the ground, lowering himself on top of it and graphi cally arousing himself to orgasm.” Diaghilev had tactically maneuvered to seat a first-night au dience filled with prominent celebrities and “a glut of high soci ety.” He was ready for a scandal. The audience responded to Faun with a mix of cheers and catcalls. In the coming days, divided press coverage ramped up public interest and, soon enough, fu ture performances were sold out. A fresh controversy followed in the 1913 season with LeSacre du printemps , a 35-minute ballet scored by Stravinsky, choreo graphed by Nijinsky, and centered around a patriarchal tribe that celebrates earth’s seasonal renewal and fertility, ending in the sac rifice of a young virgin. The score was “often violently dissonant and strident” with a “hammering intensity” at a tempo “faster than the dancers could humanly keep pace with.” The dance move ments were anti-classical, the peasant costumes “cruelly uncom fortable,” yet at Nijinsky’s relentless insistence, precision movements were required. The premiere in May 1913 provoked a legendary furor among an audience of ballet devotees, anti-mod

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