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| Succès de Scandale Jānis Frišvalds The locust and cherry trees took the brunt of the tumult. And yet as the ebony fiacre slipped through the Bois de Boulogne that late May afternoon, its path through the ‘lungs of the city' was pregnant with the threat of further conflagrations. When they came, such eruptions would flare up to the tune of random dispatches of anger, sarcasm and exhilaration from the four egos whose weight the carriage would cradle all the way to the Bateau-Lavoir and a restaurant named ‘Raprochement'. | |
| This storm in a Parisian teacup was the dénouement to the scandalous premier of a new ballet from Serge Diaghilev's ‘Les Ballets Russes' entitled ‘The Rite of Spring' at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Interspersed with fistfights between its opponents and fans, the entertainment had ended with conductor Pierre Monteux and his orchestra fleeing from a volatile audience high on the cocktail of repulsion and perverse excitement that was the artistic abomination they had just consumed. And what a tipple it was. Its ingredients consisted of Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography that was spiked with subversive and edgy movements laced with sexual innuendo. Nijinsky's radicalism was complimented by the jarring harmony and rhythm of Igor Stravinsky's music which charged the work with oppressive tension and dissonant force. For the audience, it was new and not at all what they had expected. As the fiacre slid moved towards the edge of the forest, the men's faces betrayed their individual reactions to the cataclysmic events of the night before. Of the four, the Nijinsky was the most crestfallen. Almost, but not quite, motionless, his slender frame was curled up into a question mark of shame and disbelief. His simian features were hidden from view as he stared into his lap passively twiddling his stunted fingers. In contrast, Stravinsky's oval thirty-year old face with its powerful crook of a nose and penetrating bespectacled eyes twitched fractiously in a legacy of the seething rage he felt towards those audience members who had condescended to hiss at his music before they had even taken the trouble to listen to it. At least, Serge Diaghilev's smug, contented expression confirmed that he at least was pleased with himself. "It was exactly what I wanted," he stated at one point to refute Stravinsky's fears that they might have a box office disaster on their hands. And Diaghilev possessed a genius for publicity. In this case, his instincts, quite rightly told him that in ‘The Rite of Spring', ‘Les Ballets Russes' had struck gold. The other member of the quartet, Jean Cocteau, an immaculately dressed young man of twenty-three with a pursed mouth, high forehead and coal-black hair listened to Diaghilev and Stravinsky with interest. As time went on, the twinkle in his eyes became more pronounced. He smelled an opportunity for mischief. Nicknamed the ‘Frivolous Prince', Cocteau had been hanging out with the crowd from ‘Les Ballets Russes' since 1910. And on that fateful afternoon, the scandalous reception afforded to ‘The Rite of Spring' reminded him that on occasion ‘art can be a terrible sacerdoce'. When later that evening, he proposed writing a libretto for ‘Les Ballets Russes', Diaghilev smiled. "Astound me!" he instructed Cocteau. Creative impregnation complete, the ensuing gestation cycle would last for four years. However, as is often the case in art, the longer the creation germinates in the artist's womb, the greater a cultural masterpiece it is destined to be. Nearly a year later, one rainy spring evening during the first year of the Great War, Cocteau happened to be taking cover in a bomb shelter in the Bateau-Lavoir when he was accosted by a bearded man in his late forties attired in a grey velvet suit with an umbrella in one hand and a bottle of absinthe in the other. "Good evening," said the man removing his bowler hat. "I have come to die with you," he went on reaching into his jacket pockets and whipping out two shot glasses that he proceeded to fill with the anise-nectar that would eventually prove to be the death of him. "Will join me in a toast to death?" he inquired, rolling the words off his tongue with an alacrity that the Devil's own advocate would have been proud of. Cocteau nodded. And thus began the friendship and collaboration of Cocteau and the composer, Erik Satie. Cocteau recognised Satie as a kindred spirit. He shared the older man's loathing for the Wagnerian late-romanticism that characterised popular music at that time. He took pleasure in Satie's habit of giving his music crazy titles such as ‘Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)', ‘Menus for Childish Purposes' and ‘Desiccated Embryos' as a means of shielding it from the scrutiny of music lovers obsessed with ‘high art'. It wasn't long before Cocteau identified Satie as the perfect collaborator to write the music for his artistic vision of a synthesis between literature and music, visual art and dance, fashion and poetry that would finally drag ballet kicking and screaming into the 20th century. By early 1916, preparations were in full swing. Diaghilev had agreed to direct. Satie had signed up and was busy writing the music. And Léonide Massine, Nijinsky's successor as the apple of Diaghilev's eye and chief dancer-choreographer of ‘Les Ballets Russes' was to do the choreography. And in between his frequent visits to the Belgian front where he was doing his stint in the army as an ambulance driver, Cocteau was hard at work on the libretto. By now, Cocteau had even given his creation a name, ‘Parade'. The only elements of Cocteau's ‘artistic synthesis' with a question mark hanging over them were the costume and set design. Accordingly, one day, early in 1917, Cocteau arrived at a studio in the Buttes-Chaumont where he hoped to persuade a friend of his to agree to create the stage design. His friend, a stocky, rugged man in his mid-thirties with dark hair and vivid quick-silver eyes listened to Cocteau's proposition and paused to think it over. He had his reputation to consider. He was at the height of his fame as the ‘granddaddy' of cubism, but, at the same time, he was wary of growing stale and therefore this new challenge excited him. It provided him with a unique opportunity to undertake a commission in which he could combine two approaches to the plastic arts: Cubism and Naturalism. However, he knew that were he to accept Cocteau's invitation, his decision would provoke a furious outcry on the part of the hardcore Cubist brotherhood which would certainly frown upon his involvement in a gaudy theatrical production. Nevertheless, the opportunity was too good to refuse. Cocteau's friend, a certain artist by the name of Pablo Picasso, decided to accept. He then promptly departed for Rome where he would create the sketches for the costumes, set and stage curtain before returning to the Buttes-Chaumont where he completed his work shortly before ‘Parade' opened at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 18, 1917. Picasso went about his work zealously. One afternoon, the dancers were on stage rehearsing when Cocteau and Diaghilev noticed a gap - a void - in the set. What followed was a raw display of animalistic grace as Picasso swooped to pick up a brush and jar of ink and proceeded to create a backdrop of Grecian columns which when complete saw the dancers burst into a round of applause. That evening, Cocteau inquired, "Did you know what you were going to do beforehand?" Picasso shrugged. "Yes and no," he replied, "The unconscious must work without our knowing it." Such was Picasso's enthusiasm for the project that he even came up with some ideas for the libretto itself, a development that prompted Satie to complain to a friend, "Picasso has ideas that I like better than our Jean's. How awful!" By mid-May, the stage was set for the opening night. And as Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, having returned from the front in time to pen the preface to the ballet, the audience was greeted ‘for the first time by this alliance of painting and dance, plastic and mimic art, which signals the advent of a more complete art. From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between them, there has come about, in ‘Parade', a kind of ‘sur-réalisme', in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of this ‘esprit nouveau'. And so it began with audible gasps from the audience as the curtain rose to reveal - a second curtain, to the accompaniment of a fugue by Satie entitled ‘The Prelude of the Red Curtain'. One could certainly understand the audience's surprise. For Picasso's pseudo-baroque curtain was monumental and breathtaking. Created using distemper on canvas, it was a tour-de-force reflecting Picasso's lifelong fascination with figuration. Two sets of actors are depicted holding court on a stage adorned with red curtains. To the right, jovial fairground artistes are eating at a table including a Harlequin, Matador and a Moor. On the opposite side of the stage, a star-spangled ball lies at the feet of a messenger from the gods, a winged mare, whose presence provides a link to the heavens and the fountain of creative inspiration. Delicately balanced on the mare's back, as she tends to her foal, is a winged angel caressing a baboon, the traditional playmate of wandering acrobats. The setting for this eclectic gathering is a rural landscape punctuated by mountains and ruined architecture. Once the audience had drawn breath, Satie's fugue drew to a close and the curtain rose to reveal a fairground set designed in a tendentiously Cubist style which Picasso had deliberately created along with the solid cardboard costumes to capitalise on the more bizarre aspects of Cocteau's scenario. First on stage was a Ring Master who introduced a Chinese Juggler in the hope of persuading passers by to enter the theatre for the main show. The Juggler is followed on stage by another Ring Master who introduces ‘The Little Girl from America' who tires her herself out riding a bicycle, firing a pistol and imitating Charlie Chaplin. To no avail. Even the appearance of a third Ring Master, mounted on a Cubist horse with two pairs of human legs, to present the acrobats was not enough to attract the audience's interest. And at the end of acrobats' preview performance, the audience drifts away leaving the circus artistes to pack up their equipment as a prelude to leaving town. Meanwhile, dressed in their cumbersome Cubist sculptures, the three Ring Masters dance themselves to the point of exhaustion in protest at their humiliation by the audience. The ballet was scheduled to end with a sombre reprise of ‘The Prelude of the Red Curtain'. However, destiny decreed otherwise. Both Cocteau's script and Satie's music with its incidental gunshots, typewriting and shrill car horns, exasperated the audience which was totally unprepared for such ‘surreal' entertainment. Initial hisses and boos evolved into a tirade of insults. Conductor Ernest Ansermet tried in vain to hear the music from the instruments of his players over the noise from the irate spectators. It was only a matter of time before the first chair landed on stage followed a few moments later by two more. Cocteau was delighted. He had not only realised his vision of ‘artistic synthesis', but had also succeeding in inciting a full-blown riot, a veritable ‘succès de scandale'. At the end, Cocteau and Picasso required the assistance of the Gendarmes and France's favourite poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, to escort them to safety in the face of angry threats to their health by vengeful Parisians incensed at this insult to their pre-conceived notions of classic haute-culture. The critics were merciless. They castigated Cocteau and Picasso for their stultifying stupidity and banality. Nevertheless, Cocteau's pleasure at the scandal he had fathered only intensified when these same critics proceeded to denounce Satie and himself as ‘cultural anarchists' and succeeded in having Satie arrested and sent to prison for eight days. Outside the theatre, Cocteau was proud of their efforts, "To my mind, gentlemen, we have just witnessed the greatest battle of the war," he said drolly, "But, shit, Guillaume," he said to the shaven-headed poet with the bandaged head and scar on his temple, "If it hadn't been for you, the women in there would have gouged our eyes out with their hairpins. I don't think they had a clue whether they were witnessing a performance of art or a practical joke. And to be honest I'm not sure it even matters." | |
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