Diaghilev/Cunningham

Author(s): David Vaughan

Source: Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter, 1974-1975), pp. 135-140
Published by: College Art Association
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Diaghilev/Cunnin
DAVID VAUGHAN
Diaghilev would have loved Cunningham. Besides admiring him
as an artist he would have respected the seriousness and
discipline of his company, the spare wit and style of
Rauschenberg's costumes and lighting, the consistent invention
of the choreography and the provocative strangeness of John
Cage's musical accompaniments. Above all, his acute artistic
antennae would have tingled at the sense that Cunningham was
talking in the language of today.
-Alexander Bland, The Observer
(London), 2 August 1964
It might be said that it was almost by accident that Sergei
Diaghilev became the animator of the most important dance
company the world has ever known-as though ballet chose
Diaghilev, rather than his choosing ballet as the medium
through which his ideas would be transmitted to the world.
Although he had had some musical training he was in the
beginning essentially a dilettante who edited a luxurious
magazine called Mir Iskustva (The Worldof Art) and organized
extraordinary exhibitions. For a while he also edited the
Annual of the Imperial Theaters and at the turn of the
century, when several members of the group of painters
centered around his magazine planned a new production of
Delibes' ballet Sylvia, he acted as intermediary between them
and the administration. The initiative for this production came
from Alexandre Benois, the real balletomane of the group: he
was to design one act and Constantin Korovin another, with
costumes by Leon Bakst and Valentin Serov. In those days
ballet scenery was not designed by artists, it was executed by
scene-painters. Unfortunately, the project collapsed after
Diaghilev had a disagreement with the administration over who
was to receive credit for it, and he was dismissed. (The walls
had been breached, however, and the Mir Iskustva painters did
subsequently design various productions for the Imperial
Theaters.)
A few years later Diaghilev conceived for himself the
mission of showing the art of Russia to western Europe: in
1906 he took an exhibition of Russian painting to Paris, the
following year he organized a series of concerts of Russian
music there, and in 1908 he presented Chaliapin in Boris
Godunov at the Paris Opera. That Diaghilev was still not
particularly interested in the ballet was made clear by his
program note on Tchaikovsky for one of the concerts, which
omitted to mention that the composer had written three
full-length ballets as well as operas and orchestral and chamber

music. Nevertheless, the obvious next step after Godunov was

to bring the St. Petersburg ballet to Paris the following year.
Even so, the great Saison Russe of 1909 was a season of
ballet and opera, and it was expected that Chaliapin in
Rimsky-Korsakov's Ivan the Terrible (Pskovitianka) would be
the biggest draw. The ballet repertory was thrown together
hurriedly and consisted of reworked versions of ballets that
had already been given in Russia. As we know, it was the ballet
that caused the sensation-the dancing of Pavlova, Karsavina,
Nijinsky, and Bolm and the decors by Bakst, Benois, and
Roerich-and ballets even had to be added at the end of opera
performances to ensure a sellout.
From then on it was the ballet to which Diaghilev devoted
most of his energies; he soon established his company on a
permanent basis and began to create a repertory of new ballets
calculated to appeal to the sophisticated public of Paris and
other European cities. Nijinsky threw in his lot with Diaghilev
and severed his connection with the Imperial Theaters (though
other members of the company, until the Revolution, returned
to Russia from time to time to fulfill their obligations there).
Diaghilev's genius was in the choice of collaborators: Benois
had given him the idea that a ballet should be an integrated
spectacle in which choreography, music, and design were all of
equal importance, the prime example being the Fokine-Stravinsky-Benois Petrouchka. In the first period of the Ballets
Russes the emphasis was mainly on exoticism of time and
place-the Orient, ancient Greece, pagan Russia, with occasional excursions into the baroque (Le Pavilion d'Armide) and
19th-century Romanticism (Les Sylphides, Le Carnaval, Le
Spectre de la Rose).
The decorative aspect continued to be dominated by Bakst
and Benois. Although their work had a profound effect on the
theater and decorative arts in western Europe, it essentially
represented a continuation of the ideas of Mir Iskustva. The
first step toward a greater modernism came with the advent of
Gontcharova and Larionov, whose designs derived from
Russian folk and primitive art, which in their eyes was related
to Cubism and Fauvism.
In music there were two important developments-one the
use of "symphonic" works such as Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade for ballet, the other the commissioning of scores
from contemporary composers of the caliber of Stravinsky,
Debussy, Ravel, and Richard Strauss. Choreographically, the
first ballets embodied the reforms proposed by Fokine
(naturalism, truth to epoch and locale, integration of dance
and mime, elimination of separate numbers), but more radical
135

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innovations were introduced in Nijinsky's own ballets,

however short-lived-the inversion of classic technique in Le
Sacre du printemps, the contemporary subject matter of eux,
and the totally new relation of dance to music in L'Apres-midi
d'un faune, where the steps for the first time were not tied to
the meter of the music.
By the time of the outbreak of the first World War, the
influence of the Ballets Russes was fully established and
indeed assimilated, and if Diaghilev were to maintain his
position as arbiter of the most advanced and cultivated taste, it
would be necessary for him to move ahead and leave behind
the exoticism of the first period. The second, postwar, period
of the Ballets Russes actually began in 1917 with the
collaboration of Massine, Satie, Picasso, and Cocteau in
Parade, which a little belatedly brought Cubism to the stage,
and not only in Picasso's designs-Massine devised a choreographic equivalent of certain elements of Cubism in the passages
of naturalistic but nonnarrative pantomime; the finale was a
collage of everybody in the cast repeating their movements at
once. On a similar principle, Satie's score incorporated sirens,
typewriters, pistol shots, etc. Diaghilev was getting more and
more interested in avant-garde painting: he had already
commissioned the Futurist Giacomo Balla to design a
mixed-media theater event (lights, moving scenery, but no
dancing) to accompany Stravinsky's Fireworks, and Fortunato
Depero made designs for the ballet version of the composer's
Le Rossignol. In the event, these were not used, and the ballet
was designed by Matisse.
Throughout the second decade of the Ballets Russes,
Diaghilev commissioned his decors from easel painters who
might not otherwise have been drawn toward the theater: the
Delaunays, Derain, Gris, Laurencin, Braque, Utrillo, Mir6,
Ernst, Bauchant, de Chirico, Rouault. In many of these cases
the realization of the vaguest of sketches was entrusted to the
scenic artists Vladimir Polunin and Prince Schervachidze (the
prodigious Picasso very often painted his own sets), and
costume-makers like Vera (Sudeikina) Stravinsky, the composer's widow (for instance, the costume worn by Nemchinova
in Les Biches, executed by Mme Stravinsky, bears little
relation to Laurencin's sketch with its suggestion of a quite
unmanageable train). Usually the scenery was constructed of
painted flats and cloths in the traditional way, however
avant-garde the actual design, but in some ballets experiment
was carried further. La Chatte was decorated with constructions by Gabo and Pevsner using materials that were quite new
to the stage-clear plastic, and an oilcloth floor covering. The
Soviet artist Georgy Yakulov designed a set for Le Pas
d'acier that brought to the West the kinetic, constructivist
style then current in the theater of Meyerhold and even in the
State ballet theaters: the d6cor was made up of platforms,
ladders, wheels, pulleys, signals, etc., which all jiggled, spun,
and whirred in the finale.
Even more remarkable than these, in many ways, was the
decoration of another Massine ballet, Ode, by Pavel
Tchelitchev. The hoopskirts worn by some of the women were
duplicated in the dresses of puppets of diminishing size that
formed the main element of the scenery. Other dancers wore
allover tights, and the decor also included light projections and
even a movie, made in collaboration with Pierre Charbonneau.
Such things have become commonplace, not merely in
experimental, but in commercial theater as well, in recent
years, but it is worth remembering that these and many other

Henri Matisse, Costume for one of the mourners in Diaghilev's Le

Chant du Rossignol. 1920.

innovations were first seen in the productions of the Ballets

Russes.
It has been customary to say that the last years of the
Ballets Russes were a period of decadence, that after the
commercial failure of Diaghilev's great production of the
four-act Petipa-Tchaikovsky classic The Sleeping Beauty in
London in 1921 (Bakst's last work for him), he turned to an
ever more desperate pursuit of novelty at all costs, particularly
in terms of decor, to the detriment of choreography and
music. From today's perspective, we might rather say that
Diaghilev wished to make the ballet an expression of the
contemporary spirit in life and art. Conservative critics might
be horrified at ballets like Le Train bleu, but young people
were excited to see ballets that bore a recognizable relation to
their own times.
Nor were all the ballets of this period of ephemeral interest
only. Some of the music Diaghilev commissioned may have
been trivial, but scores like Poulenc's Les Biches and Berners'
The Triumph of Neptune are at least first-rate ballet music,
and it was Diaghilev's suggestion to Stravinsky that he base his
score for Pulcinella on the music of Pergolesi that led to the
transformation of the composer's aesthetic, without which the
history of contemporary ballet, or at least that part played in
it by George Balanchine and his company, would be very
different. As for choreography, one need only mention here
that two of the most influential and revolutionary dance
works of the 20th century were presented by Diaghilev in,
respectively, 1923 and 1928: Nijinska's Les Noces and
Balanchine's Apollo.
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Pavel Tchelitchev, Decor for Diaghilev's Ode, 1928.

the members of his company who went to work elsewhere:

Kochno continued to devise libretti, some of them for
Balanchine's new works for Les Ballets 1933 and the
reconstituted Ballets Russes, which also presentednew ballets
by Fokine, Massine,and Nijinska,as well as much of the old
Diaghilev repertory. When Balanchine came to the United
States in 1934 he brought with him decors by Christian
Berard,Derain,and Tchelitchev from Les Ballets1933, and at
first the new ballets he made in this country were often
decorated by the last-namedor by Americanpainterschosen
by Lincoln Kirstein.As we know, this practice,still the rule in
the days of Ballet Society (1946-48), has largely been
abandoned since the formation of the New York City Ballet,
partly through economic necessity, partly as a matter of
artistic policy. In any case, stage design in this country, not
only for the commercialtheater but for most ballet and opera
companies, like other aspects of artisticendeavor,is subjectto
union regulations-few companies will dare to defy United
Scenic Artists and commission a decor from a painterwho has
not passed the union examination. Thus, while no one would
wish Agon, say, to look otherwise than it does, one must
deplore the state of affairs that makes marvelousballets like
Liebeslieder Walzer or Who Cares? look as dismal and dowdy

Giorgio de Chirico, Costume for a male guest, Diaghilev's

Le Bal, 1929.

Toward the end, Diaghilev'sinterest in the ballet waned as

his health began to fail; he turned again to music and his
collection of rare books and no longer exercised total artistic
control over his company's productions, many of which were
conceived by his secretary Boris Kochno. After Diaghilev's
death the tradition of artistic collaborationwas continued by

as any contemporarySoviet ballet.

But Diaghilevhad been interestedin recruitingnew painters
not only to decorate his productions-he would let them
change the nature of the stage space itself, or even the human
figure, if they wanted to, and he was always ready to let his
artists make theatrical use of what they were doing in their
work as a whole. As we have seen, a remarkablenumberof
contemporaryexperiments in stage design were foreshadowed
in Diaghilev's productions, and we can only guess at what
further experimentshe might promote if he were still with us.
Which bringsus to the other half of the presentexhibition.
Merce Cunningham'smajor works over the last 20 years have
been a series of distinguished collaborations: as in the
Diaghilev ballets, the choreography, music, and decor have

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been of equal importance, with the significant difference that

instead of the integrated spectacle of Diaghilev's time, a
Cunningham work is what one might call a disintegrated
spectacle, in which the elements are independent of each
other-and often are brought together only in the very last
stage of the creation.
From the time of his earliest solos Cunningham has had the
musical collaboration of John Cage, and their way of joining
music and dance has always been unconventional. While in the
ballet the practice has always been to choreograph dances to
music that exists, whether or not specifically composed for
that ballet, a common procedure in the modern dance has
been for music to be composed after the choreography is
made, but with strict adherence to its metrical structure (the
"counts," in dancers' parlance). Either method, in the opinion
of Cage and Cunningham, meant the subservience of one or
the other of the elements, and they proposed instead a dance
whose relation to the music would be simply that they both
happened at the same time-the music would define the
dance's duration but not its rhythmic structure or even its
"mood." The logical conclusion of this idea has been that
neither the music nor in recent years the dance has had to be
the same at every repetition of a piece.
For most of his early solos Cunningham designed his own
costumes, and many early group works were designed by
Remy Charlip, who danced in Cunningham's original company. Cunningham has said: "I had always been interested in
working with artists: Isamu Noguchi with the ballet The
Seasons for the Ballet Society; David Hare with a handsome
but unfunctional costume for a solo, unfunctional in the sense
that it was too heavy to wear to do anything; Howard Bay
with mediocre costumes and set for the Brandeis production

of Les Noces. These were not collaborations so much as

designs after the fact of the dance." (Noguchi had already
designed for Martha Graham and was to design Orpheus for
Balanchine, also for Ballet Society, in 1948, the year after The
Seasons, which was Cunningham's first major work.)
The earliest costume in the present exhibition was made for
Cunningham to wear in Dromenon, in 1947, and was worn by
him again in the Solo of 1973. The late Sonja Sekula painted
the design directly onto the tights and leotard while
Cunningham was wearing them, and a little of the design
usually comes off onto his body every time the costume is
worn. Cunningham choreographed The Monkey Dances for a
production of Satie's play Le Piege de Meduse at Black
Mountain College in 1948, a production that Diaghilev himself
might not have disdained to present-the text was translated
by M. C. Richards, Willem and Elaine de Kooning did the set,
Cunningham's tail was made by Richard Lippold, and the cast
included Elaine de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller.
The Cunningham Dance Company formally came into being
in 1953, also at Black Mountain, and it was there that Robert
Rauschenberg became associated with it, having taken part in
the John Cage Theater Piece in the summer of 1952. In 1954
Rauschenberg designed a set for a Cunningham dance,
Minutiae. This set, actually executed in collaboration with
Jasper Johns, is related to the small collage also on exhibition.
It is three-dimensional and was used as a freestanding unit in
center stage around, through, and under which the dancers
moved during the course of the piece. Two years later, for the
Satie Nocturnes, Rauschenberg made a set and costumes that
represented his idea of night-not darkness but the bright
moonlight of a nuit blanche. In Nocturnes, in fact, as opposed
to much of Cunningham's work, the relation of dance to music

Robert Rauschenberg, Set from Cunningham's Minutiae, 1954.

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was a fairly traditional one, and the decor and costumes were
further extensions of the same imagery presented in the music
and the choreography.
Cunningham had already been experimenting with chance
methods of composition, in which he sought to free himself
from the limitations of his own imagination and of a dancer's
habitual way of moving from one position to another, by using
such methods as tossing a coin to determine the choice,
sequence, tempo, and frequency of the movements in a dance.
Even Nocturnes was choreographed in this way. Some
consultation with the designer frequently took place, for
obvious reasons-for an example, see Cunningham's letter to
Rauschenberg on his ideas for Antic Meet, reprinted in
Changes, Cunningham's notes on choreography (edited by
Frances Starr for the Something Else Press, 1968). All the
same, Rauschenberg was given and exercised total freedom to
decorate and clothe the piece: the dancers wore basic black
tights and leotards, to which were added 35 ready-made
garments and objects-overalls, burlap sacks, a nightgown,
parachutes, hooped underskirts. In the same year, 1958,
Rauschenberg painted the famous pointillist backcloth and
costumes for Summerspace, for which Cunningham had the
idea, which he described in the same letter as "looking at part
of an enormous landscape and you can only see the action in
this particular portion of it." Rauschenberg carried the idea
further in his decor-when the dancers were at rest they
became almost invisible, camouflaged like insects or animals
whose protective coloring conceals them in their environment.
Again in Aeon (1961), there was the idea of using basic leotards and tights, bluish in color, to which different elements
could be added: long sleeves for the women, trousers made of
feathers for the men. Rauschenberg also devised certain events
such as small explosions that occurred at the front of the stage
as the curtain rose, and a machine suspended from the flies
that passed across above the dancers as they lay prone at the
end of a section. With all these pieces there is a difficulty as far
as an exhibition is concerned: habitually, Rauschenberg did
not design his d6cors and costumes, he made them-there is no
sketch, there is just a costume or a set. This practice was
carried to its logical conclusion in Story (1963), performed all
over the world in the tour of 1964, but never in New York:
for this ballet Rauschenberg constructed a set out of whatever
materials were at hand in each theater the company visited (at
one series of four consecutive performances in London,
Rauschenberg's contribution consisted of making a painting on
stage, which grew night after night); for the costumes the
dancers again wore basic leotards and tights, in yellow this
time, to which they could add various garments out of a large
duffel bag whose contents were dumped in the wings. This
dance and Field Dances of the same year introduced a greater
element of indeterminancy into the performance itself, the
dancers being given freedom of choice among various
possibilities in the choreography. Cunningham has described
this kind of activity as "a kind of anarchy where people may
work freely together."
The end of the world tour also marked the close of the
period of collaboration with Rauschenberg, during most of
which the painter had functioned also as stage manager and
lighting designer. In the last few years, Jasper Johns has been
the artistic advisor to the company, designing some pieces
himself and for others choosing an artist who has been free to
decorate or define the space in whatever way he likes: for

Andy Warhol, Set for Cunningham's Rainforest, 1968.

Scramble (1967) Frank Stella made strips of canvas in primary

colors, stretched on movable frames; Rainforest (1968) was
decorated with Andy Warhol's floating silver pillows; Johns
made a decor based on Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass for
Walkaround Time (1968), and for Second Hand (1970)
dressed the dancers in costumes that made a spectrum when
they lined up across the stage in the final bows; Robert Morris'
vertical beam for Canfield, crossing and recrossing the stage
and throwing light onto the backcloth, and Bruce Nauman's
row of standing industrial fans for Tread (1970) both placed
the decor between dancers and audience; for TV Rerun (1972)
Johns' "decor" consisted of a group of photographers who
moved around the perimeter of the performing area shooting
the action with still or movie cameras.
For the ballet of the Paris Opera last year Cunningham
choreographed a work of epic proportions, with music by
John Cage and decor by Johns, assisted by Mark Lancaster,
Un Jour ou deux. This piece used the whole enormous space
of the Opera stage, divided into two areas by scrims, one down
front, one halfway back, shading from very dark to very light
gray; behind the farther scrim, the shadowy outlines of the
architecture of the stage's rear wall could be seen.
His own company's programs are now almost always given
over to what Cunningham calls Events-uninterrupted per139

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Jasper Johns, Set after Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass for Cunningham's Walkaround Time, 1968.

formances of pieces from the repertory, whole or in part, put

together in an arrangement for the particular occasion and
rarely repeated more than two or three times. His newest
choreography, including Changing Steps of 1973, has been
seen only in this way. Cunningham's reasons for doing this,
like most of his decisions, are essentially practical ones: an
Event can be arranged to fit any kind of performing area,
whether proscenium stage or gymnasium or studio, and can
accommodate itself to any of the circumstances that may
occur, such as loss of dancers through permanent departure or
temporary disability, unsuitability of stage surface, or whatever-Cunningham feels that in the face of this kind of
unpredictability, it is better to be flexible than rigid.
As with any artist, his experiments and innovations are
rarely made for the sake of doing something new, but because
that is the direction in which his way of working takes him. A
choreographer like Cunningham does not deliberately work in
an experimental way, any more than one like Frederick
Ashton works in a consciously traditional way-they do what
they do, and the results may seem to some people surprisingly
"classic" in a Cunningham work (as in the Paris Opera piece)
and innovative in one of Ashton's. Thus in his Scenes de ballet
(1948) Ashton had the idea "that you could make the front
anywhere, not necessarily... where the public sit and see."
Cunningham has worked on a similar principle at least since
Suite by Chance (1953)-"The dancer is at a given point in the
dancing area. That point in space ... is center for him... ."

We are accustomed by now to the fact that such ideas are

"in the air" and can occur to different artists who may not be
aware of each other's work. By the same token, we can trace
Cunningham's lineage back to various works of the Diaghilev
period (contrary to what many people have said, Cunningham
was not influenced by Martha Graham in his choreography or
even in his technique, except in a negative sense)-Nijinsky's
use, or nonuse, of the music in Faune (and also the shapes
made in space between the dancers); the collage elements of
Parade and the Dadaism of another Satie ballet, Reldche,
presented by the Ballets Suedois in 1924; the abstract designs
made by the dancers in gray tights in Massine's Ode; the
dislocations of the stage area of Les Noces; the sculptural
groupings of Apollo. I am not suggesting that Cunningham is
"influenced" by these ballets, most of which he cannot have
seen, merely that their discoveries, once made, become part of
what is available to any choreographer, just as Cunningham in
his turn has come across new ways of moving and new ways of
putting movements together, and thus made them available to
U
those who come after him.

David Vaughn has written on dance for many American and foreign
periodicals. He has been an associate of Merce Cunningham's for 15
years. This piece originally appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition
at Hofstra University's Emily Lowe Gallery.

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