Philip BULLOCK

Project at the MaCI

October - December 2024

Bringing together dancers, choreographers, composers, artists and writers to produce some of the most memorable collaborative stage works ever, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes represent one of the best-known monuments to modern Russian culture worldwide. Between 1909 and 1929, Diaghilev and his troupe staged some three thousand performances in eighteen countries over three continents. Although its finances were often straightened, Diaghilev nonetheless managed to establish a commercially successful artistic venture that played a central part in the emergence of high modernism in Europe and beyond. Many of the works he commissioned remain central to the repertoire, and dance traditions around the world owe their existence to the example of the Ballets Russes. My project explores the global impact of the Ballets Russes, focusing on Britain, Spain, Central Europe, the USA and South America as much as the more familiar Paris scene. It also asks how ‘Russian’ were the Ballets Russes, and what might that notion of Russianness mean in a global context? After all, many members of the troupe were even not Russian at all, representing instead the crucial contribution of Balts, Poles, Ukrainians and other ethnic groupings within the Russian Empire to the development of what is often reductively, simplistically and inaccurately referred to as ‘Russian’ culture. Restoring these hidden and overlooked narratives to the history of the company is an urgent scholarly priority and forms part of recent and ongoing initiatives to ‘decentre’ and ‘decolonise’ Russian studies by focusing on the marginalised stories of its many non-Russian subjects (whilst also noting that these other identities were themselves also subject to complex and often contradictory narratives). It is the very popularity and canonicity of the Ballets Russes that mean that a new history of its presentation of Russianness has the potential to make a major impact on the field of Slavic studies more generally, as well as with non-specialist audiences and readerships.
 

'Towards a Global History of the Ballets Russes" marks a natural evolution in my scholarly interests and the Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation is the ideal place in which to launch the first stages of this new project. As a former Director of TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), I was privileged to visit Grenoble on two occasions (2018 and 2020) and to observe the development of MaCI. Its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and performance are a natural fit with my new research project, and I know that I will learn a vast amount from discussions and collaborations with researchers there. During my fellowship, I will work on Prokofiev’s "Sur le Borysthène", commissioned by the Paris Opera immediately after Diaghilev’s death in 1929. Removed from the stage after just six performances, "Sur le Borysthène" is Prokofiev’s least studied ballet score, yet its theme is urgently topical. The Borysthenes – mentioned in Heroditus – is the classical name of the Dnipro River, and three of the ballet’s four co-creators had Ukrainian roots. How did these artists – all with hybrid identities and varied relationships to the Russian imperial centre – relate to a ballet on a Ukrainian theme that was premiered in 1932 and which deals with the return of a local soldier to his homeland after the end of World War One? How do contemporary calls to promote a more diverse, less Russo-centric history of the multi-ethnic make-up of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union fit with the historical context of the ballet’s conception, realisation and reception?'