The Making of Ballet Modernism

Abstract

In 1914, as Europe went to war, Serge Diaghilev launched an artistic revolution that profoundly altered the identity of the Ballets Russes. By and large, historians have dated this artistic shift to Parade. Unveiled in Paris in 1917, three years after Diaghilev's last full-scale season in the French capital, the work served public notice of the switch in his allegiance to the avant-garde. Parade came with impeccable modernist credentials: designs by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, a libretto by Jean Cocteau, program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Only Léonide Massine, the ballet's choreographer, was an unknown quantity, although by the early 1920s, his name, too, would be synonymous with modernism. It is not difficult to understand why historians have identified this work as the cradle of Ballets Russes modernism.

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