Attitudes.

Serge Diaghilev--a name now more honored in the breach than in the observance.

He neither danced nor choreographed; he neither created music for ballet nor designed--at least not overtly. Yet as artistic director of his own expatriate Ballets Russes, Diaghilev and his initial artistic team, consisting most importantly of the designers Alexandre Benois and Leon Bakst and choreographer Michel Fokine, created a new brand of ballet, one that suggested that music, visual design, and dance should be an "alliance ... of complete equality." To me this is heresy, for dance in dance should always be paramount. Yet this brand of ballet did have unique virtues.

About a year ago in Cincinnati, I found myself thinking about the Diaghilev formula for ballet-making. I had gone there for an homage to what Cincinnati Ballet with justification called "The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo--The Golden Years (Dance, Sets, and Costumes)." In addition, the Cincinnati Art Museum offered an equally rewarding exhibition of Ballet Russe designs (see "Russian Revolution Takes Ohio," News, DANCE MAGAZINE, October 2002, page 18).

The museum, with the aid of a few borrowings, staged a splendid display of designs and original costumes that offered a remarkable insight into the workings of this troupe, which was started in Monte Carlo in 1938 by Leonide Massine, Rene Blum, and Serge Denham, and which incorporated Blum's own Monte Carlo Ballet. It litigiously shared much of the old Diaghilev repertoire with Col. De Basil's Original Ballets Russes, from which it had, in effect, splintered off.

To the end, Denham's Ballet Russe stuck very firmly to that original formula of Serge Diaghilev's first Ballets Russes, which considered ballet to be an amalgamation of the theatrical arts. Indeed, many of the artists on display at the Cincinnati Museum, from Matisse, Tchelitchev, and Dali to Eugene Berman and Christian Berard, even Raoul Pene du Bois, Boris Aronson, and Oliver Smith (none of the latter easel painters), were the kind Diaghilev himself would have appreciated. And the themes and musical scores also had something (admittedly, not so much) of the same distinction.

This Diaghilev/Fokine formula, accepted by even the subsequent Soviet Ballet, was dominant until the 1950s. Then the new, seemingly subversive Balanchine formula of simply dance and music, with a few costumes for decency and bodily support, gained ground. Balanchine was fascinated by the plotless ballet, although not exclusively: Think of La Sonnambula, Don Quixote, or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thrift and economic considerations also may have played a role here. Design, more or less, went through the ballet studio window, while lighting became paramount. Stories, even themes, were suspect, largely according to Balanchine's witty, accurate, and damning comment, "There are no mother-in-laws [sic] in ballet."

Ironically, the Balanchine Foundation was associated with this Ballet Russe homage, mounting Night Shadow (the original name of La Sonnambula) in Cincinnati in an attempt to get as close as possible to the original. The plan was to use the now abandoned set and surrealistic costume designs by noted painter Dorothea Tanning. In the end this project failed to materialize--cost considerations I imagine intervened, because virtually all of the original Tanning costumes designs are in this collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Nevertheless, here was a performance partly sponsored by the keepers of Balanchine's legacy, honoring a company that in effect ran counter to Balanchine's final and enduring aesthetic.

Walking round the Cincinnati gallery, entranced by this magic grotto of ballet designs, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether we had gone too far in an anti-Fokinean direction. And not only with New York Gig; Ballet, although Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, who subscribed to Balanchine's aesthetic, virtually spurned theme and design alike, but also with other companies, classic and modern. For example, during American Ballet Theatre's 2003 season at the Metropolitan Opera House, of the modern works presented, only Frederick Ashton's La Fille real gardee and The Dream and Antony Tudor's Offenbach in the Underworld had truly narrative plots and proper scenery. Nor are such spartan attitudes exclusive to classic ballet. When did you last see settings at a modern dance performance?

Occasionally--with Cunningham and Taylor particularly--but surely not often. What would Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi have thought?

For more than fifty years I have been an outspoken champion of plotless, neoclassical ballet and nonliteral modern dance--yet there are times when I do feel that the design and even narrative can have a place to play in precisely the manner of the Diaghilev formula. Interestingly, one place where this formula--as handed down by staunch Diaghilev disciple Ninette de Valois--remains is Britain's Royal Ballet, and equally interesting, one choreographer who seems to have at least a passing interest in that formula is Christopher Wheeldon. Wheeldon, with his mixed City Ballet and Royal Ballet lineage, may yet prove a proponent of ballet's currently perhaps neglected literary and decorative elements. No one is suggesting anything other than that the prime and proper business of dance is dance. But beyond dance there might be areas currently left largely unexplored.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to DANCE MAGAZINE since 1956.