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Behind-The-Books Blog

Books at the Ballet

Friday, December 10th, 2010

My sum experience of ballet encompasses an evening in St Petersburg three years ago (we attended believing seeing the ballet was the thing to do), and a fondness for Degas. Of course, in toddlerhood, I did don a tutu for ‘ballet’, but my only memory of this class is being given dolly mixtures at its end, and of us being encouraged to hide behind the stacked chairs to jump out and ‘frighten’ our arriving parents.

Clearly, my knowledge of ballet is a little wanting. It was therefore in the spirit of cultural instruction, and most definitely not simply to escape the cold for an hour, that I found myself last week loafing around the V&A’s Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russe exhibition.

Even for a dance-ignoramus it was quite interesting – and surprisingly, at times, amusing. Much of the credit should go to the care that has gone into set-designing the exhibition, and coordinating not just a wide array of paintings, posters, costumes and artefacts, but using colours, film and sound clips in novel ways to evoke an atmosphere as well as to inform.

But despite the V&A’s best efforts to convince me of the wonder of dance, I must admit that the highlight, for this particular sucker for literary leftovers, was something rather peripheral. Towards the end of the exhibit stands a glass case filled with scribbled-on bits of paper; namely, a draft of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, covered in Ezra Pound’s comments, and a few pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, similarly annotated. Apparently Diaghilev was quite chummy with them at one time – as he was also with the likes of Picasso, Proust, Stravinsky, Satie and Prokofiev.

The exhibition is therefore about far more than ballet – it is a reminder of a time when Europe boasted a great intellectual milieu; and for aspiring little editorial scruffs like me, it also offers an unexpected glimpse into the formative process behind some of the 20th century’s greatest writing.

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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