Modernism after the Ballets Russes

Abstract Modernism after the Ballets Russes recovers the striking yet understudied role that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes played in the development of modernist theatre in Britain. Diaghilev’s company holds a renowned position in modernism across various arts. Yet its contributions to dramatic literature and dramaturgy have remained surprisingly elusive. This book establishes the Ballets Russes as an integral part of British theatre history, revealing how the company’s avant-garde repertoire inspired the creation of new composition strategies and performance techniques that privileged the immediacy of expression offered by the moving, dancing body. It shows that Diaghilev ballets provided new ways of thinking about the relationship between the literary and embodied aspects of dramatic performance, fuelling collaborations between eminent dramatists and theatre practitioners—Harley Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Terence Gray, and W. H. Auden—and lesser-known choreographers: Cecil Sharp, Tamara Karsavina, Ninette de Valois, and Rupert Doone. Through the prism of the Ballets Russes, this group of artists crafted distinctive new theatrical forms, including a whimsical terpsichorean fantasia and a politically subversive poetic–dramatic satire, as well as new methods of staging Shakespearean comedy and Attic tragedy. Together, this book contends, these literary and dramaturgical innovations represent a previously neglected strand of modernism: one that saw the dramatic power of the moving body expand the expressive resources of the period’s theatrical arts.