The Lost Visionaries

You’ve probably never heard of Swedish dancer-choreographer Jean Borlin or Swedish impresario Rolf de Mare, but 75 to 80 years ago the company and repertory they created arguably defined the future of dance. Borlin was called the new Nijinsky, De Mare the new Diaghilev, and from 1920 to 1925, their Ballets Suedois successfully challenged the supremacy of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes as the epitome of modernism.

Like Diaghilev in 1909, they first made their mark in Paris, not only ground zero for 20th century ballet but the unrivaled center of contemporary art and music. Besides showcasing a number of their adventurous countrymen, they hired the most avant-garde Parisian composers and designers to reinvent classical dance, commissioning music from Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and others in the group known as Les Six; scenic designs and costumes from the likes of Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio de Chirico and Francis Picabia.

But they went further than Diaghilev. By encouraging their collaborators to be fully involved in the creative process, they sought a true synthesis of the arts--and, along the way, pioneered the use of jazz, motion pictures and what came to be called modern dance on the ballet stage.

By the end of 1930, however, everything was gone: Borlin dead at age 37, the company disbanded, the choreography unused and fading into memory. Fading so fast, in fact, that dance scholars have largely ignored Borlin and De Mare, treating them, at best, as footnotes to the creations of the Suedois designers and composers.

No longer. In arguably the biggest comeback ever in the dance world, the Suedois vision and Borlin choreography live again. After being staged for the 225th anniversary of the Royal Swedish Ballet last year in Stockholm, a whole program of reconstructions and re-creations is due to be presented by that company Saturday and next Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

This is no mere salvage operation for a single lost work. It’s an attempt to reclaim or evoke four major and very different Borlin creations, and thereby restore his place in dance history.

None of the four was fully notated, and only one was even partially filmed, so the project required a combination of exhaustive research and inspired guesswork. And some of the guesses involved the question of why an entire high-profile repertory of this sort could be so easily forgotten.

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If we flash back to Stockholm in the period before World War I, when De Mare was a 30-year-old art collector and Borlin (five years younger) danced in the Royal Swedish Ballet, their story looks like a Viking version of the well-known personal/professional history of Diaghilev and Nijinsky.

Like their Ballets Russes counterparts, De Mare and Borlin became lovers and traveled together, with De Mare funding Borlin’s studies with the great choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who had also been an early influence on Nijinsky.

It is from Fokine’s writings that we get the clearest picture of Borlin’s qualities as a dancer and choreographer. “He crossed the stage with great bounds, landed with all his force and glided over the boards,” Fokine recalled in a tribute essay after Borlin’s death.

“His short life was an ardent, single, soaring burst of creativity. He moved from one style to another, one form to another, constantly seeking the best expression for his chosen subject.”

That search led Borlin to explore non-Western dance and also to investigate early forms of modern dance, the starkly simplified movement languages being created in Germany by Mary Wigman and others.

When De Mare and Borlin headed for Paris in 1920, deciding that their artistic ambitions couldn’t be achieved in their conservative hometown, they precipitated an all but irreparable break with the Royal Swedish Ballet. For one thing, they convinced many of the leading dancers in Stockholm to defect with them. And this loss, along with the new company’s boldly anti-classical philosophy, caused the Swedish establishment to retaliate.

“The dancers were blacklisted,” says Frank Andersen, current artistic director of the Stockholm company. “And whenever they had a success in Paris, the [Swedish] newspapers reported it as a scandal instead.”

This unrelenting press campaign sometimes descended to the sleaziest homophobic invective--descriptions of Borlin as “a disgusting creature . . . who must drive any normally constituted person mad with his feminine affections,” and even the accusation that the company represented an undercover brothel.

Obviously, Stockholm’s wrath couldn’t harm De Mare and Borlin in Paris, but it helps explain why so many Ballets Suedois dancers never returned home when the company folded, and why even the company’s most universally praised ballets didn’t enter the Royal Swedish repertory for the next seven decades.

What did arguably harm the young company was its policy of making Borlin not merely the main choreographer, but the only one, and its star dancer as well. This high-stress overwork soon led to alcohol dependency and drug abuse, eventually causing the end of his relationship with De Mare and, with it, the shutting down of the company. In one last bitter parallel to Diaghilev and Nijinsky, the younger man’s dance career effectively stopped when he and his lover-mentor-employer broke up, and he lived his last years in the shadow of former achievements.

De Mare died in 1964, leaving behind extensive archives on the Ballets Suedois that documented nearly everything except Borlin’s contribution. And largely from this neglect sprang the myth that Borlin’s choreography represented nothing more than the glue that held together the various collaborative elements of a Suedois spectacle, that De Mare’s productions were simply an expression of his art collecting on a bigger scale and the dance elements were negligible.

So when companies in the second half of this century periodically experimented with re-creating Suedois repertory, they wasted no time worrying about Borlin and settled for merely reassembling the original decor, costumes and accompaniments with new choreography.

In 1979 and ‘80, for instance, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet assigned Moses Pendleton of Pilobolus to choreograph an evocation of the last and most controversial Suedois ballet: the Dada extravaganza “Rela^che,” which featured designs by Picabia, music by Erik Satie and a film interlude by Rene Clair. Pendleton’s new version created no stir whatsoever.

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In fact, Borlin’s resurrection as a seminal 20th century choreographer dates only to 1996. In January of that year, the Zurich Ballet premiered a reconstruction of “Skating Rink,” his 1922 Ballets Suedois ensemble piece with an engulfing score by Arthur Honegger, startling Cubist sets and costumes by Fernand Leger and dancing of enough weight and originality to easily hold its own. The result sent shock waves through the Anglo-Euro dance world.

“It is the throbbing, headlong rush of the movement--circles turning into lines turning into pivoting formations before coming back to circles again--that gives ‘Skating Rink’ its drive,” wrote Allen Robertson in Dance Now. “Totally fresh and up to the moment.”

“ ‘Skating Rink’ still vibrates with the shock of the new,” agreed Jann Parry in the Observer, who called it “a multi-focus assault on the senses, a visual-emotional punch to the solar plexus.” And Ramsay Burt in Dance Theatre Journal concluded, “It is necessary to rewrite the history of dance in the 1920s. . . . [The ballet] suggests that Borlin may have been not merely a memorable dancer and a prolific choreographer but, crucially, one who . . . was at the cutting edge of choreographic innovation.”

Robertson, Parry, Burt and their colleagues also showered praise on the reconstruction team: Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson, the husband-and-wife dance archeologists best known for piecing together Nijinsky’s “Rite of Spring” for the Joffrey Ballet in 1987.

Only 17 minutes long, “Skating Rink” took four years to reassemble. Archer and Hodson interviewed the last two surviving dancers (one woman from the 1923 cast, another who performed a trio reduction of it with Borlin just before his death); tracked down Leger’s original designs and a model of his set; compiled a dossier of contemporaneous photographs, press clippings and memoir descriptions; located Borlin’s annotated copy of the poem on which the ballet is based; and incorporated their greatest find--15 sketches of choreographic patterns that Borlin had made.

The next step: turning all this data into a sequence of working drawings that logged the choreography, measure by measure, like animation storyboards. Finally, Hodson and Archer began setting the reconstruction on living dancers. Inevitably, gaps occurred, places where they had to fill in a blank passage or resolve contradictory evidence by relying on their sense of Borlin’s conceptual priorities and working methods.

“Without a doubt we had to intervene, we had to connect things,” Hodson says. “But I think we really got inside Leger. And it is the creative sphere of dance and design that made ‘Skating Rink’ work. And also Honneger, of course. Where we didn’t have the choreography, we had so much from the music and the design.”

An important design intervention came from Hodson and Archer’s discovery that Leger had been unhappy with the way the women’s dresses looked in the original production. “He wanted each figure to move like a sculpture,” Hodson says. “The costumes look very wide if you see them head-on, but if the [dancers] are standing sideways to you, [the costumes] should look straight up and down. But the way they were made in 1922, they looked fat both ways.”

To reflect the designer’s original vision, rather than the compromise audiences saw in the 1920s, Hodson and Archer experimented with padding and wires, eventually creating costumes for the Zurich reconstruction that turned the dancers into the boldly colored geometric forms that Leger intended: what he’d called “moving scenery.”

One of Archer and Hodson’s greatest admirers in the Zurich audience turned out to be Frank Andersen, artistic director of the Royal Swedish Ballet. He immediately saw the advantages, artistic and political, of welcoming to Stockholm and incorporating within national cultural traditions the work of the despised and then-forgotten Suedois rebels who had fled 80 years earlier.

“I find this part of our history, our heritage, extraordinarily important,” Andersen says, and he decided “on the spot” to make “Skating Rink” and other reconstructions of Borlin-Suedois ballets a part of his company’s anniversary celebrations in 1998.

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Archer and Hodson proposed two Borlin ballets they had already researched on their own, both tantalizing in different ways. Danced to music by Glazunov, with an exotic set by Georges Mouveau, the ritualistic “Dervishes” was part of the very first 1920 Suedois program in Paris and, in a solo version, had been danced by Borlin very early and late in his career. Hodson calls it “the ballet that tells us the most about Borlin personally,” touching on his artistic debt to Fokine, his homosexuality and his profound sense of alienation.

At the opposite extreme came “Within the Quota” from 1923, a whimsical character ballet that featured Gerald Murphy’s giant reproduction of a newspaper front page as a backdrop and Cole Porter’s pop score (his only symphonic work). Here Borlin recycled Hollywood stereotypes to show a fantasy view of Jazz Age America, a place where a naive Swedish immigrant could be set upon by a Prohibition agent one moment and marry a movie star the next.

In addition, veteran Swedish choreographer Ivo Cramer contributed to Andersen’s program what he called “a free interpretation” of Borlin’s dance parable “El Greco,” working in his own way with the score by Desire-Emile Inghelbrecht and the Mouveau decor (based on El Greco’s paintings) that Borlin had used in 1920.

This four-part event launched the weeklong 225th anniversary festival in Stockholm last June and left many spectators, critics, Royal Swedes and even the reconstructors hungry for more. Hodson and Archer plan to eventually expand their Borlin collection with “Man and His Desire” and “Rela^che.”

“For me, it was like walking in history,” Andersen recalls, “and the most important thing is that we did it, on this large a scale, and really put in all our resources. Every one of the ballets is a chapter all by itself, and when you put them together, you have a book.”

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The Royal Swedish Ballet dances its Ballets Suedois program on Saturday and next Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $10-$68. (714) 556-ARTS.