Anna Sutton slips amongst the glamorous shadows of the past. All photography by Joshua Burns.

On a recent trip to Venice I saw a sublime exhibition that explores the contributions of Russian émigrés to fashion and costume design.

Elegance in Exile: Between fashion and costume, Diaghilev’s time is housed in The Museum and Study Centre of the History of Fabrics and Costume at Palazzo Mocenigo, a 17^th-century Gothic building that formerly belonged to one of Venice’s most noble families. It’s a fittingly grand choice of venue for this event.

The exhibition, curated by Francesca Dalla Bernardina, features costumes of the Ballets Russes designed by artists such as Leon Bakst, Andre Derrain and Natalia Goncharova, whose take on colour was as stunningly original as anything achieved by the Fauvist painters, as well as fashion created and informed by the Russian émigrés who scattered all over Europe following the October Revolution.

At the heart of this show is the lasting contribution Sergei Diaghilev made to culture.

The pieces are sourced from the collections of Alexandre Vassiliev, a renowned fashion historian and a designer of costumes and sets, and Toni Candelero, a noted dancer and choreographer.

Elegance in Exile is curated so that the costumes complement the interior design and furnishings of each room. In the Portego (great hall), a collection of dresses introduce the theme of Orientalism. Embellished with hand-sewn glass beads, pearls and lace – some from Venice, a major centre of the glass and lace industries in Italy – an array of 1920s evening dresses are presented in a context of antique opulence. Intricately embroidered and beaded Charleston-style gowns of magenta silk, mustard velvet and silver tulle as fine as gossamer are framed by Renaissance cupids and chandeliers.

Nearby, a French silk cloak encrusted with hundreds of sapphire-blue stones and Venetian-style beads is a shining reminder of the influence the Russian exiles had on haute couture in Paris in the first half of the 20^th century. Designs by Charles Worth, Paul Poiret and Mariano Fortuny are interspersed with those by Russian fashion houses such as Kitmir.

The Contessa’s bedroom and the bathroom reveal a collection of champagne-coloured lace ball and concert dresses laden with exquisitely rendered embroidery and pearl embellishments, some with bold floral painted patterns inspired by the Ballets Russes.

Costume drama is heightened in the Rococo red room, where gilded mirrors, antique Murano glass chandeliers and Louis XV chairs provide a sumptuous setting in which to showcase evening dresses reflecting Oriental influences from Istanbul and China. Heavier fabrics such as brocade silk and exotic detailing like metallic embroidery predominate here.

Further on, an opulent line-up of dresses in fabrics such as crepe and velvet, adorned lavishly with squirrel fur and Russian floral prints, provoked many gasps of admiration from viewers on my visit, while a trio of bell-shaped evening dresses in lace and lamé dating from the 1920s carried through the pronounced ballet theme.

Head pieces and accessories worn by Russian ballerinas are on show in the Count’s library, a display of glittering prizes yielding precious crystals, pearls, marabou feathers, dainty beading and hand-sewn sequins.

The finale of my trip was seeing the more familiar but always wildly original Ballets Russes costumes dating from 1909-1929 . Highlights included Leon Bakst’s ‘Costume for a Slave’ from Le Dieu Bleu (1912) and Natalia Goncharova’s ‘Costumes for a Noble’ from Le Coq  d’Or (1914).

This is curation at its finest: a harmonisation of costume with evocative surroundings which does justice to the bold Russians whose art is so beautiful it stirs the senses and elevates the soul. For further reading see Beauty in Exile: the artists, models, and nobility who fled the Russian Revolution and influenced the world of fashion by Alexandre Vassiliev.

How about Russian ballet in Australia? The Ballet Russes in Australia and Beyond explores the impact of these vital artistic troupes on Australian dance. You can pick up a copy from our online store.

In 1926, Diaghilev orchestrated a surrealistic version of Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers elope, departing the stage by plane in leather coats and airmen’s caps, complete with goggles. The scenario may seem Monty Pythonesque, but the months before – and after – the ballet’s premiere were far from funny. Following the first performances in Monte Carlo, the Ballets Russes presented the work in Paris, where the opening night was disrupted by a riot. Diaghilev could not have been happier. He thrived on scandal and outrage.

The chaos accompanying the ballet’s creation was inevitable, considering the mélange of collaborators. Choreographed by Bronislava Nijinksa, with an entr’acte by George Balanchine, the Ballets Russes’ production was danced to a score by the English composer Constant Lambert, with design by two leading surrealist artists.

Diaghilev persuaded the Russian ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, to dance the role of Juliet, while Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s lover at the time, danced the part of Romeo. Karsavina did not approve of Lifar’s partnering skills, but she hid her distress.

Diaghilev initiated the work, commissioning Lambert, then 20, who called his score Adam and Eve. Diaghilev promptly changed that to Romeo and Juliet, then set about dictating the scenario. The story would take place during a rehearsal of a ballet based on Shakespeare’s play. Lambert was not impressed, but undeterred, he asked the distinguished portrait painter Augustus John to design the ballet. Diaghilev dismissed that idea, commissioning instead a friend of Lambert’s, the English artist Christopher Wood. But Wood, too, was dismissed, as Diaghilev decided that no designer was necessary. As the ballet was about a rehearsal of a ballet, there was need for any scenery, he told Lambert. However, after a visit to France, Diaghilev changed his mind once again.

At an exhibition in Paris he admired the works of the surrealist artists Max Ernst and Joan Miró. He bought paintings by both as a gift for Lifar, then commissioned the artists to design Romeo and Juliet.

“For a long time”, wrote the author, Arnold Haskell, “the Russian ballet had been considered bourgeois by the Surrealiste group … the obvious thing to do was to commission décor from some of the group and win them over that way.”

The designers travelled to Monte Carlo, where Ernst painted curtains representing day and night and Miró painted a front cloth. For the first scene, set in a rehearsal studio, Miró scattered some everyday bits and pieces – a barre, some screens, and that pink dressing gown centrestage. Lambert was horrified, telling this mother that the designers were “Tenth-rate painters from an imbecile group called the Surrealistes”.

In the second scene, depicting the performance of Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy unfolded in the usual way, but after the death of Juliet, Romeo – and a very much alive Juliet – donned their aviator costumes. The ballet ended with Karsavina, apparently representing a plane in flight, hoisted to a horizontal position on Lifar’s shoulders.

The premiere at the Theatre de Monte Carlo on May 4 went well enough but when the ballet opened in Paris it was greeted with catcalls, whistles and fisticuffs, led by diehard surrealists who objected to Ernst and Miró being led astray by a capitalist venture (the Russian ballet).

When the curtain rose to reveal Miró’s décor, a shower of leaflets fell from the upper balconies. Written in red ink by two founding members of the surrealist movement, Louis Aragon and André Breton, the leaflets were captioned “Protest!”

Diaghilev was prepared.  He had alerted the police to a probable disturbance and told the conductor to continue, even as the yelling drowned out the music. As Haskell wrote, the “plunge into modernism brought a scandal that was dear to him and convinced him he was on the right track”.

But the life of this madcap Romeo and Juliet was brief. It took Prokofiev’s powerful score, written a decade later, to bless the ballet with its long life.

Graeme Murphy’s Romeo & Juliet is sold out in Sydney, but you can still get tickets for the 2012 seasons in Brisbane and Adelaide. It will also travel to Perth in 2012; tickets for the Perth season will go on sale early next year.

The 30-second fragment was found by a ballet fan, who alerted Jane Pritchard, co-curator of the recent Ballets Russes exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The clip was in the British Pathé online collection and was wrongly labelled, but Pritchard, who talks about the discovery on her blog, was able to identify it as a Ballets Russes performance and even single out Serge Lifar (the famously egocentric star and future director of the Paris Opera Ballet) underneath a long wig as the Poet in Sylphides.

Film records exist of individual Ballet Russes stars but the company dancing together was never filmed. Russes fans have mourned for years that a project to film The Sleeping Princess, in colour and with synchronised music, fell in a hole after the production folded in London. This grainy black-and-white moment, captured surreptitiously, hardly makes up for that; and yet, the sylphs flitting around the open-air stage, charmingly framed by an arch of greenery, has that touch of magic that made the Ballets Russes so unforgettable.

Iconic artists from Pablo Picasso to Georges Braque turned Russes costumes into living sculptures. Exhibition Assistant Simeran Maxwell points to Henri Matisse’s ‘Costume for a mourner’.

“It’s very striking – the way it’s so angular”, she says. “(Henri) Matisse is a draftsperson and you can see he got very hands-on, painting directly onto the fabric.” Describing the thrilling design for Le Chant du Rossignol, Matisse said, “They’re like a painting, only with colours that move”.

The most striking designs do at times belie troubled waters in terms of production. Leon Bakst’s ‘Costume for the Bluebird’ from Sergei Diaghilev’s The Sleeping Princess is a relic from a production so extravagant that it resulted in bankruptcy.

Three hundred extraordinarily beautiful costumes and sets were not enough to save the production from alienating its audience, who were displeased with the staging of such a drawn-out classical ballet. It was one of the few Diaghilev ballets that misjudged what the audience wanted.

Bakst produced garments that are very wearable: he used non-constrictive bodices and favoured loose fits. Garments such as the Scheherazade harem pants and caftans were more than just a source of amusement – they channelled the spirit of the times in a dazzling mixture of opulence and athleticism. The costumes for The Buffoon by Michel Larionov, on the other hand, were so cumbersome that ballerinas threatened to strike.

Fifty new costumes have been restored, some to untarnished glory, while others cling to a more fragile state.

Before-and-after illustrations and untreated pieces on display teach us much about the art of conservation in the process. Maxwell paints a clear picture of the challenges faced. “Some pieces needed to have all their embellishments removed in order for them to be cleaned, while some of the silk costumes can’t be washed because the dyes aren’t fixed. There are mould problems and details like gelatin sequins are troublesome.”

‘Costume for a squid’, designed by Natalia Goncharova for Sadko, took nine months to stitch back together. Head of Conservation Debbie Ward worked with conservator Micheline Ford to restore the ultramarine silk-and-gold lamé dress to its former glory.

The conservation process extends to the staging of the exhibition, with lighting done in house by Tui Tahi. “He has spotlighted each costume with appropriate light levels so the light is not harsh enough to degrade the fabrics but is bright enough to make the costumes sparkle.”

Ballets Russes: the art of costume continues until 20 March 2011 at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Image: Léon Baskt Tunic from costume for the Blue God c 1912 from Le Dieu Bleu
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1987

The recent production of Peggy! was a nostalgic moment for Jim McFarlane.

His first assignment was to photograph Dame Peggy van Praagh’s farewell speech in Melbourne. That memory is a throw back to the old days, when The Australian Ballet was based in the former tyre factory and Jim’s partner Yvonne (who is now the company’s director of special projects) was also working there, after coming from a ballet teaching background herself.

The seed of Jim McFarlane’s passion for ballet came from his mother, a Japanese war bride, Setsuko, who met the Ringland Andersons while on the boat ride to Australia in the 1950s. Setsuko’s voyage to Australia was preceded by Cherry Parker, the first Japanese war bride to come to Australia, at a time when the White Australia Policy still loomed like a pasty spectre over the cultural landscape. Cherry’s being here was so deeply unpopular that she required a personal bodyguard, McFarlane explains. It is evident when talking to McFarlane that his involvement in ballet is the legacy of Ringland Andersons’ generosity towards his mother, who went on to become friends with them. “My association with them is a deep one and the fact that they were kind to my mother at a time when it was unfashionable has been an inspiration to me,” he says.

Dr Joseph Ringland  Anderson is well known for his moving pictures of the Ballets Russes tours during the 1930s, and McFarlane has fond memories of visiting their house in Toorak as a child. The connection to ballet continued to flourish when McFarlane’s mother became friends with Algeranoff, who was introduced to her by the Ringland Andersons in the early 1950s. McFarlane had always been interested in photography and recalls admiring issues of National Geographic and the British Journal of Photography. He trained as a draftsman and by 17 was working as a technical illustrator at General Motors, a stint which he describes as being “like stuck in a box”, although it did give him a good technical grounding. He went on to study fine arts at Prahran College, where he found his true calling in what he describes as a transformative art form. “Look at the recognition of figures like Nureyev, who was loved as a dancer. The arts transcend religious and political barriers and politics is no issue.  I’m living proof of that.”

Rupert Bunny’s paintings glow with the kind of luminous energy that could only derive from a young Australian residing in Paris at the turn of the 20^th century. His work is so sumptuous that at times it’s easy to forget his humble beginnings in 19^th Century St Kilda. At barely 20 years old Bunny left the brown earth of Victoria for a more cosmopolitan European culture, quickly aligning himself with the Parisian art scene. Bunny received the most recognition and critical acclaim of any Australian artist of his time and it’s not difficult to see why. Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris, currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, exhibits Bunny’s exquisite range of work, from delicate depictions of mythological sea-idylls to his vibrant and richly saturated danse chromatique series.

His early work displays atmospheric light that lends itself to strong poetic feeling. Pastoral demonstrates Bunny’s skill in creating large-scale mythological work. The dream-like quality of the painting is accentuated through the use of faded pastel tones and poppies (a symbol of sleep). In many of Bunny’s earlier works, red flowers can be seen scattered on the ground. The bright bursts of colour stand out from the peachy melons and soft turquoises he was using at the time. In Endormies, one of Bunny’s most ambitious works, light falls on the subjects like dappled sunlight shining through summer blooms.

In 1909, impresario Sergei Diaghilev collaborated with revolutionary artists such as Picasso, Stravinksy and Nijinsky, shocking the world with his dazzling new dance troupe the Ballets Russes. In 1913, Bunny, like everyone else, watched in awe at the profound affect the premiere of Nijinsky’s Rite Of Spring had on the Parisian public. Influenced also by Matisse and Gauguin, it was at this time that Bunny began to reinvent himself as a modern artist.

Elena Taylor, curator of Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris, explains that with Bunny’s new aesthetic came the depiction of “fantastic movement or energised poses that were in great contrast to the languid poses of his wife in his earlier work”. His compositions became “rhythmic” and “the recurring male figure in his later works is thought to have been the figure of Nijinsky” continues Taylor. In Salomé, the exotic mauves and dark blues strongly differ from the creamy pastels used in his earlier work. Many of his danse chromatique works look like scenes from Fokine’s The Firebird, with the women in exotic make-up and the scenery drenched in colour. “In Salomé, the setting which is so richly oriental was very much in line with the Ballets Russes”, Taylor explains. Rupert Bunny’s elegant work is not to be missed.

Rupert Bunny: artist in Paris runs until Sunday 4 July at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Image: Rupert Bunny, Australia 1864–1947, lived in Europe 1884–1933
Salomé (c. 1919)
oil on canvas 81.0 x 65.0 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased, 1968