Clothing the corps: How the avant-garde and the Ballets Russes fashioned the modern body

"A dictatorship weighed upon Montmartre and Montparnasse," the Parisian centers of avant-garde activity, during the 1910s, according to Jean Cocteau's Picasso (published 1923). In this "austere" climate, certain artistic practices and liaisons were proscribed: "To paint a decor, above all for the Ballets Russes...was a crime," he wrote. Despite this purported schism between "dictators" of high art and "decorators" of the theater, artists of all stripes collaborated with the Ballets Russes after the troupe's first Parisian premiere in 1909. Clothing the Corps furthers our understanding of this "alliance of dancing with the other arts," as the troupe's choreographer Michel Fokine termed it, by delineating how and why visual artists turned the human body into an aesthetic object for Ballets Russes productions.; Reflecting the ancillary status often assigned to these "decorative" works, previous scholarship focused almost exclusively on set designs, treating these works like large-scale paintings. Moving beyond this approach, I analyze interactions among sets, costumes, choreography and musical accompaniment in order to reconstruct the way these productions appeared to their original viewers. Piecing together fragmentary evidence from extant sets and costumes, photographs and recent reconstructions, letters, memoirs and critical reviews, I establish not only what these ballets looked like, but also how audiences understood them at the time. This perspective restores what was lost in earlier interpretations: a vital sense of how performers' bodies activated artists' designs as they traversed the Ballets Russes' stage. Taking shape only in response to the dancers' movements, these designs shifted constantly, refusing any fixed form. Composite and contingent, these works challenged boundaries between artist and medium, artwork and viewer. Fusing various media, these projects lay "between the arts"---in the space where the work of art confronts its opposite, its negation. Reveling in productive confusions of live bodies and designs environments, these productions exhibited classic symptoms of the "postmodern": a synthetic heterogeneity and engagement with the real world, in contrast to the purity and autonomy conventionally associated with modernism. Clothing the Corps thus participates in a larger historiographic project of recovering the anti-modernist strain running through much art of the early twentieth century.