Les Présages [Destiny]
Choreographic symphony in four scenes
- Producer: Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo
- Premiere: 13 April 1933, Théâtre de Monte Carlo, Monaco
- Costume design: André Masson
- Costumier: Barbara Karinska
- Scenery design: André Masson
- Music: Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (Fifth symphony in E minor)
- Choreography: Léonide Massine
- Libretto: Léonide Massine
- Main characters: First movement: Action, Temptation, Movement
- Second movement: Passion, Fate, Destinies
- Third movement: Frivolity, Variation
- Fourth movement: Passion, Frivolity, Action, Fate, The Hero, Destinies
Humanity’s struggle with destiny is represented in the four scenes of this ballet. The first scene, Action, is devoted to life’s diversions, desires and temptation. The second scene, Passion, explores the contest between the base emotion of passion and the purity of love, which triumphs after an extensive battle. In the third scene, Frivolity, destiny is momentarily forgotten with the distractions of frivolity. Lastly, in War, heroes are eventually victorious and triumph over the evils of war.
Masson is celebrated as an avant-garde artist, and prominent in the Surrealist movement after the First World War. His innovative designs for the radical production Les Présageswere made in 1932 and 1933 in a first attempt at giving visual structure to a symphonic ballet. Instead of narrative, Massine and Masson presented ideas and allegorical characters which reflected primordial gestures and movements. It was conceived to represent no particular time or place, rather an expression of universal emotions, driven by the controversial use of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth symphony in E minor as its score. The backdrop of Masson’s expressionist set was painted in flickering and swirling flame-like images, almost as a diagram for Massine’s handling of the dancers as a single organism. While the costume designs are locked into 1930s Futurism (H G Wells’s The shape of things to come was published in the same year), their jagged patterns and sometimes bitter colour orchestrations in the massed and undulating structures of Massine’s choreography brought an almost architectural energy to the stage. This production was seen in Australia only three years after its European premiere, providing audiences with a direct and visceral experience of Modernism in ballet that was being constructed on Diaghilev’s legacy.
