so far we've seen how ballet went from being a very stylized formal
group activity to very
beautiful melodies um
some often um folk
story kinda tales of Tchaikovsky's ballet
now we're into the modern period what's happening in ballet
ballet's still very much alive and in fact mmm
changing all the time I mmm saw ballet not long ago where they had taken
um Bessie Smith tunes and they were doing ballet to it and it was
amazingly wonderful so when we get to the 20th century
we've already talked about how um
the music is different
keeps changing one of the composers who did some
very dramatic things with ballet in terms of the music
and the dance was Igor Stravinsky
so stravinsky was a composer at the turn of the century
uh Russian who worked with
a very significant person in the history of ballet and that is sergei diaghilev
diaghilev was an entrepreneur basically he
was not a musician he was not a dancer he really didn't have any of those skills but he loved
all those things
and he was a great salesman
so he'd knew how to get together the people he needed to
creat a production to be able to finance it to get people to come to it
he he was the the mastermind behind all those things and he wasn't
responsible for a remarkable number of significant
ballet events over the time period in that he worked
so he worked with stravinsky on several of his ballets
um something's really important about diaghilev to know is that he was
also
interacting with famous painters and and
visual artist of the day he hired picasso to create costumes for ballet
picasso I mean it's not like picasso wasn't already famous so he's hiring
people who are famous artists
to create designs for costumes just imagine the power that being able to do
that
I'm going to give you a link to a website on the Victoria and Albert
Museum in
London did a wonderful exhibit of diaghilev
and his relationship with his artists and it has pictures of the costumes
that he had people design
he had them designing sets for him so he had found the very best people he could
to create those works and so you should take a look at that just to
see
the really cool stuff they came up with especially since it's also early 20th
century
and costuming-wise it's pretty out there
in terms of what you might think for ballet as well so
diaghilev works with stravinsky um stravinsky
like tchaikovsky is famous for three ballets one is called the firebird
which is a
um brush in mythology
of that you know sort of Phoenix coming out the ashes short story
um he also did a ballet
called petrushka where the characters are puppets so
that's kind of an interesting approach to ballet people didn't think you could
make ballet dancers look like puppets but he managed to make that work
but the one that he is most famous for is the Rite of Spring
or Le Sacre du printemps see how to practice my French
this is from 1913 so imagine 1913 you're an audience member you've been going to the ballet
you've had your season tickets for years and you're going to the ballet here's a new
ballet by
stravinsky and you show up to the ballet
all right so this ballet is based on
um a lot of pagan Russian
history so that the characters are sort of
caveman-like uh um
tribal people so they're not your pretty swans and
those things that we've been looking at in tchaikovsky all this time so we go to the
ballet we settle in we're ready
and when the music starts
it's very weird starts with this kinda odd
high-pitched bassoon solo this is not what we expect we go the ballet
what's happening here things move on
this is 20th century now right stravinsky's kind of pushing the envelope a little bit
instead of having all these beautiful lovely melodies that we associate with ballet
he's got these intense driving rhythms like to bomb pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
yeah ballet . . . who's gonna ballet dance to that just you know. . .
bomb pop pop pop well the dance itself
was also new so we've got stravinsky who's doing a story that's not your pretty
story
he's got music that is very focused on
winds and percussion it's very driving it's very rhythmic its very
dissonant and the dancers are doing things that nobody expected
either now we're very fortunate that the Joffrey Ballet
has recreated that production remember they've got the choreography they know what
it was they got the costumes
so I'd like you to go now and watch the scene from the Rite of Spring
and when you come back we're going to talk about what audiences thought about it when
they saw it
All right so now you've watched a scene from the rite of spring
what'd you think
when I first saw this video I thought you know you could take out that
music and you could put a hip-hop track in it it would look just like a hip-hop video
the dancing is just so not what you think when you think ballet
you know they're hunched over in odd positions and
like jump up like straight up off the ground instead of leaping beautifully
it's different Now
imagine that you're there in 1913 in the audience
what would happen the audience did not react well at all in fact there was a
riot
a literal riot at the first production of The Rite of
Spring
fortunately they persisted and they kept doing this ballet
but you can see that this would've been a very dramatic change
from the kinds of things people who were used to seeing
and Giselle and coppelia and all those other really sort of pretty
operas happening i meant ballet sorry so stravinsky
this is his big moment here the rite of spring highly dramatic
you may recognize some of the music because it's also used in Fantasia
but it has nothing to do with the way the story line actually goes
but I think it's just wonderful we have ballet troops now that are recreating
these early things so that we can see what it was like and really get a sense of
why that was such a big deal that the rite of spring was so different
so now it illustrates a lot of things about 20th century style
musically and in terms of ballet now let's look at another Russian composer
and that is Sergei Prokofiev who's just a little bit behind stravinsky in terms
of time
prokofiev um is famous for um some orchestral things
you know him for Peter and the wolf which is um
you know that the Children's piece that introduces us to different
instruments
he also wrote ballets my favorite ballet like of all ballets in the world
is Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet
another one of those great examples where we have a literary influence
that is powerful and it and it just keeps going and we're still doing Romeo and
Juliet stories today
so prokofiev has taken the story of Romeo and Juliet translated it
into ballet
prokofiev is in the 19... this is 1935 so we're just a little bit
later then stravinsky he like stravinsky
has a lot of emphasis on rhythm
and a lot of emphasis on the winds and percussion
part of the orchestra so while there are certainly lovely string parts in this
ballet
it like the rite of spring is driven in a slightly different
way
I can watch two parts of this ballet one is...
happens early in the ballet and is a scene
um basically it's in the the town square there
and we have the Montagues and Capulets and all their knights
of their. . . their families are out in this um
open space and they're basically just sort of
strutting there stuff you know they really aren't
going anywhere but they're really just sort of showing their power
you may recognize this this piece of music because was actually used in the
in a car commercial several years back uhm
they had a scene, like, where the car comes driving through this thing in
as a car driving through these gigantic steel balls were swinging
like missing the car as it drove through and they're using the music from this
dance of the Knights
from Romeo and Juliet so take a look at that because it's a really nice example
of a crowd scene in ballet and how they
and how they would manage that many people on the stage
and in the second scene I would like you to watch is the ballet- balcony scene
you can't do Romeo and Juliet without thinking about the balcony scene
so when we think about that balcony scene um you know this is like the
highlight romantic part of the story
we would think this is gonna be really lushly string
kinda driven and it does have some elements of that
string part but think about how prokofiev uses a
slightly more modern sensibility about that how he creates
that sense one of the things that I love about this scene
is that um you remember the Romeo Juliet have been barely
met and they start
spatially very separated she's on the balcony
and he's in the in the garden which in the play that's how it would stay
but obviously if you're going to get a good ballet you gotta get the two together
physically
right so she eventually comes down and and look at
the way that both the music and the dance
show that change and their relationship how they are how they're falling in love
and how they're coming together
and trusting each other more if you think about
a partner dance a partie deux like this where you have two people who are dancing
together
there's a lot of trust that has to be going on there because you know he's
gonna pick her up and carry her around and you have to absolutely believe in
your partner
and the way that the choreography and the music show you
that change in their relationship it's just so powerful i think it's one of the
greatest scenes in all ballet
so watch the crowd scene
and then watch the balcony scene and if you like it a whole lot I think you
can actually watch the entire
ballet on uh YouTube somewhere and hopefully you'll take advantage of that
opportunity and
watch what is my absolute favorite ballet Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet