Dance and the Visual Arts

Dance Chronicle ISSN: 0147-2526 (Print) 1532-4257 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ldnc20 Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts Joellen A. Meglin, Karen Eliot & Lynn Matluck Brooks To cite this article: Joellen A. Meglin, Karen Eliot & Lynn Matluck Brooks (2017) Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts, Dance Chronicle, 40:3, 243-258, DOI: 10.1080/01472526.2017.1375278 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2017.1375278 Published online: 07 Nov 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 225 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ldnc20 DANCE CHRONICLE 2017, VOL. 40, NO. 3, 243–258 https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2017.1375278 Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts Joellen A. Meglin, Karen Eliot, and Lynn Matluck Brooks When American Ballet Theatre premiered in America Alexei Ratmansky’s two-act re-creation of Le Coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel) on June 6, 2016, New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay pronounced Richard Hudson’s evocation of Natalia Goncharova’s stunning sets and costume designs for the ballet (1914, 1937) the chief marvel of the evening.1 Paul Stiga, a well-known design collector, traveled from Boston specifically to see the execution of those designs. And I, too, felt Ã bowled over by them. Not that the other elements of the production were to be sneezed at. Le Coq began life as an opera composed by the great orchestrator Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, based on a libretto adapted from Aleksandr Pushkin’s verse version of stories from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Produced as an opera-ballet by Sergei Diaghilev, with choreography by Michel Fokine, it played in Paris in 1914. The Original Ballet Russe performed (and recorded) a one-act ballet adaptation by Fokine in 1937. Le Coq now unfolded in choreographic phrases of unexpected rhythm and caesura, spatial range, and gestural intricacy. ABT’s dancers moved with speed, attack, poetic inflection, and precision. Nonetheless, designs that construct a world, indulge the viewer in a suspension of disbelief, tantalize the eye and transport the imagination to mystic realms, and, cru- cially, stimulate not only spectators, but also those intimately involved in the process of creation—librettist, composer, choreographer, and dancers alike—deserve the acclaim they receive. Such designs linger in the memory and suffuse the experience of total art toward which ballet, at its grandest, aspires. They also leave some of the most important relics and material traces of the conception and aesthetic style of a ballet. Goncharova would go on to design Les Noces (1923) and Les Contes de Fees (1925) for Diaghilev, and she was, of course, not the only cutting-edge avant-garde artist he drew into the inner circle of the Ballets Russes in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. Others included Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Joan Miro, Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Georgi Yakoulov, Pavel Tchelitchew, Giorgio de Chirico, and Georges Rouault.2 Indeed, one could Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ldnc. Ã For a glimpse of Goncharova’s designs for Le Coq and those of other visual artists who collaborated with the libret- tists, composers, and choreographers associated with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, see the online exhibit Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1909–1929: Twenty Years that Changed the World of Art, at Houghton Library (Harvard College Library), http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/diaghilev/ (accessed August 21, 2017); American Ballet Theatre, Metropolitan Opera House, Playbill, June 8, 2016, 2:00 p.m., The Golden Cockerel,20–23. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 244 J. A. MEGLIN ET AL. reasonably argue that the critical mass of avant-garde visual artists working in Paris in the period 1909–1929 shaped the avant-garde aesthetics of the Ballets Russes. Dance historian Lynn Garafola has pointed out that Diaghilev’scompany created its revolution “outside the academy, at the crossroads of the other arts,” where “choreographers enriched their stock of ideas and applied them to dance.” Working outside the danse d’ecole, the cosmopolitan impresario brought inter- national currents in visual arts, music, and literature to bear on the ballet, yield- ing a heady mix of modernism that renewed the art form for the twentieth century.3 The great Pablo Picasso created six designs for Diaghilev ballets: Parade (1917), Le Tricorne (1919), Pulcinella (1920), Cuadro Flamenco (1921), Mercure (1924), and Le Train bleu (1924). Currently on display at the New-York Historical Society Museum and Library is Picasso’s drop curtain for Tricorne, newly acquired and conserved.4 One can experience vicariously how the drop curtain put the spectator in mood and milieu with its flâneurs exchanging gossip, taking refreshment, and “being seen” in the arcades overlooking the bullring. Parmenia Migel’s edited reproductions of Picasso’s designs for the ballet reveal how the master made the period costumes “eminently theatrical and suggestive no less of the gravity than of the gaiety which are characteristically Andalusian, by his lavish use of bright colors in opposition to black and by his recourse to very bold stripes and arabesques.”5 In short, swirling line and color in high contrast made the movement of human bod- ies pop out. Could Picasso have failed to influence Leonide Massine, when it came Ã to movement invention in the Andalusian style? Beyond such direct interactions between dance makers and visual artists, the latter sought, throughout the twentieth century, ways to render, evoke, and even incorporate motion into their work in any number of ways. Admittedly, film— motion pictures—ignited a profound fascination with montage, which could go far beyond mere mise-en-scene. However, is it mere coincidence that motion—specifically, movement of the human body in space—is the sine qua non of the dance art? In their quest to understand the spiritual, the invisible structure ordering the material universe, and the time-space conundrums of modern science, visual artists often turned to dance as subject matter. For their part, influenced by the zeitgeist toward abstraction, dancers sought to capture the material essence of movement through various means of ampli- fying the body’s physical presence and motion in space and time. In this spe- cial issue, we explore this rich dialogue between dance and the visual arts in the twentieth century, and how artists of diverse mediums entered such intermedial terrain. Through the interplay of the mobile and the immobile, the Ã In “Massine/Picasso/Parade,” a lecture presented at the Dance Studies Colloquium (Temple University, Philadelphia, October 29, 2013), Gay Morris has argued that Picasso’s designs for Parade (1917) similarly influenced the structure and syntax of Massine’s choreography for the ballet. Massine also studied Spanish dance directly with Felix Fernan- dez Garcı and others. Parmenia Migel, ed., Pablo Picasso: Designs for “The Three-Cornered Hat” (Le Tricorne) (New York: Dover, 1978), v–vi. DANCE CHRONICLE 245 fixed and the constantly in flux, the textured and the seamless, dancers and visual artists expanded their technical horizons. As they emulated each other’s art form, they moved toward greater abstraction in their own work, for there is no direct translation of one medium into another. Modernity catalyzed this intermedial impetus, unleashing the desire to convey the realities of the encounter between the human and the nonhuman. New tech- nologies in the form of machines and mass media, the cataclysm of war, and seis- mic shifts in demographics (i.e., migrations and globalization) spurred artists of all mediums toward modernity or confrontation with these large-scale, sweeping changes in the human condition. Some wished to re-humanize society after wit- nessing inhumanity and carnage on a grand scale.6 Many sought to instill their art form with a new dynamism and vitality. How do these three themes—mobility, kinetic energy, and modernity—inter- twine with one another in dance’s dialogue with the visual arts throughout the twentieth century? One way to broach this question is to explore reconstructions and re-creations of dances steeped in interdisciplinary collaboration and avant- garde aesthetics. Another is to examine visual artworks that come alive through their focus on mobility, kinetic energy, dynamism, or—not by accident—dance. The latter path is easier than might be expected because nowadays one can hardly attend an art exhibition without encountering dance in some shape or form. Consider, for example, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s landmark exhibit, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (February 21– September 1, 2014). The viewer ascended the museum’s layout—as if suspended in an Aeropittura painting—in dizzying spirals up the vortex of Italian Futurism. If we are to believe at least one art historian of this movement, founded by F. T. Marinetti in an “advertising blitz,” it was the mother of all twentieth-century avant-gardes.7 While Marinetti, the chief theorist of Italian Futurism, was a poet, eventually the movement encompassed all manner of visual arts—painting, graphics, photography, architecture, ceramics, murals; literature—poetry, hybrid texts, and multimedia; and performing

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