In 1905, the dancers of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg went on strike. Their demands: higher wages, a five-day workweek, training in how to apply theatrical makeup, the right to wear their own pointe shoes. They elected a small delegation, which included star pupils Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, to represent them in negotiations. This modest political action at the Mariinsky Theater proved that the spirit of the Revolution of 1905 had seeped into nearly every crevice of Russian society. That year, a crushing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War left Czar Nicholas II vulnerable to the calls for change—calls that were now growing louder and more militant across the country. Russia had become awash in peasant uprisings, labor strikes, and military defections. These revolutionary impulses would soon be quelled—at least temporarily—by liberal reforms, but not before the dancers had staged their own revolt. The strikers were met with retaliation: Some were expelled from the company, others passed over for plum roles. Suddenly the possibility of taking their work abroad, in a nascent ballet company run by an art critic who seemed more preoccupied with set design than pirouettes, did not sound half bad.
This upstart company would sap the Imperial Ballet of its best people. In 1909 in Paris, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had its first season. Drawing from the luminaries of Russian modernism, the impresario amassed an unprecedented—and perhaps not since replicated—collection of talent, and not only from the world of dance. In addition to poaching Pavlova and Nijinsky, Diaghilev commissioned Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to compose new scores for his ballets. At a time when the set design for ballets revolved around paintings of castles or flowery landscapes, Diaghilev hired artists from the avant-garde to create his backdrops, calling on the Russian Cubo-Futurist Natalia Goncharova and—later—Pablo Picasso. The costumes designed by Leon Bakst were colorful and ornate, made from gauzy, transparent fabrics meant to evoke the Orient. Others were designed by Diaghilev’s good friend, Coco Chanel.
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence that Diaghilev’s company had on modern ballet. The Ballets Russes pulled the medium of dance off its genteel pedestal;
— source thenation.com | Jennifer Wilson | May 3, 2022