THEATER
Classic Stage Company
Fire and Air
"This world premiere by Tony Award winner Terrence McNally explores the rich history of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev’s itinerant Russian ballet company. Surrounded by great talents of art, design, and music, the tempestuous relationship between Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky revolutionizes dance forever."
THE LEGACY OF THE BALLETS RUSSES BY FIRE AND AIR ASSISTANT DIRECTOR SOPHIE ANDREASSI
Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes existed for a mere twenty years, and yet it is difficult to overstate the company’s influence on dance, art, music, and design in Western Europe and beyond. From its inception in 1909 to Diaghilev’s death and its dissolution in 1929, the company drew throngs of spectators, eager to witness the product of Diaghilev’s latest, carefully-orchestrated collaborations among promising artists of different disciplines. The itinerant company’s experiments galvanized the art world in their time, and forever altered the trajectory of art and culture in the 21st century.
Diaghilev capitalized on a vibrant Paris arts scene and engaged his talented circle of Russian émigrés. Artists who secured Diaghilev’s approval were poised to take on a near-cult following. Visual artists and designers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalì, Coco Chanel, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Natalia Goncharova, André Derain, Léon Bakst and Georges Braque enjoyed the exposure afforded them by creating works for the company’s stages. The company’s composers included Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss. If not already prominent in their field, these and other composers achieved legendary status, especially after the creation of such enduring works as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune.
Diaghilev’s choreographic protégés, including Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, Serge Lifar, and a young George Balanchine, tested the viability of currents within modernism at the level of the body while exploring the limits of the classical ballet vocabulary. Significantly, the Ballets Russes challenged the centrality of the idealized female body to ballet. It was the male body was of special importance to Diaghilev’s aesthetic.
Following Diaghilev’s death, offshoots of the company formed to continue to tour the company’s existing repertoire internationally. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, national companies on both sides of the Atlantic grew in prominence, often under the purview of Ballets Russes disciples. On the American side, Fokine, Massine, and Nijinska were some of the first choreographers to be engaged by the newly-formed Ballet Theater, now known as American Ballet Theater, in New York in 1939. Balanchine, too, moved to the States and, with Lincoln Kirstein, created the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the New York City Ballet in 1948.
In the 1970s, Robert Joffrey, director of the Joffrey Ballet, began a project of reconstructing select pieces from the Ballets Russes canon, inviting Massine to oversee some of his and Fokine’s ballets. Later, Joffrey set about the ambitious project of reviving works by Nijinsky, including Rite of Spring, relying on extensive research by dance historians to attempt to capture the spirit of the piece in the absence of any films.
Under Diaghilev’s ingenious, if heavy-handed, supervision, the Ballets Russes reimagined ballet as the fusion of movement, art, and music. The product of these experiments was a rich legacy of innovation and an addicting history that continued to inspire artists, scholars, and the popular imagination through to the present day.
Photo: Alexandra Danilova and Serge Lifar in the Ballets Russes’ Apollo (originally Apollon musagète) in 1928.
Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes existed for a mere twenty years, and yet it is difficult to overstate the company’s influence on dance, art, music, and design in Western Europe and beyond. From its inception in 1909 to Diaghilev’s death and its dissolution in 1929, the company drew throngs of spectators, eager to witness the product of Diaghilev’s latest, carefully-orchestrated collaborations among promising artists of different disciplines. The itinerant company’s experiments galvanized the art world in their time, and forever altered the trajectory of art and culture in the 21st century.
Diaghilev capitalized on a vibrant Paris arts scene and engaged his talented circle of Russian émigrés. Artists who secured Diaghilev’s approval were poised to take on a near-cult following. Visual artists and designers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalì, Coco Chanel, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Natalia Goncharova, André Derain, Léon Bakst and Georges Braque enjoyed the exposure afforded them by creating works for the company’s stages. The company’s composers included Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss. If not already prominent in their field, these and other composers achieved legendary status, especially after the creation of such enduring works as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune.
Diaghilev’s choreographic protégés, including Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, Serge Lifar, and a young George Balanchine, tested the viability of currents within modernism at the level of the body while exploring the limits of the classical ballet vocabulary. Significantly, the Ballets Russes challenged the centrality of the idealized female body to ballet. It was the male body was of special importance to Diaghilev’s aesthetic.
Following Diaghilev’s death, offshoots of the company formed to continue to tour the company’s existing repertoire internationally. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, national companies on both sides of the Atlantic grew in prominence, often under the purview of Ballets Russes disciples. On the American side, Fokine, Massine, and Nijinska were some of the first choreographers to be engaged by the newly-formed Ballet Theater, now known as American Ballet Theater, in New York in 1939. Balanchine, too, moved to the States and, with Lincoln Kirstein, created the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the New York City Ballet in 1948.
In the 1970s, Robert Joffrey, director of the Joffrey Ballet, began a project of reconstructing select pieces from the Ballets Russes canon, inviting Massine to oversee some of his and Fokine’s ballets. Later, Joffrey set about the ambitious project of reviving works by Nijinsky, including Rite of Spring, relying on extensive research by dance historians to attempt to capture the spirit of the piece in the absence of any films.
Under Diaghilev’s ingenious, if heavy-handed, supervision, the Ballets Russes reimagined ballet as the fusion of movement, art, and music. The product of these experiments was a rich legacy of innovation and an addicting history that continued to inspire artists, scholars, and the popular imagination through to the present day.
Photo: Alexandra Danilova and Serge Lifar in the Ballets Russes’ Apollo (originally Apollon musagète) in 1928.
‘Fire and Air’ Review: Flat-Footed Portrait of a Dance Icon
Terrence McNally’s new play about Sergei Diaghilev is a fact-heavy stumbler.
Marsha Mason, John Glover, Douglas Hodge and Marin Mazzie. PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
1 COMMENTS
New York
Within the small world of ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, who died in 1929, was and is a giant. Outside it, though, he is less well remembered, if only because there is no simple way to explain what he did and why it still matters. The founder of the Ballets Russes, the most influential company in the history of dance, Diaghilev on paper was nothing more than an impresario—a producer, if you like. He couldn’t dance a step, much less choreograph a ballet. Yet it was because of him that “The Rite of Spring” came into being and Igor Stravinsky, then an obscure young Russian composer, emerged as a central figure in 20th-century music. Diaghilev made Vaslav Nijinsky a star dancer and George Balanchine a major choreographer; commissioned sets from Picasso and Matisse and musical scores from Debussy, Prokofiev and Ravel ; and did more than anyone else to introduce European audiences to the modern movement in art.
Fire and Air
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.
$50-$125, 866-811-4111, extended through March 2
$50-$125, 866-811-4111, extended through March 2
Such a man could scarcely have been anything other than interesting in private life, and Diaghilev’s more-or-less open homosexuality and fabulously flamboyant personality made him a journalist’s dream. Not surprisingly, several attempts have been made to put him on stage and screen, the latest of which, Terrence McNally’s “Fire and Air,” in which Douglas Hodge plays Diaghilev, is the work of a playwright who has previously written on numerous occasions about the equally extravagant world of grand opera. Having given us a successful play about Maria Callas, Mr. McNally would seem as likely as anyone to be able to make theatrical sense out of Diaghilev. Yet “Fire and Air,” despite the strong staging of John Doyle and a spare but visually effective production by his Classic Stage Company, is brought low by most of the usual mistakes to which biographical plays are heir. Fact-heavy and stodgily undramatic, it feels for the most part more like a well-meaning TV documentary than a full-fledged play, on top of which it suffers from a devastating piece of miscasting.
“Fire and Air” is the kind of history play in which most of the dialogue conveys factual information instead of illuminating personality or propelling the rudimentary plot. James Agee famously complained in his review of “Casablanca” that the characters kept saying things to each other like “Oh, Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight!” I thought of Agee’s review as I listened to Mr. McNally’s characters spouting such eye-rollingly on-the-nose lines as “This is the beginning of the 20th century and there is a new god of the dance.” Real artists don’t talk like that, and Mr. McNally knows they don’t, as he proved in “Golden Age,” his cunningly wrought 2012 comedy about the opening night of Bellini’s “I Puritani.” The only expository line in “Fire and Air” that lands with memorable force is the one in which Diaghilev sums himself up brutally, if not quite accurately: “I have no talent. My artists are my talent.” (All too characteristically, another character says the same thing again at play’s end, calling him “a man whose only talent was other people.”) Nor is there any exciting dramatic conflict driving the play. Instead, Mr. McNally has given us a shapeless, wandering pageant in which event follows event for no clear reason other than that they happened.
James Cusati-Moyer PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
Mr. Hodge is best known in New York for having played Albin in the 2010 Broadway revival of “La Cage aux Folles.” That will give you some idea of his approach to the role, which seems to be based on the assumption that Sergei Diaghilev was a dead ringer for Nathan Lane. His Diaghilev is small, whiny and about as Slavic as Russian dressing, and it is impossible to believe in him as a man possessed of the ruthlessness necessary to conceive of a venture like the Ballets Russes, much less to have kept it running for two hectic decades. James Cusati-Moyer and Jay Armstrong Johnson play Nijinsky and Léonide Massine, Diaghilev’s dancers-protégés-lovers, as a matched set of blank-faced pretty boys, which may or may not be true to life—Nijinsky’s offstage personality was unusually opaque—but fails to convince within the context of the play. The other actors, John Glover, Marsha Mason and Marin Mazzie, don’t make much of a splash, but that’s Mr. McNally’s fault: Their roles are underdeveloped.
Douglas Hodge and James Cusati-Moyer PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS
Mr. Doyle has staged and designed the set for “Fire and Air” in his well-known minimalist style, restricting himself to a half-dozen gilded chairs and two rehearsal-room mirrors. That’s all he needs to move us efficiently and convincingly from place to place and scene to scene. It’s just possible that the script might have profited from greater specificity of design, but I doubt it: The trouble with “Fire and Air” is fundamental, not superficial.
—Mr. Teachout is the Journal’s drama critic. His play “Satchmo at the Waldorf” begins previews at Houston’s Alley Theatre on Feb. 24. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
