These companies, the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet, the Covent Garden Russian Ballet and the Original Ballet Russe, visited Australia under the artistic leadership of a former Russian Cossack officer, Colonel Wassily de Basil. They brought to Australia a panorama of dance, music and design on a scale not seen before in this country. They were the inheritors of the legacy of that great Russian impresario, Serge Diaghilev, whose vision for a new creativity in the arts nurtured the work of Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine and brought together the most innovative composers, choreographers and visual artists of the day. The work of Diaghilev astonished European audiences from 1909 to 1929. In their turn, Australian audiences were also astonished from 1936 to 1940 by new and invigorating artistic experiences.

In November 2004 the National Library, in collaboration with the University of Adelaide and the Australian Ballet, submitted a bid for funding from the Australian Research Council to research, document and celebrate the tours to Australia of the Ballets Russes companies. The success of the bid was announced in June 2005.

As a collaborative endeavour the Ballets Russes project will have performance, research and documentation outcomes, making it an innovative collaboration highlighting a rarely recognised conjunction between performance and scholarship. The Australian Ballet will celebrate the legacy of the Ballets Russes period with performances, including re-creations and new commissions in the spirit of the Ballets Russes; the University of Adelaide will lead an academic research programme into the social and cultural history of the tours; and the National Library will use its extensive collections and its expertise in the fields of dance and music to support and contribute to both the research programme and the performance schedule. A major contribution by the Library will be in the field of digitisation. Selected Ballets Russes material from the Library’s Pictures, Manuscripts, Ephemera, Oral History and Music collections will be made available online in digital form.

The National Library already has a strong collection of Ballets Russes material across the range of its unique collecting areas. But news of the success of the ARC partnership has generated much interest amongst the general public and donations of new material have already been received. Among the new material is a photograph album assembled by a Sydney-based dermatologist, Dr Ewan Murray-Will. Murray-Will befriended the Ballets Russes dancers; his beach house at Bungan Beach, just north of Sydney, was a retreat for the dancers on their day off. They danced on the beach or went on picnics to nearby nature reserves. The photographs in the Murray-Will album show the dancers posing with native animals or holding bunches of wildflowers. They indicate that the dancers were as fascinated by us as we were by them.

That the dancers were surprised and bewitched by their new experiences is supported by letters in another new collection. These were written by English dancer Betty Frank (who danced under the name Elisabeth Souvorova) to her mother back home in England. Souvorova describes the experience of an Australian barbecue:

We went to the most lovely place in the mountains, & I have never seen so many fruit trees & wild flowers – & even paraqueets [sic] flying about. We had a marvellous lunch, they built fires & grilled chops & sausages & [we] ate until we nearly died.

Other surprises to have emerged as a result of the Ballets Russes project include the discovery of a book of cables in the Library’s J. C. Williamson collection. These cables record the entrepreneurial activities of the organisation between 1931 and 1937, and are a mine of information about the economic and political circumstances in which the Ballets Russes tours came about. The Ballets Russes project promises to open up new fields of enquiry into the impact the tours had on Australians and Australian cultural life.

Michelle Potter, Curator of Dance, National Library of Australia