kvetchlandia:

Nickolas Muray     Mikhail Mordkin, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe Dancer     1922

I spent my entire life training to be a concert pianist so I had to study Les Ballets Russes in detail. Mordkin is a pretty famous dancer, but the Ballet is most associated with Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers of all time, a schizophrenic who died in obscure insanity.

(E.O. Hoppe/Getty Images   Vaslav Nijinsky)

Les Ballets Russes was a ballet company founded by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909; many famous artists have been associated with the ballet, including Anna Pavlova, Peter Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Eric Satie, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Coco Chanel.

My favorite story about Les Ballets Russes is the debut of the Rite of Spring. The Ballet tells the story of two primitive Slavic tribes that sacrifice a virgin to the Gods of the spring, and it is the most frightening piece of music I have ever heard. It’s difficult for music to incite and narrate real fear; images and films are much better at it. But the Rite of Spring, with primitive tonalities and rhythms, is scary and violent and dissonant; it sounds like primitive violence unrestrained by centuries of corrective civilization. Movement III of Part 2, a section vividly titled ‘Glorification of the Chosen Victim,’ begins with huge booming drums, and the first time I heard it, I imagined warriors and elders and primitive half-men leaping around in a bloodlust frenzy, laughing manically as the victim struggles against her bonds.

Even by today’s standards, its jarring. The choreography is more stomping than graceful leaping, and the dancers are clad not in tutus but in shapeless sackcloth.

The images of pagan Russia, the theme, the primitive harmonies and the heavy grotesque choreography horrified the Paris audience. The crowd eventually rioted, shouting so loudly that the dancers could no longer hear the music. Nijinsky had to shout numbers to them from backstage.

I’m not especially famliar with dance history, but I know The Ballet was enormously influential in that field. And it was equally monumental in music, probably one of the most important pieces of music ever written. Everyone has felt its echoes, whether they know it or not. The Rite of Spring was used in Disney’s Fantasia. And even those who don’t know about the Rite of Spring have heard the music from Star Wars, which was heavily influenced by it. Listen to the music in Episode IV: A New Hope.

(Stravinsky and Nijinsky, 1911. At the premiere of Petrushka.)

lights reflected in the water. Venice, May 2008.

I know this picture isn’t really of anything in particular, and I also know that it’s blurry and smeared and technically poor. But I was writing an email to Young Will, being very nostalgic about all the weeks we lived there together, and this was the picture that seemed most appropriate.

I was telling him about Mendelssohn’s Venetian Gondola Song, a piece I played a long time ago:

“…in the way I played it and in the way I dreamed it, I saw melancholy, mustached men in black and white shirts, gliding so gracefully as if dancing on the pointed ends of pointed boats, slicing through crystally waters, letting their oars scrape moss and bark and ancient brick. Past little candles in windows, soft voices singing into the night, singing to the stars, and meanwhile, I dreamed that every trill I played was a soft wave rippling onto the walls of the bridges that connected so many damp sidewalks. I saw every star reflecting the black, lonely waters; I saw shadows reflected in the ground floor windows of old sunken buildings; I saw those buildings, once unfinished and empty, once full and warm, now decrepit.”

©Niti Parthasarathy (elle told me to do this)

kvetchlandia:

Vydareny Ivan      Budapest     1908

Budapest is a phenomenal city. it isn’t saturated with tourists so all its many old-world mysteries - alleys that seduce with shadows, strange cobblestoned paths, incomprehensible conversations - feel authentic and amplified.

Best of all, just like in this picture, Budapest is a city of towers and big bridges, of operatic designs; the blurry spires in the top-right corner of the photo are from the Liberty Bridge, the narrowest bridge spanning the Danube that cleaves the city into its Buda and Pest halves.

—

Below - A view of the Margaret (Margit) Bridge across the Danube, March 2009. The Houses of Parliament are on the right. It was a cold, cloudy day, but in some inexplicable way, that made Budapest even lovelier; not all cities are meant to be seen in the sun.

tartanspartan:

kvetchlandia:

Tibor Honty     Les Ballons sous la Pluie, Slovaquie      c.1963

look at that petit munchkin. he looks so lost, and he looks like he likes it. this is probably his first solo journey down the boulevard. i hope his parents are the responsibly indulgent kind, letting him wander off bravely but always waiting behind a nearby tree.

when i was a kid, i thought i could fly if i held enough balloons.

georgiakatee:

I find trains so fasinating, everyone on them is going somewhere and meeting someone, everyones got a story, everyones going somewhere whether they realise it or not.

Also it is nice to sit by the window and watch unknown roads go by.

on the way from trondheim to oslo, may 2008. The train wound around snowy mountains. Vast plains of snow and ice and a few dead trees. Bright houses with dark trim, dainty and symmetrical, like fairy-tale transplants. Towns hidden in a forest buried to its knees in fog. I love trains.

“Rio de Janeiro was sunny and chilly this morning, with the tiniest hint of a breeze pushing through my hair and making my cheeks flush as I headed home. Views of water and peaks: dimpled hills that dwarf the surrounding skyscrapers; a concave coastline dissolving into the Atlantic; the seamless, searing blue of the horizon and the ocean. A monstrous metropolis that resembles an etch-a-sketch scribble from above.

I like taking the bus home on these days.” - my diary. September 17, 2008, my birthday.