Afternoon of a Faun as a Gesamtkunstwerk and Two-Dimensional Tableaux. Copyright © 2017 Natalie Pretzman.
In 1912, the Ballet Russes debuted the approximately 12-minute long short ballet entitled L’apres midi d’une Faune, or in English, Afternoon of a Faun. The work can be considered a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in several respects, not least of which are the multiple and interdisciplinary contributors to the creation of the ballet. Based on a poem by the Symbolist writer Stephane Mallarme, using the tonal musical composition of Claude Debussy, choreographed by the Ballet Russes’ lead dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, and with stage, costume, and makeup designs by the Russian Symbolist painter Lev Bakst, the ballet became a sensation for numerous reasons, including the unsurprisingly controversial final act of masturbation on the part of the lead character of the faun. Putting aside that very infamous conclusion and the predictable sensationalized reactions of early 20th-century Paris, this paper will focus on the art direction and stage choreography of the work. Considered by most scholars to be ultimately a joint project of Nijinsky, the choreographer, and Bakst, the art director, Afternoon of a Faun is, I argue, an incredibly influential and singular work within the history of art and performance for the simple fact that it aimed to transform a two-dimensional type of artwork, Ancient Greek vase painting, into a tableau vivant that retained the two-dimensionality of its source material, rather than the usual attempt to render it three-dimensional. This paper will demonstrate how a two-dimensional tableau vivant was attempted and how successful it was, in addition to revealing the importance of the relationship between a visual artist known for two-dimensional Symbolist canvas painting, and a performance artist known previously for his danced performances within a three-dimensional space. The collaboration between two-dimensional and three-dimensional art forms is integral to this particular creation of a tableau vivant, or as Nijinsky called it, a “stage picture”. Furthermore, I argue that the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is integral to the creation of a tableaux, whether it is two or three-dimensional. Lev Bakst especially thought of the ballet production as a whole work of art, as will be seen.
Turn-of-the-century Europe was a thriving moment for the beginning of modern stage performance. Though a complete history of performative dance and ballet in particular is out of the scope of this paper, perfunctory coverage of the history and formation of the Ballet Russes, as well as its major contributors, is necessary to introduce this paper’s topic. Though most famous today for his Ballet Russes stage and costume designs, the Russian artist Lev (or Leon) Bakst began as a canvas painter. Born as Lev Samoilovitch Rosenberg in 1866 in Belarus (the so-called “White Russia) near the Polish border, the man who would become known as Bakst achieved early fame in St. Petersburg as a commissioner and portrait-painter for nobility. In the 1890s he met Alexandre Benois, another artist who would become famous for his Ballet Russes designs, and the two joined a group of young artists who would gather around the formation of the “World of Art” magazine (“Mir Iskusstva” in Russian). Sergei Diaghilev, the soon-to-be impresario of the Ballet Russes, was also a member of the group despite his lack of artistic ability, acting as organizer, coordinator, producer, and fundraiser.
The Ballet Russes was not officially formed by Diaghilev until 1909, after a number of years during which Diaghilev and company helped produce, organize, and stage multiple operatic and ballet productions in St. Petersburg. Diaghilev himself was born into a wealthy family from Novgorod, Russia, who held a monopoly on local vodka production, which allowed him to invest in and produce a number of artistic projects. In 1905, Diaghilev organized a grand portrait exhibition at a royal gallery of the tsar, and when Russian troops were decimated in a battle with Japan in 1904, the tsar promoted efforts towards greater cultural relations with France and “Western” countries. Following this, in 1907 Diaghilev, with state sponsorship, organized a concert ad opera series in Paris. This would become his foot in the door, as it were, for the creation and popularity of the Ballet Russes’ domination of the Parisian theatrical scene. The Parisian audiences were captivated by the supposed exoticism of the costumes and music evoking Russia’s medieval past in operas such as Boris Goudonov, produced in 1908. In 1909, Diaghilev returned again to Paris with a company of more than 70 off-season dancers from the Imperial Russian Ballet, saying that “From opera to ballet is but a step. I began to wonder if it would be possible to create new, short ballets, which would link music, art, and choreography together more closely than ever before.” The Ballet Russes had officially come into being late in 1909. Although the company would not perform in Russia during its existence as an official company through the early 1920s, though it quickly climbed to international fame within its first three years and in its early stages performed mainly in Paris. Afternoon of the Faun, it can be argued, may have been the turning point in the company’s history as one of the most influential dance troupe of the twentieth-century.
Alexandre Benois describes the formation of the Ballet Russes out of the World of Art circle as unsurprisingly the result of a need for capital-A “Art”: “Everything followed from the common desire of several painters and musicians to see the fulfillment of the theatrical dreams which haunted them…there was a burning craving for Art in general.” This description is reminiscent of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Total (Work) of Art, an idea that necessarily involves all elements of an artistic production to create a unification of the arts into, perhaps one could say, Art. This unifying of multiple personalities and talents from the World of Art group was integral to the stage productions for which the soon-to-be-formed Ballet Russes would become world-famous.
The personalities involved with the Ballet Russes’ formation were also interested early on in the art and history of ancient antiquity, particularly that of Greece. Lev Bakst, scholars generally presume, was absolutely obsessed with it and brought a near-encyclopedic knowledge of Ancient Greek traditions, theater, and art with him to the World of Art group, and then to the Ballet Russes. His first forays into Greek-inspired theatrical design were the three plays he designed: Hippolytus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonna, all fairly straight-forward adaptations of the ancient texts. Bakst orchestrated the production of the ballet Acis and Galatea at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg in 1905 alongside the choreographer Michel Fokine, who would later become a member of the Ballet Russes himself (and their star choreographer before Nijinsky would take over the role with Afternoon of a Faun in 1912). The ballet was meant to be a hybridization of traditional balletic movement and the angular, acrobatic motions of Greek dance.
Lev Bakst fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting the classical world when he travelled with fellow artist Valentin Serov throughout the Greek mainland, as well as Constantinople and Odessa, in the early summer of 1907. Several Symbolist-style canvas paintings by both artists resulted from the innumerable sketches and studies done of each of the cities, ruined palaces, and ancient temples the artists visited, but none is more essential to one’s understanding of the influence of the ancient world on Bakst than his Terror Antiquus of 1908. A roughly square-shaped canvas, the painting depicts a vast Greek landscape seen from far above, as if the viewer floats in the atmosphere. An immense amount of detail is used to delineate individual monuments and locales from antiquity, all of which Bakst has intertwined and mixed in with one another with little concern for accurate geographical location. The land space is split in half by a series of enormous roiling waves which threaten to cover the mountains and the rocky structures. Lording over the scene, placed extremely incongruent to the main perspective of the landscape and nearly life-size in comparison with the viewer, is painted an Ancient Greek kore sculpture, emerging from the waist up at the bottom edge of the canvas, the top of her head nearly reaching a third of the way up the canvas. The kore, perhaps representing the goddess Aphrodite, seems ominous and threatening with her archaic smile and unmoving, columnar pose and physique. Behind her, an enormous lightning strike seems to reach toward a vast monumental or temple complex far in the distance below the viewer.
Bakst’s interest in the ancient world would soon become evident as well in his designs for the early Ballet Russes productions, including his designs for Salome (1908), Cleopatre (1909-1910), Scheherazade in 1910, Narcisse (1911), Helen de Sparte of 1912, Daphnis and Chloe of 1912, and finally Afternoon of the Faun, also 1912. Charles Mayer, in his article “The Influence of Leon Bakst on Choreography” argues that Afternoon of a Faun would be the culmination of Bakst’s interest in the antique, but also represented Bakst’s desire for art to return to a more “primitive” and primal state. Terror Antiquus, Mayer claims, was an attempt by Bakst to represent the contrasting themes of human progress and human primitivism, most notably in the foreboding imagery of Aphrodite in the form of the most primitive of all types of Greek statuary and art. It is no coincidence, says Mayer, that Bakst designed Kore-like peplos gowns for the dancing nymphs in Afternoon of a Faun, and also no coincidence that he chose a Post-Impressionistic, nearly Cubist style of dance and backdrop, as will be described below.
Bakst’s work with the Ballet Russes has often been spoken of by way of Gesamtkunst terminology, and the above-mentioned references to elements of Ancient Greek primitivism combine with one another and coincide with the creation of a Gesamtkunstwerk performance. According to Bakst scholar Alexander Schouvaloff, the Russian artist changed his style often throughout his career, all for the purposes of adapting to the current narrative or ethnographic authenticity of the production at hand. Bakst’s costume and stage designs on paper, which are mostly what is extent of his work for the Ballet Russes, are evidence of his chameleon-like ability to adapt based on the greater needs of the production: Gerald Siordet calls his costumes “personages”, and Schouvaloff calls them “portraits”. Schouvaloff also states that Bakst’s use of color also changed often to fit the needs of the stage: color to Bakst had symbolic meaning, with certain colors creating different moods, perhaps influenced by the recent rise in Expressionist painting. The stage was his “canvas”, Bakst claimed, and he would “paint” the borders, the backdrops, furniture, props, and costumed figures in the creation of a complete three-dimensional “moving picture”.
Leo Aylen, scholar of Ancient Greek theater, repeatedly enumerates the importance of considering Greek theater as a Gesamtkunstwerk. He theorizes that it was meant to be a “totality of experience…Words, music, dance, and spectacle, whether in tragedy or comedy, combine to form a Total rhythm that can only be analyzed in terms of itself”. While Aylen wrote his treatise as late as 1975 and it is unknown whether or not Bakst would have considered Ancient Greece from the perspective of the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it seems likely that he considered his production, too, as a total experience, wherein all elements come together to create a single moving picture, or stage canvas. Inspired by the poetry (words) of Mallarme, using the music of Debussy, the motions of Nijinsky, and the visuals of Bakst himself, Afternoon of the Faun should indeed be considered as a totality, and it is necessary to see it as such when analyzing just what kind of tableaux was actually created with the finished performance.
As the twelve-minute production begins, the titular faun (originally played by Nijinsky himself, as well as others in the decades since) sits atop a rocky outcropping at the center of the stage, facing stage right, and playing his flute along to the opening notes of Debussy’s composition. He reclines on his side, one arm braced against the ground while the other holds the flute to his mouth, with one leg outstretched and the other bent. Around a minute into the ballet, the faun finally moves from his opening pose, jerkily turning toward stage left and slowly arising from his reclining position. He then lies back down, stretching his legs and arms out in languid movements. He once again sits up, his body entirely in profile to the audience: the faun looks forward to stage left, toward which he reaches with one arm while the other once again braces against the rock, his right leg crossed and bent upright over his left. Two and a half minutes in, he finally begins to completely rise, but not before taking hold of a bundle of grapes and dragging them along his face to the rise and fall of the musical score.
Suddenly from stage left enters a group of three maidens, nymphs with long plaited and braided golden hair and swirling, gauzy chitons decorated in antique geometric patterns. They walk out rhythmically with arms seemingly intertwined, but in actuality merely bent over top the next to create an illusion of three-dimensional mingling of limbs. Their faces turn toward stage right, seen in profile by the audience, while the rest of the body faces forward. They step one after another in sync toward stage right, as though walking on an invisible straight line delineated on the ground. They pause in front of the faun’s rock (on which he sits half-risen, frozen) and turn their heads together toward stage left, lifting their right arms up and perpendicular to their bodies, bending them at ninety-degree angles. Another pair of nymphs emerges from stage left, mirroring the original poses of the lead group of nymphs. As they move toward the faun’s rock, the first group moves further to the right, coming to a stop only as the second group pauses in front of the faun. All five freeze for a few moments until a sixth figure walks into the space created by the two groups. This sixth nymph completes a few balletic poses, her face always in profile with her body facing the audience, before joining the group at left. Finally, a taller, more splendidly bedecked nymph quickly emerges from stage left and takes her lead place centrally located between the groups of nymphs and standing directly in front of the rock on which the faun sits a few feet above the nymphs. The faun’s attention is almost immediately captured by the lead nymph, his head turning to follow her movements as she manages to place a silk scarf on the ground before her without breaking her profile stance. The nymphs dote around her, moving back and forth to each side of her, while the faun stands and begins to descend his rock, still utterly transfixed by the lead nymph. The faun sneaks slowly alongside the rock behind the nymphs as the lead nymph begins to undress. Five minutes in, the other nymphs notice him and are frightened off stage, but the lead nymph stays, eventually grabbing her garments as though to also run from him. She decides at the last moment to meet the faun in the center stage, where they engage in mirrored movements more akin to modern dance than ballet. Eventually, she leaves him, denying his apparent wish for amorous relations. At first disappointed, the faun at once realizes the nymph has forgotten her silk drapery. He tenderly plucks it off the ground, dancing with it as he might the nymph herself. Occasionally, the other nymphs wander out to try to retrieve it from the faun, with no success. He clutches it to his chest as he walks with slow steps toward his rock, remaining in profile at nearly all moments. Once having climbed back atop his rock outcrop, he lays the silk down, then proceeds to lie upon it. The curtain closes on the faun making passionate, masturbatory love to the silk drapery.
The set design was a simple painted cloth backdrop of which the original production design still exists in the form of a watercolor on paper. Contributing to the sense of the two-dimensionality of the production, the backdrop, painted by Bakst himself, was an Impressionistic autumnal landscape of the Greek countryside, a suitable pastoral locale for mythological nymphs and fauns. Nijinsky apparently thought the landscape too “oppressive” in the dense flatness of the thick forest it depicted: depth of space and field in the scene was nearly indistinguishable, as tree, rock, and grassy forms blended in and out of one another, moving upward in diagonal planes to the very top of the cloth canvas, with no hint of a sky or light breaking through the autumn foliage. The dark teals, greys, tans, golds, and rusted oranges were applied flatly to the surface of the cloth with minimal mixing or use of light and shadow to delineate volume and depth. For instance, toward the right edge of the cloth canvas is painted a large pond or bathing pool surrounded by rocky outcropping. The pool is not foreshortened to any extent, but rather takes up nearly half of the canvas, stretching vertically up along the flat surface rather than receding backwards into the depths of the scene. The effect is disorienting and unrealistic, especially when considering the production design’s addition of several figures of nymphs “below” the pond, to show how the dancers might appear against the backdrop. In any sort of realistic landscape scene, figures standing before a landscape element such as a pool would block the view of it at least partially; in this flattened, upright landscape, the lack of foreshortening and delineation of depth makes it so that the figures stand below every element of the landscape. The pool, the rocky outcrops, and the trees all rise at varying levels, not in front of one another, but on top.
This extreme flattening and abstraction of the landscape follows the rules of medium specificity that Clement Greenberg famously laid out in the 1940s. The cloth canvas is flat, so in accordance, so too must be the objects painted upon it…including the “objects” who would move before it, the dancers themselves. In her analysis of the ballet as a production lacking space, Hanna Jaervinen states that the three-dimensionality is often taken for granted as a precondition of the dance medium. But is it a requirement? Jaervinen says it isn’t, for the Afternoon of a Faun is a “choreographic picture” which reveals the unnatural and composed nature of the danced tableau. This revealing of its true nature through the fantastical, unrealistic posing of the dancers similarly questions the dance medium, just as modern artists such as the Cubists were simultaneously questioning the nature of the painted canvas. The poses of the dancers have even been compared to the angular, hieratic, and contorted shapes and forms of Cubist art. Compare for instance Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, first exhibited at the Salon des Independents in the same year as the Afternoon of a Faun’s debut. The Salon des Independents was particularly known for its exhibiting of Cubist figural works, including Duchamp, Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, and even Russian artists such as Alexander Archipenko. It is not unlikely that Bakst and Nijinsky, stationed in Paris since 1908-1909, would have visited and seen many of the Cubist and Post-Impressionist works on display, with the blocky, geometric figures, their angular, bent limbs painted into contorted poses.. Picasso and Delaunay would even join the Ballet Russes as designers in the later 1910s. These Cubist images were absolutely flat: though a slight illusion of spatial depth is created through the geometries of the bodies (their spherical heads, block-like hands, and rectangular limbs, seen from multiple points of view simultaneously), there is no true concern for spatial recession. All forms press flat against the picture plane, the colors fairly unmodulated and placed onto the canvas in solid planes.
There are no illusions of three-dimensionality in Bakst and Nijinsky’s Faun either, nor should there be in the eyes of Lev Bakst, for the utter flattening of the backdrop image also accords to the flatness that was to be the goal of the entirety of the stage production. After all, Afternoon of the Faun was a “stage picture” according to Nijinsky, and the stage was a “canvas”, according to Bakst. These statements, alongside the flattening of the backdrop image, as well as the placement of the backdrop a mere two meters back from the proscenium arch of the stage, reveal the goal of a living and moving two-dimensional Gesamtkunstwerk. Despite this, there seems to have been a much-noted incongruence of form and motion with sound…the angularity and geometric poses of the dancers do not seem to match the flowing tones of Debussy’s composition, or the dreamlike illusory imagery of Mallarme’s original poetry. This perhaps can be seen as breaking the idea of the total work of art, but it serves, in my opinion, as a modernizing effect which is fundamentally important to the flattening and two-dimensionality of the stage picture as a whole. There is an explicit relationship between the Modern and flatness as a stylistic characteristic, and therefore this contrast between soft, smooth music and sharp, flat movements seems to paradoxically bring the seemingly incongruent elements of the work together into a complete Gesamtkunstwerk.
The placement of the backdrop cloth only two meters from the stage edge was particularly important in forcing the dancers to keep to a flattened, linear style of moving tableaux. Afternoon of the Faun, though recreating a flat painting using living actors (or in this case, dancers), is not a traditional tableau vivant. Unlike the traditional definition of a tableaux as an unmoving arrangement of three-dimensional bodies meant to bring to life a work of two-dimensionality, Faun’s tableau is completely centered around movement and action. The choreography attempts to bring to life the frozen movements only hinted at on the red-and-black Greek vases: dancers move from side to side, often in profile or frontally facing the audience, placing their limbs in angular, often bent arrangements. For instance, a body faces forward, stepping to the left with upraised arms, while the face, in profile, turns to the right. At no point in the dance does a dancer purposely turn their back to the audience for more than the split-second necessary to change directions of angular poses. There is a conscious effort to avoid movement forwards or backwards into space. Rather, the choreography involves a distinct emphasis on line and linearity, on movements which travel from side-to-side rather than backwards and forwards. Diagonal movements are also avoided. The general motion is jerky and lacks a smooth rhythm or flow, with little to no extraneous movement. Indeed, contemporary criticisms of the production claimed that Nijinsky’s choreography represented a series of poses more than a flowing dance. A critic writing in The Daily Mail on February 18, 1913 stated that “The miracle of the thing lies with Nijinsky…who as the faun does no dancing.” Hanna Jaervinen states that the ballet was repeatedly called a “bas-relief stage picture” by critics, and Igor Stravinsky, in his 1936 Autobiography, states that Faun was to be “a sort of antique tableau” and was to be “presented as an animated bas-relief, with the figures in profile.” Bakst’s influence was pivotal to the productions overall concept and design, and his obsession with Greece could be seen in every element of the ballet. Stravinsky says that he “inspired the choreography even to the slightest movements.” Dance theorist Joan Acocella has stated that the “limitation of space” of a dance like the Faun ultimately reveals the movements of the bodies more successfully. Echoing the idea that figures on Greek vases were shown with faces in profile and bodies facing the viewer in order to show as much of the body as possible, Acocella writes, “What was natural, and therefore harder to see, in the round becomes, when forced into flatness, both readable and miraculous.” Even the dancers were known to have complained about the movements being “unnatural”, “constraining”, and feeling as though their bodies were carved from wood or stone. Even the dance notations completed by Nijinsky, and utilized by countless choreographers in the last century, consist of a series of poses more than fluid dancing. Novelist and translator Francois de Miomandre commented on the “excessive choreographic stillness” of the dance, which might remind one of the traditional theatrical definition of a tableaux as a series of short freezings of particular scenes to heighten audience awareness of an event , or of the poses, in the case of a dance production.
The significance of Afternoon of a Faun in the history of both ballet and art can be better understood by looking at the productions that proceeded from Faun’s 1912 debut. In 1913, Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes bought to life an even more controversial and spectacularized ballet production, The Rite of Spring. With music by Igor Stravinsky, whom Diaghilev had been courting for years, designs by another Russian Symbolist artist Nicolas Roerich, and once again choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, The Rite of Spring firmly placed the Ballet Russes as the forebears of modern dancing on the international stage. With The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky took the stilted, jerky movements of Faun to an extreme, combining supposedly “primitive” Russian folk dancing with vaguely recognizable traditional ballet motions. Set to a dramatically threatening and sublime orchestral score by Stravinsky, and with highly exotic and extremely colorful Russian costumes, the early audiences were absolutely scandalized. From then on, the Ballet Russes would be considered anything but traditional and would make way for extravagantly original modernist dancing in the decades to come.
Beginning in 1914 and partly to escape the Great War, Diaghilev took Nijinsky and his dancers across the ocean to the United States for the first time, premiering Afternoon of a Faun in Los Angeles n 1916. Charlie Chaplin was in the audience and spoke unwaveringly with his praise: “I have seen few geniuses in the world, and Nijinsky is one of them! His every movement was poetry, his every step a flight into strange fancy.” He even used the motifs and general movements and imagery of Afternoon of a Faun in a scene in his 1919 film Sunnyside. As late as the 1980s, Afternoon of a Faun was influencing film, including the drama biopic Nijinsky which featured a full-length recreation of the ballet’s debut showing the scandalized audience reactions.
It could be argued that without the break-through genius and originality of Afternoon of a Faun, ballet and modern dance as we know it would not exist today. For Bakst and Nijinsky to make a truly original, modern ballet,it was not enough to merely bring the images of Ancient Greece back to life…to remain loyal to the antique, Bakst retained that original two-dimensionality in every element of the production that was available to him, merging the classical with the Modern. Though the critical response was at first negative, mistakenly stating that Nijinsky and Bakst failed to join the two-dimensional sources to the three-dimensionality of the dance medium, I argue that this was entirely purposeful. Bakst and Nijinsky chose to flatten their stage picture as much as was possible while still using living, breathing humans as the subjects of the narrative image. The ballet’s recognition and reputation, as well as the innumerable reproductions, retranslations, and restagings that have occurred throughout the past century, prove that the two-dimensional Gesamtkunstwerk was ultimately successful.