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ABSTRACT
Action sketches hold vast communicative potential as windows into the historical details of dance events. This article foregrounds sketchbook images depicting ballet dancers created in the 1910s by British artist Laura Knight (1877-1970) and French artist Valentine Hugo (1887-1968) to show how the quick line drawings inscribed during live performances translate nuances of spectator-performer dynamics. Analyzing various instances of women’s action sketching serves to elevate the activity as an independent form of artistic expression alongside established visual cultural practices such as painting. Knight’s and Hugo’s geographically distinct yet thematically coinciding works prove that action sketching does more than draft silhouettes: it forms a network of microcosms which enhance perceptions of the time, place, and atmosphere of dances and their surroundings. By advocating for a deep reading of the sketch as a major dance reception method, I highlight the ways ballet audiences saw their emotional and material conditions reflected onstage in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, I argue that a serious consideration of the woman spectator as an active participant in theatrical dance performance, through her own artistic practice, is indispensable to building a more holistic view of ballet’s role in reinventing the modernist subject-object relationship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Notable repositories include the Harvard Theater Collection at Houghton Library and the Theater and Performance Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which are the homes of several primary case study materials included here.
2 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 6.
3 Ibid., 6, 12.
4 Ibid., 10.
5 Benjamin Gillespie echoes the turn to objects initiated by Muñoz in his essay “Que(e)rying Theatrical Objects” by stating that “the presence of the theatrical object itself connotes a life, a history, and a stake in collective (re)enactments with humans; mapping these relations can thus produce valuable social and political projects.” See Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, 153.
6 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 11.
7 Love, “Small Change,” 432.
8 Gillespie affirms that “history plays upon the marked surfaces we perceive and feel and that life often lies beneath the surfaces much further than we can detect. Thus, theatrical properties offer rich networks for critically feeling toward new life-forms in the theatre that are just now coming out of the scholarly woodwork.” See Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, 160.
9 Schweitzer and Zerdy, “Introduction: Object Lessons,” 4. Speaking of stage props, Schweitzer and Zerdy establish that “[by] constructing, reshaping, choreographing, and obstructing the humans with which it interacts, the materiality of, say, a wool thread or an oil lamp carries a charge or pulse that radiates energy into those (things) in proximity.” The same principle can be applied to the audience sketch, which both absorbs and alters the energy of those watching performance.
10 Qtd. in Howerton, “‘Primitive Sounds’,” 120.
11 The narrative of The Firebird unites various classic character archetypes together in a romantic one-act dance play. It tells the story of Prince Ivan who wanders into a dark forest overtaken by the monster Koschei Bessmertniy, the ur-villain of Eastern European folklore. There, Ivan encounters the imprisoned firebird whom he tries to kill but then decides to spare; she offers him one of her flaming feathers as a reward with the promise to come to his rescue in times of need. Shortly after, he crosses paths with thirteen princesses, also trapped by Koschei, and falls in love with one of them, deciding to confront their captor. When he arrives to Koschei’s lair and the villain orders his minions to destroy him, Ivan summons the loyal firebird, who enchants the minions and their master by putting them into a deep sleep, during which Ivan finds a golden egg concealed in Koschei’s kingdom in a casket under a tree, holding the villain’s immortality inside. Ivan destroys the egg, Koschei dies, the spell he holds over all good creatures is broken, and they all celebrate their victory by returning home.
12 For Adrian Paul Allinson’s painting, see: Tamara Karsavina as the Firebird in Mikhail Fokine's ballet 'L'Oiseau de feu', ca. 1918. Oil on hardboard. 640mm x 535mm. Cyril W Beaumont Bequest. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
13 For Laura Knight’s painting, see: Sketch of Karasavina in L’Oiseau de Feu. 1919-1920. Oil on canvas. 51×46 cm. David Museum.
14 One notable example is Emil Otto Hoppé’s The Firebird, 1911. Photograph. 163mm x 195mm. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
15 Laura Knight, Ten sketches of Tamara Karsavina in The Firebird. Date unspecified. Pencil on paper. Private collection (sold at auction).
16 The costume pieces depicted by Knight are consistent with the garments shown in later paintings and publicity photographs depicting Karsavina dancing or posing in character.
17 Garafola, “Reconfiguring the Sexes,” 258. Garafola clarifies: “[it] was Bronislava Nijinska who put the women of the Ballets Russes back on pointe. Indeed, Les Noces, which she choreographed in 1923, was the first ballet created for the Diaghilev company in which the entire female ensemble donned ballerina footwear.”
18 Ibid., 252.
19 Laura Knight. Firebird: [Two] Sketches of Tamara Karsavina. Date unspecified. Pencil on paper. Harvard Theater Collection, Stravinsky-Diaghilev Foundation Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
20 Valentine Gross (Hugo). Page of a sketch book showing sketches made in Théâtre de l'Opéra and Théâtre du Châtelet during rehearsal or performance depicting Karsavina in Firebird. Ca. 1910. Indian ink and pencil on paper, front and back, detached from original sketchbook. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
21 Valentine Gross (Hugo). Two pages of a sketch book showing sketches made in Théâtre de l'Opéra and Théâtre du Châtelet during rehearsal or performance depicting Karsavina in Firebird. Ca. 1910. Blue crayon on paper, front only, detached from original sketchbook. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
22 Valentine Gross (Hugo). Page of a sketch book showing detailed drawing. depicting Karsavina in Firebird. Ca. 1910. Detailed drawing in pencil and watercolor depicting Karsavina leaping sideways, stretched legs and arms, front only, detached from original sketchbook. Date unspecified. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
23 The two-act ballet, inspired by an 1874 novella of the same name penned by Spanish author Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, employs primarily national character dance sequences instead of classical ballet choreography. Set in eighteenth-century Andalusia, it follows the story of a magistrate who attempts to seduce a miller’s wife. Sergei Diaghilev and Leonid Massine employed the services of Spanish dancer Félix Fernández García while preparing the choreography. See Beechey and Shone, “Picasso in London, 1919,” 668.
24 Based on a verse by nineteenth-century French poet Théophile Gautier, the piece uses the music of Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance as its score. Its choreography was composed by Michel Fokine and the original costume designs were conceived by Léon Bakst. Tamara Karsavina danced as the lead female character, vis-à-vis Nijinsky in the title role, when the short ballet premiered at the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo on April 19, 1911. The scene portrays a young girl who, upon returning from a ball holding a souvenir rose, inadvertently falls asleep on a chair and conjures images of the flower dancing in her dreams.
25 Beechey and Shone, “Picasso in London,” 666.
26 For example, see: Baron, Portrait of Leonide Massine in Le Tricorne. Ca. 1919. Photograph. Gelatin Silver. 3.3×8.6 cm. Valrene Tweedie Collection of Photographs from the Ballets Russes, The National Library of Australia.
27 Garafola, “Reconfiguring the Sexes,” 257.
28 Beechey and Shone, “Picasso in London,” 677.
29 Ibid., 666.
30 Ibid., 674.
31 Dame Laura Knight. Eleven sketches of Leonide Massine and Tamara Karsavina in 'Le Tricorne’. Chalk on paper. Date unspecified. Private collection (sold at auction).
32 The first image is: Laura Knight. Le Tricorne, Character portrait of Léonide Massine, 1919. Ink. Uncatalogued portrait drawings. Purchased with the Howard D. Rothschild Fund, 2001. Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The second image is: Dame Laura Knight. Russian Ballet 1920 no. 18, Massine. Carbon pencil. Depicted in the artist’s book “Twenty One Drawings of the Russian Ballet.” The Estate of Dame Laura Knight.
33 Garafola, “The Sexual Iconography of the Ballets Russes,” 61.
34 Ibid.
35 This was one of Nijinsky’s most memorable roles, playfully modernizing androgyny in ballet.
36 The first image is: Valentine Gross Hugo. Portrait of Vaslav Nijinsky as Le Spectre de la Rose (The Spirit of the Rose). Ca. 1913. Graphite on paper. Gift of the Tobin Endowment. Theater Arts Department, the McNay Art Museum. The second image is: Valentine Gross (Hugo). Sketch of Nijinsky made in Le Spectre de la rose. Made in 1913. Pencil on tracing paper, front only. Given by Jean Hugo. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
37 See, for example: Herman Mishkin. Nijinsky, Vaslav, no. 2097. Photograph. 1911. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.
38 Print depicting Nijinsky executing four different movements in Le Spectre de la rose. Sketch by Valentine Gross, ca. 1911. Given by Jean Hugo. Theater and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
39 In a discussion of literary heroines in her chapter of the book Women Writing Modernism entitled “Writing Modernist Women: Towards a Poetics of Insubstantiality,” Emily Ridge elucidates this notion in the broader modernist context: “Women had, in fact, traditionally been associated with material levity, largely due to their long-standing proprietal disenfranchisement, which highlighted, in Jordanna Bailkin’s words, ‘a perceived division between masculine worth and feminine insubstantiality’.” Qtd. in Gene Delsandro, Women Making Modernism, 28.
40 Alpers, “Is Art History?,” 8.
41 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 8.
42 Reason, “Archive or Memory?,” 87.
43 Newspaper and periodical commentaries about performances by the Ballets Russes such as those written by Cyril Beaumont, Andre Levinson, and Alexandre Benois are already well-known and widely cited.
44 Ibid., 88. Reason elaborates: “Stage detritus presents an ‘archive’ able to create and recreate the multiple appearance of the performance. In the accumulation of these traces it is as if an immediate archive of the production is established: here is the shaky and incomplete evidence of what happened; these are archives which display their own randomness and selectiveness, and that mirror the nature of the audience’s memory of the production. These are also archives that, uniquely, need archiving if they are not to disappear.”
45 Ibid., 89.
46 Pease, “Bringing Women Together,” 121.
47 Ibid., 126.
48 Ibid., 127.
49 Schweitzer and Zerdy, “Introduction: Object Lessons,” 3.
50 Gillespie, “Que(e)rying Theatrical Objects,” 150.
51 Ibid., 149.
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Anna Paliy
Anna Paliy is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the Amilcare Iannucci Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. She holds an Honors BA in Comparative Literature from Western University as well as an MA in Comparative Literature and Book History & Print Culture from the University of Toronto.