Ein Brief aus Groningen

It couldn‘t have escaped anyone‘s notice in Holland. For weeks, billboards and TV and newspaper ads urged all unemployed, well-to-do ballet fans to take a five day trip to Groningen for the Diaghilev experience: three ballets by Fokine, two by Balanchine, Nijinsky and Massine and one each by Lifar and Nijinska to supplement an exhibition on Diaghilev‘s world of art. Expectations were certainly high for this lavishly sponsored over-exposure of companies from St. Petersburg, London, Chicago, Bordeaux and Amsterdam.
The first problem was the contemporary visitor.

However provocative Diaghilev‘s flirtation with elitist, cosmopolitan decadence might have been, his ballets, like their audiences, now belong to the past. Ballets can be revived, but not their audiences. Any effort to resuscitate this spirit, once filled with sophisticated sensuality, decaying decadence and apocalyptic alarm, is doomed to fail. I decided to take on the persona of Lady Rippon. Consequently, I felt deep disappointment and even deeper indignation at that cheap, kinky “Firebird“ and the sordid treatment of “Les Noces“ by the Mariinsky dancers. Bakst and Gontcharova would have turned in their graves.
A pleasing ...