Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [48]
Day after day, Gabrielle climbed up to Elise’s studio in Montmartre and then strove to convince her teacher that she could become a dancer. Once again, however, she was to be disappointed; after several months, Elise told her that she just wasn’t right for the stage. For all her noted grace, was it that some part of Gabrielle remained self-conscious, inhibiting her ability to abandon herself completely? Whatever the reasons for her failure, she was by now devoted to her expressive dance lessons (and her eccentric teacher), and continued with the classes. Convinced by the idea that a beautiful body was a slim and exercised one, for the rest of her life Gabrielle would work to keep hers that way. If she couldn’t become a dancer, at least she would have a dancer’s body.
9
The Rite of Spring
In 1913, some doubted whether France was still the cultural arbiter to the world, arguing that it had become more fascinated by foreign culture than by its own. While French artists and composers such as Renoir, Braque, Matisse, Ravel, Debussy and Fauré were being seen and heard, it was the innovation of the foreigners—Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Arthur Rubinstein, Rachmaninov and the Ballets Russes—that was attracting more animated attention. The foreigners seemed more thrusting in their search for liberation from past aesthetic and moral ideals, from authority and bourgeois conformity. They had traveled, physically and mentally, from the margins to Paris, which they saw as the place where revolution was fermented. The Polish-Italian Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire understood that an essential element of the modern mentality was exile, the “battle on the frontiers.” The French painter Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote that the French capital had become the central station of Europe, and that “in Paris uncertainty rules.”1
One May evening in 1913, following much anticipation, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presented a new ballet at the avant-garde Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. This work embodied the rejection of everything in art and life that its creators regarded as outmoded, and was to become one of the seminal works of the modern era. In the audience on that historic occasion was Gabrielle Chanel, invited by her dance teacher Elise Toulemon. (Eurythmics had become so influential that Diaghilev and his dancer-choreographer, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, had visited its founder, Jaques-Dalcroze, to ask for help with the dance movements for their ballet.)
Its composer, Igor Stravinsky, had named the ballet Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). He said that “it represents pagan Russia, and is unified by a single idea: the mystery surge of the creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot.”2 Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, had written to Stravinsky : “Now I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, beautiful and utterly different—but for the ordinary viewer a jolting and emotional experience.”3
Stravinsky told his mother not to be afraid if the response to the ballet was negative, saying that “it is in the order of things.”4 Meanwhile, Nijinsky’s dancers complained that his ideas were incomprehensible and his style entirely without beauty. With Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Diaghilev was intent on confrontation; their united goal was to shock.
How had it come about that Sergei Diaghilev and his dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, had not only become essential elements of the Parisian avant-garde but were central to the development of the modern movement?
A younger Diaghilev