The aim of Les Saison Russes du XX1e Siecle is to restore and perform the ballets which Diaghilev and the made famous just over a hundred years ago. There were three programmes. I caught the last, all three pieces choreographed by Michel Fokine.
Chopiniana, which premiered in Paris in 1909, is the Russian name for the ballet we in the West call Les Sylphides. Fokine wanted it to be the personification of a poetic vision. The setting is a forest in moonlight. A poet (Xander Parish) wanders in a dream world of serene spirits. The lighting was totally non-atmospheric and did nothing for the romantic mood. There was no orchestra. The dancers danced to recorded music and Chopin was amplified so loud – so totally out of keeping with the ballet’s lyrical softness and poetic sadness – that the ballet was ruined
The Polovtsian Dances, lifted from Alexander Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor, was re-choreographed by Fokine in 1909. The loud amplified music and the pounding rhythms were more appropriate here for the barbaric Tartar setting and the frantic exciting energy of the warriors, slaves and women folk.
Artistic Director Andris Liepa had intended to stage Cleopatra as the centre piece for the London season but the leading lady had suffered an injury and Saison Russes performed Scheherazade instead. The story comes from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the music is by Rimsky-Korsakov. The oriental kitsch roused the audience to wild enthusiasm in 1910. Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Marcel Proust were particularly impressed. Leo Bakst’s sumptuous décor and costumes were a huge success and famously influenced the Paris fashion houses.
The sultan’s favourite wife (Yulia Makhalina) is caught in flagrante delicto with a negro slave. Xander Parish is far too white-skinned (and well-bred) to be playing a randy slave. The eroticism, debauchery and the massacre of the whole harem, women, slaves and eunuchs, which caused such a sensation at the premiere, is very anodyne by today’s standards and feels like a pale carbon copy of the original until the frenzied dancing just before the killings.