The Monte Carlo Ballet Russe

CECIL BEATON

The Ballet is a puppet-world, which gaily portrays, rather than mirrors, life. It is a witty commentary, without melodrama and without insistence. It can, on occasion, produce a tragic depth of emotion. hut it prefers to laugh sympathetically at the frailties of man, without too much thought for the forces which control him.

The puppets of the Ballet are symbols. Everything in Ballet combines to make it easier for the audience to recognize this, to dissociate the very real men and women who portray these symbols from their material reality. Ballet is an elaboration of mime: there arc no words; and words, even in the most apt and poetical of writing, must always he stripped of certain banal associations. Their absence merely gives freer rein to the imagination and to the emotions; intellect, always necessary in some degree when words are concerned, need he no check to ecstasy. To Ballet, the audience can surrender itself entirely; and without the effort, which words demand, it can he held in a state of suspense. In the same way the synchronization of music and movement, and such effects as a chorus performing an action in perfect unison, a thing which never occurs in everyday life, make it easier for the audience to understand that the dancers can transcend matter-of-fact reality, and cause a fantasy to live.

Not that the Ballet is an easy entertainment, devised for the idle; but it is entirely

buoyant. One can go to the Ballet tired and come away refreshed; but, at the theatre, certain effort is necessary. One does not go to the ballet to get rid of emotions, but to gain consciousness of emotions—consciousness of living.

Here is jet another difference between drama and ballet: the audience does not, at any time, have to remember that the fact that Hamlet's father was murdered before the play began, or that GEdipus married his mother years ago, is of importance to the plot. These puppets are innocent of the past. A dancer enters the stage and for an hour he weaves a pattern with which are interwoven the patterns of the other dancers. That is all that matters; the audience need only he concerned with the present.

My first Ballet was The Good-Humoured Ladies. The undreamed-of vividness of the costumes against the sombre and mysterious tones of nocturnal Venice; the harpsichord, which I was hearing for the first lime; the contrast of demented gaiety, rapid, glittering music and eighteenth-century affectation, with the haunted silences; the lovelorn Constantis; the fragments of ghostly melody; the sinister line of beggar musicians, gliding with dragging, side-long step across the gloom, provided for me the greatest emotional experience 1 had yet known.

That I might see jewels such as this, set among red-nosed clowns and performing

seals, my three and sixpences were impatiently saved. Under these circumstances, the futuristic colors of Scheherezade, Thamar and Cleopatra were branded on my memory and, together with the simplicity of Carnaval, yielded inexhaustible subjects for my water-colors.

When the season ended, there came the unexpected discovery of the shrine of Ballet in the Charing Cross Road, presided over by Mr. Cyril Beaumont, whose pale complexion, thick ginger hair, cut en brosse, and velveteen jacket added further thrill to this balletomane's paradise. It would have afforded me the utmost pleasure to feel that 1 could visit this Mr. Beaumont, whose intimacy with the Ballet lent him such glamor, and 'who just knew everything 1 wanted to know, and pass the time of day with him, but Mr. Beaumont was there primarily to sell books and so l would visit him with a hardly saved seven and sixpence in my pocket, determined to get its full value. I felt that if I were buying a seven and sixpenny hook, I could demand to see at least fifteen pounds worth of other books and be granted ten minutes of Mr. Beaumont's conversation.

It was here that 1 heard first the legend of Nijinsky and pored over the pictures of Lopokova, Tchernecheva (whose face remains, for me, a haunting symbol of the Ballet) and Massine.

When the Ballet returned, it brought with it a new style. There were new French artists and new French composers, working together in new and unexpected ways, and, wonder of wonders, there were three ballets each night.

Picasso was the key-note of this period. In The Three-Cornered Hat, he produced a deécor which was the common denominator of the Spanish countryside, and, consequently, infinitely more telling than a representation of any part of it would have been. So true were Picasso's wiry balconies, the bird-cage tacked to the wall, the striped awning, the suggestion of vines, the glaring whites and hard colors, that when, later, I visited Spain, I recognized its characteristics from the memory of this Ballet.

New idols now began to appear, Nemchinova, Danilova, Nikitina, and, in particular, Serge Pi far, the embodiment of charming gallantry and youth, who became the inspiration for the next group of Ballets. La Chatte was the herald of the Cellophane, American cloth, aluminum, tube furniture epoch. I he ballet was too cold to be sexual; it was as though physical beauty were being analyzed in the hard light of a laboratory. Les Biches was perverse without being irritating or pretentious. DiaghilefT extracted the best designs possible from the sophisticated imagination of Marie Laurencin, which blended per(Continued on page 72) fectly with the plaintive, metallic music of Poulenc. Nijinska's choreography gave the dancers in this hard, white, Riviera setting a pointed swagger, which completed this odd and witty piece of contemporary satire. Then there was the classical simplicity and humanism of the Apollo Musagetes. The greys of the decor intensified the sunburnt physical perfection of Lifar, in scarlet tunic, as he slowly interwove his pattern with the Muses to the unexpected classicism of Stravinsky's swooning themes.

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But most moving of all was the Prodigal Son. Rouault is a difficult artist, hut the grand and terrible gloom of his dark blues and deep crimsons and blacks prepared the audience for the direct and poignant simplicity of the Ballet. Here there is no laughter: depths of emotion are plumbed which are usually only reached by tragedy. The curtain came down with Lifar, after a drag across the stage, almost intolerable with the suspense in which it kept the audience, in a pose of complete yet taut exhaustion, curved like a trout which ran fight no more, at the knees of the statuesque, Biblical father.

When I first went to Ballet, DiaghilefT was forgotten in my gratitude to Bakst for having placed a purple bow on Mariucca's yellow brocade. Now I began to appreciate the driving force which controlled the artist and every other part of the Ballet besides. DiaghilefT became my hero, but although it thrilled me to see him, dressed like a dandy, in Monte Carlo, in Venice or at the Savoy Grill, London, T was, as so often happens in the case of people whom one particularly wants to meet, afraid to meet him. More, my shyness prompted me deliberately to avoid him and, although DiaghilefT proved to be a model of courtliness, ibis shyness reached a pitch of terror when the Baroness d'Erlanger insisted that I should meet him in the Piazza, at Venice, and show him some of my designs. Such was my reverence for this impresario, whose volcanic presence, tireless activity and flawless taste had brought such gifts.

And then, quite suddenly, he died. His death was something that no one had ever contemplated. There had been

so much life in his Ballet, that there had not been time to think of what would happen when he was gone. All was confusion; DiaghilefT had left no will; and his brother, to whom, as his heir, the scenery and properties now belonged, could not be found. No one appeared who could carry on, even temporarily. The dancers who had been hopefully awaiting a miracle, could wait no longer, and, one by one, they drifted away. Sacheverell Sitwell wrote:

"It was exactly a year ago that DiaghilefT died. Since then it seems as if nothing more had happened. All the strings that he held in his hands, those small white hands that were in such contrast to his stature, dropped from him, and the puppets have never moved again."

And then, four years later, the miracle did happen. Incredibly, Colonel de Basil gathered the company together again and, more incredibly still, it was a success. Of course, just as in the later phases of DiaghilefT's career, those who had known Nijinsky bemoaned the decline of ballet, so, now, many voices could talk of nothing but the good old days. And I too, prejudiced by the knowledge that the driving force was no longer there, unconsciously felt that anything might go wrong, that the dancers might even be technically, as well as spiritually, incapable of carrying the performance through. But gradually I realized that not only would the Company not fail, but that there were more dancers of technical excellence than before.

The note on which to leave the Ballet is that of Choreartium. This is the only real experiment that has been made since the death of DiaghilefT. It is true that it is an experiment in one direction only, that of choreography, but the fact that an experiment has been made at all shows that there is life in the Ballet. It may be that in our time there will never come another master like DiaghilefT, who can lead the Ballet forward as a whole. But the vital fact is this, that the Ballet is not relying entirely on past successes, but is a living movement, and, as long as it is living, it can afford to wait for another master who will lead it to complete fullness of life.