Pablo Picasso, Joueur de guitare, 1916 © Succession Picasso/BUS 2011

Cubism and The Mechanical Ballet

There were many interesting connections between the world of visual arts and developments in dance and performance art during the first decades of the twentieth century. They shared a common interest in spatial composition and in the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk – of the total work of art. Both had a desire to let the expressions of the new age—film, sports, technology, and modern music—into the realm of art and dance.

In Fernand Léger’s film Ballet Mécanique (The Mechanical Ballet, 1924), the new modern machines and mechanical elements seem to have a life of their own. The musical score for the film, written by the American composer George Antheil, was performed on a player piano, car horns, airplane propellers, and electric bells. Léger’s theories about cubism and “freestanding objects in space” are here put into action.

Léger had already tested the dream of experimenting with moving elements on stage a few years previously together with the Swedish Ballet in the performances of Skating Rink and La Création du Monde (The Creation of the World). In working on Ballet Mécanique he went a step farther, replacing the ballet dancers with mechanical objects. Marching boots, cogwheels, and shiny metal kitchen tools are the stars of the film, dancing the ballet of the new age before the backdrop of a storefront window displaying mass-produced consumer goods.

Artist Otto G. Carlsund sought out Léger’s school in a shared passion for fast cars and the machine aesthetic, and later assisted his teacher in work on the film Ballet Mécanique. During the same period Carlsund was finishing a painting called The Chair that was inspired by a circus act that featured a suspended chair.
Gösta Adrian-Nilsson lived next door to Léger in Paris in the 1920s, and designed stage sets and costumes in Cubist style for a number of ballets during these years. Nevertheless, when the Eskimo ballet Sea of Ice premiered it was performed as a symphonic poem—without the dancing—because Adrian-Nilsson’s costumes were considered impossible to dance in.

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