Dance aficionados will have had this show in their diaries for months but putting together such an enlightening tribute to the myriad achievements of Serge Diaghilev – whose name may be less familiar to many than those of the artists he collaborated with – for a general audience is no mean feat. Although the exhibition gets off to a slow start while it establishes where dance was at before Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes shook it up so radically, it builds dramatically, illuminating the lasting impact of the innovative artistic director who collaborated with Braque, Cocteau and Coco?Chanel, championed the composer Stravinsky, had an affair with dancer and choreographer Nijinsky (and others of his principal dancers), and, after two decades of febrile creativity, died suddenly of diabetes – and on his uppers – at the age of 59 on holiday in Venice.
In specially commissioned footage composer and broadcaster Howard Goodall talks with great clarity about the innovation and legacy of the music that accompanied the Ballet Russes (half Diaghilev’s ballets had original scores, by composers who included Poulenc, Rimsky Korsakov and Debussy) . It’s a shame, though, that the sound from the audio visual elements is audible all over the galleries and tends to overpower the dance music.
The highlights of this major retrospective are the vast original front cloth for ‘Le Train Bleu’ by Picasso, the towering backcloth by Natalia Goncharova for ‘The Firebird’ and the clips of ballets, old and new, that punctuate the show. The exhibition occupies three galleries (which may not be obvious if you’re not familiar with the V&A’s layout), the middle one designed by Tim Hatley to give visitors the sense that they’ve managed to sneak backstage. In the final gallery there’s a real treat: footage from a witty, brittle ballet, ‘The House Party’, choreographed by Peter Darrell. Commissioned in 1964 for television, it’s an updating of Bronislava Nijinska’s 1924 production of Poulenc’s ‘Les Biches’ for the Ballet Russes.
Diaghilev the impresario reverberates throughout the V&A’s galleries as he does down the years; strange, though, how elusive Diaghilev the irascible man remains.