One defining characteristic of Sergei Diaghilev’s personality, complementary to his capacity to make things happen and get things done, was a low boredom threshold. It was this almost irritable restlessness that lay behind his much-quoted exhortation to the young poet Jean Cocteau, a tiresome opportunist hanging on to the Ballets Russes’s coat-tails in Paris as he angled to be given his big chance. “Étonne-moi, Jean,” Diaghilev challenged him, perhaps with a note of impatience. Buzz off until you can show me something fascinatingly different. Cocteau would certainly try.
By the beginning of 1912, London and Paris were conquered territory, and throughout that year the Ballets Russes would also lay siege to the Middle European cultural centers of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden and Budapest as well, with tours of the Americas on the horizon too.
Read Full Article »