E-Mail This Article to a Friend Balletomaniacs The Ballets Russes on film BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	BALLETS RUSSES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DAYNA GOLDFINE AND DAN GELLER | A ZEITGEIST FILMS RELEASE | 118 MINUTES KENDALL SQUARE
	Related Links Ballets Russes's official Web site Jeffrey Gantz reviews PBS' salute to George Balanchine, a former member of the Ballets Russes. Iris Fanger writes about Nijinsky, a former star of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes Marcia Siegel writes about Michel Fokine, the great reformer and first choreographer of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. Jeffrey Gantz reviews Paul Cox’s Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky Jeffery Gantz reviews Daphnis et Chloé, which started out life as a dance work; commissioned by Ballets Russes’ Serge Diaghilev.

When Serge Diaghilev died in 1929, his company, the Ballets Russes, expired with him. Instantaneously, 20 years of glamorous, innovative performances became legend. The dancers dispersed all over Europe and beyond, to plant the idea of "Russian Ballet" across four continents over the next 40 years. In America, two main touring companies carried on the exotic tradition that became synonymous with ballet, until the culture boom of the 1960s certified the primacy of our own indigenous ballet companies.

It’s hard to imagine the almost fanatical excitement generated by the itinerant Ballets Russes companies in the 1940s and ’50s, but an extraordinary new film by the San Francisco team of Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller evokes the charisma and the competition of the era. Seldom has a two-hour documentary inquired so deeply into the heart of dance culture.

Goldfine and Geller interviewed 17 dancers over a two-year period around the time of the Ballets Russes reunion in New Orleans, June 2000. Some were in their 80s or 90s at the time, some have died since they spoke on camera. But they all share their priceless memories, insight, and gossip.

You might think it would be depressing to see these ancient, crumpled ballerinas and arthritic danseurs reminiscing, but actually the film sparkles with their vivacious personalities. We encounter icons. Dame Alicia Markova, the last of the great stars to have danced for Diaghilev. Two of the famous "baby ballerinas," Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska. And great principal dancers: Mia Slavenska, George Zorich, Maria Tallchief. Gifted with lifelong vitality, these seniors talk about what drew them to the ballet in the first place, and you can still feel the attraction. Nathalie Krassovska, in jewels and décolletage, rehearses a scene from Giselle with Zorich, who wears a T-shirt over his still-muscular torso. Riabouchinska finishes teaching a class and trundles away in a dented red convertible. Frederic Franklin, now 91, is still performing and coaching revivals. It’s he who provides the anchoring voice in the film with his informative and funny commentary.

All the speakers contribute to a collective history that isn’t easy to sort out. The two big Russes companies, that of Colonel Wassily de Basil (1932-’52) and that of Sergei Denham (1938-’62), overlapped in time and repertory, and dancers went back and forth, periodically forming short-lived spinoff groups of their own. The film’s narrative, with brilliantly layered talk, music, and visual images, keeps a clear bead on these surging and waning fortunes.

It’s a story of success, hardship, intrigue, and, finally, of history moving on. With the rise of American Ballet Theatre and the ascendancy of George Balanchine, ballet æsthetics began to change. We lost our taste for eccentricity and ego. The older generation of Russes dancers settled into more permanent teaching and choreographing opportunities in New York and elsewhere. Some found new careers in Hollywood.

If one person could represent what made the Ballets Russes fabulous and then obsolete, it would be Léonide Massine. A novice choreographer and fabled character dancer for Diaghilev, Massine went on to re-create Diaghilev favorites, and he made his own repertory of bubbling post-Diaghilev party ballets like Gaîté parisienne and Le beau Danube. Beginning in the 1930s, he created a string of allegorical, abstract "symphonic ballets" that astounded audiences and perhaps stimulated the modernist tendencies of his rival Balanchine.

The film gives us glimpses of Massine’s forgotten works, together with generous footage of the other repertory, the dazzling personalities and the daring designs. The only critic in the film is Chicago’s Ann Barzel, who preserved countless bygone performances from the wings and the balconies, wielding a silent, stop-and-go camera. As the Russes phenomenon was winding down, television entered the culture, and pretty soon we had high-tech video to preserve the performances of our time. But the Russes era had already ended. This film is a poignant but heady memoir.