“Ballets Russes” is a documentary history of the most influential ballet companies of the 20th century.
If you’ve read beyond that first line, you pass the film’s most important test. You’re not allergic to dance, and you don’t mind a movie where no one wears a bat suit.
Actually, there is a bat suit here. It’s a testament to the incredible reach of these Russian expatriates that their dance reached into Hollywood, and even onto the old TV show, “Batman.” Yvonne Craig, a.k.a. Batgirl, got her start in the company that brought classical ballet to the width and breadth of the Americas.
Vintage footage and modern interviews and staged “events” tell the tale of this important piece of art history.
The Ballets Russes – there were a couple of competing versions of the troupe – were the seed from which many of the world’s ballet companies, especially those in North and South America and Australia, sprang to life. For 40 years, leading up to and following World War II, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Original Ballet Russe, both offspring’ of Serge Diaghilev’s first Ballets Russes company, hired the choreographers, trained the dancers and created the look of modern ballet.
George Balanchine, who cut his teeth choreographing the company in the ’30s and staged his comeback later with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the ’40s, fell in love with specific dancers, and a particular “type” of ballerina, which he would clone in his corps. And marry. Long, thin necks, longer legs and dancers so young they were “baby ballerinas” became the rule.
Agnes de Mille showed up and gave the company with the Monte Carlo name a more American flavor.
Great composers collaborated. Great artists – Miro, Dali, Picasso – helped design sets.
American Indians took to the stage, color barriers were tested (if not completely broken) and everywhere they went, young women and men were inspired to take up an art form that would never make them rich, that might toss them aside at 40, could even cripple them.
But “Ballets Russes” never lets us feel sorry for these folks, because a lot of them are still around. The film begins with a spirited 2000 reunion of the companies’ survivors, feisty, haughty, outspoken and fun, and many pushing 90. They’re the heart of the movie, ripping colleagues and rivals, laughing at their mistakes and glorying in their glory years.
“The Russians weren’t very nice to one another, you know how they are,” American star Frederic Franklin dishes, noting the feuds and backstabbing that caused the company to split in the first place.
The film’s glaring flaw is how it skims over the company’s truly revolutionary era, the Diaghilev years, in a brief prologue. That company ended with his death in 1929. Ballet historians might blanch at that omission.
But the film makes the case that the later years, the traveling years, when his successors kept it going, nurtured talents and set the tone for dance in the non-Russian parts of the world, were where its real impact was felt.
** | “Ballets Russes”
NOT RATED but worth a PG for language and adult themes|1 hour, 58 minutes|DOCUMENTARY|Written and directed by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine; starring Irina Baranova, Marc Platt, Yvonne Craig, Mia Slavenska|Opens today at the Chez Artiste.
