Yesterday's post analysed over-embellished details in contemporary ballet costumes. Now let's take a step backwards to the late '20s and look instead at futuristic costume details in a Constructivist ballet from that decade.
The production in question is the ballet "La Chatte", with choreography by George Balanchine and music by Henri Sauguet. The ballet was commissioned for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and was premiered in April 1927 at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.
The subject by Sobeka (pseundonym for Boris Kochno) was based on an Aesop fable: a young man falls in love with his cat, and prays Aphrodite to change her into a woman. The goddess grants his wish and transforms her into human form, but decides to test her.
While the couple is engaged in passionate love-making, Aphrodite makes a mouse appear, and the heroine immediately leaves her lover and gives chase, rushing off in the wings in its pursuit. As she is turned back into a cat, the young man dies from disappointment. The costumes and sets for this ballet were particularly interesting and they were designed by brothers Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977), Russian Jews who had left their country in 1922 and lived in Paris and Berlin.
Both were sculptors, though Pevsner was also a painter and for this ballet they opted (though it is believed that Gabo did most of the work for this performance) for Constructivist moods, choosing very unusual materials - talc and mica - for the set and costumes.
The Constructivist sets were made indeed in a form of talc known as Celon, flexible, transparent and dazzling when lit. The curtains were made of shiny black American cloth and the floor of the stage was also covered in this substance.
Among the other Constructivist elements on stage there were geometrical objects of wood painted black and white carried by the hero's friends during the funeral procession, and a statue of Aphrodite placed in a raised position in the centre of the stage, surrounded by various completely abstract structures in transparent plastic.
The model of this statue is actually part of the Tate Gallery collection: found in a drawer in Naum Gabo's house shortly after his death, the statue wasn't probably made by Gabo.
As he explained in the late '50s: "The model of the stage-setting and all the costumes, designs, and accessories presented to Diaghilev, with the exception of the statue of the goddess, were designed and made by Gabo. In this first model of the setting the place was left empty and this statue was done by Pevsner. I refused to make any naturalistic sculpture for the ballet as at that time I had already left behind me the period of figurative art and had no wish to return to it."
According to the Tate Gallery site, the statue should definitely be attributed to Pevsner, especially if certain sections of this piece - such as the pelvis and bottom section or the head and shoulders - were compared respectively to his works "Fountain" (1925) or "Dancer" (1927-9).
Costume-wise the male dancers wore yellow tops and grey shorts with mica accessories: Serge Lifar as The Young Man wore a mica breastplate, Olga Spessivtseva had instead a mica cover on her tutu and a mica headdress. The novelty of the production lay in the intriguing effects obtained by the play of light upon these transparent constructions, that perfectly matched with the celon settings.
Rather unusual for those times, the ballet was quite successful and, while it's undeniable that the starting point was Constructivism, the forms, shapes and materials employed could be filed under the "Classical Futurism" label and could be conceived almost as an anticipation of the moods in William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come.
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