An East/West Pas De Deux: The Ballets Russes and the Orient in the Modern Western Imagination

Abstract

Using the case of the Ballets Russes, this paper continues an interrogation of the viability of applying Edward Saids definitions of Orientalism to the sphere of the arts. Although in his original study, Orientalism, Said explicitly asserts that his study is a delimited analysis focused principally on British and French 18th- and 19th-century academic Orientalism and that he is not analyzing so-called Orientalist painting and literary artists such as Flaubert, his followers, and later Said himself, extended his theoretical framework to include studies of literature and the arts. By examining the profundity of the rupture caused in the aesthetic sphere by the arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909, this study simultaneously repositions the works of the Russian ballet troupe to the center and the very beginning of European modernism and attempts to show how its radically subversive works undermine the notion of such facile categories as East and West or Oriental and Occidental. In addition to examining the paradoxes of cultural transmission inherent in the groups works, which belie the existence of rigid civilizational borders in the arts, the study also proposes a reconsideration of European modernism by re-examining the place of ballet in the modernist movement; the significance of the work of the groups producer Serge Diaghilev, designers Leon Bakst and Natalia Goncharov, choreographer Mikhail Fokine, composer Igor Stravinsky and performers such as Ana Pavlova, Ida Rubinstein and Vaslav Nijinsky; and of the work produced in collaboration with the Ballets Russes by European artists, composers and designers such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie and Coco Chanel.