Georges Rouault, Design for the back cloth for Home (scenes 1 and 3) from The Prodigal Son, 1929; pastel, ink, tempera, and watercolor on paper, framed: 74.9 x 95.9 x 3.3 cm (29 1/2 x 37 3/4 x 1 5/16 in.;) Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/ADAGP, Paris.
A museum exhibition about dancing is, by definition, at least half dead. For paintings never moved, whereas dancers always did. When the dancing stops, so does the dance, even when—indeed, especially when—a gallery commemorates it.
Can we imagine a bygone dance alive again? Rarely, yes. So it goes for the most part at the National Gallery’s large, impressive, and ambitious Ballets Russes exhibit. The show persuades us to imagine what it was like to dance for Serge Diaghilev, its founding director, early in the twentieth century by offering artifacts to gaze upon. The curators also bring the dancing to us, indirectly, with films of recent dancers performing restaged or updated Ballets Russes classics.
These dances began as artistic revolutions—revolutions that have long since reached their conclusions. It’s all receded. We cannot feel the old as new. There lies the challenge of reviving this episode from dance history. Perhaps nothing done by Diaghilev retains its original ability to turn audiences upside down.
Still, glimmers reach us. What leaps out, for instance, in Washington: the dangling, long pendant earrings