Art X Ballet

Art in Ballet

While ballet has inspired many artists to create their own works, it has also invited them to step directly into the creative process, thereby shaping not only how ballet is seen, but how it is staged. The creative dialogue between art and ballet reached a high point in early 20th-century Europe with the Ballet Russe, an avant-garde company founded by Serge Diaghilev in 1909. Renowned for their radical collaborations, the Ballet Russe boasted a who’s who of artistic associates from the world of music, dance, and visual art, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Léon Bakst.

Lesser known, but no less influential, were two pioneering female Modernists; Natalia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay, who both lent their unique artistic styles to the Ballet Russes designs.

Goncharova, a Russian painter and designer, was associated with multiple avant-garde artistic movements, including Neo-Primitivism and Rayonism (which, like Impressionism, was focused on the movement of light), and created her own movement called “Vsecestvo” (Everythingism), which fused different techniques and influences from painting, prints, cinema, fashion, illustrations, theatre, and ballet! Goncharova's designs drew on Russian folklore and religious iconography, utilising vivid colour and abstract motifs. She designed costumes and sets for several Ballet Russe productions, including The Golden Cockerel (1914), Les Noces (1923), and the 1920s revival of The Firebird. Her bold, expressive designs complemented the new dynamic choreography, expanding her visual rhythms onto the stage.

Like Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay was a Russian-born artist who spent most of her career in Paris. Working as a painter, fashion, textile, and set designer, she was a co-founder of the Orphism art movement (a subset of Cubism) known for its abstract geometric shapes and bold colours. She first met Serge Diaghilev in 1917 in Madrid, and he was drawn to her experimental textile designs, a style of contrasting patterns and colours she termed ‘simultanéisme’. Delaunay’s family home in Russia, which she had been renting out, had just been seized by the Bolsheviks leaving her no stable income when Diaghilev offered her the chance to redesign the costumes for Cléopâtre (1918), beginning a long and lucrative career in costume and fashion design.

Delaunay’s designs were directly influenced by contemporary fashion and Parisian haute couture, with a streamlined modern shape and tasselled fringing that reflected street fashion, an ideology that matched with Diaghilev’s attitude that art and life should be as one. Her striking approach to colour and patterns made from concentric circles and zigzags emphasised the movement of the dancers. Her collaborations with the Ballet Russe and other companies blurred the lines between design and dance, her unique artistic vision becoming not just ornamentation but an active element in the performance itself.

Australian artists have also played their part in directly shaping the visual heritage of ballet, at home and internationally. In 1963, while living in London, Antipodean artist Arthur Boyd was commissioned to create sets and costumes for Robert Helpmann’s new ballet Elektra. Already established as a renowned painter, potter, and printmaker, Boyd’s works drew on literary and mythological sources, exploring themes of love, grief, and shame, which he incorporated into his designs for the ballet adaptation of this dark Greek tragedy. Boyd created three dramatic moveable backdrops based on black and white etchings, a blood-red floor, and boldly suggestive costume designs painted on body stockings. When the ballet was restaged for The Australian Ballet in 1966, the costumes were remade in stark black and white to further incorporate the dancers’ movement with the striking set designs.

Sir Sidney Nolan, best known for his ‘Ned Kelly’ series of paintings, was also a prolific designer for ballet and theatre. After seeing Nolan’s abstract work, director and choreographer Serge Lifar invited him to create designs for the 1940 revised Icare performed by the original Ballet Russe, who were touring Australia, and in 1962 he designed Kenneth MacMillan’s Royal Ballet restaging of The Rite of Spring.

Arguably his most significant design was for The Display, a 1964 Robert Helpmann production known as the first wholly Australian ballet. The Display takes place during a bush picnic and explores themes of masculinity in modern Australia by drawing parallels between the mating rituals of a lyrebird and a group of AFL-playing lads as they attempt to seduce a woman at a bush picnic. In addition to the costumes, including the iconic lyrebird with its enormous unfurling tail feathers, Nolan designed a backdrop that evoked sunlight shafts stealing through dense rainforests, with streaks of white gumtree trunks peeking through the darkness.

Collaborations between artists and dancers have resulted in some of the most iconic performances and visually arresting images in history and show what can be possible when applying creative minds to new mediums. More than just movement, more than just a painting, it becomes a living, breathing artwork as ephemeral as it is unforgettable.