PLAYING WITH THE BALLETS RUSSES
After first seeing the Ballets Russes archive footage nearly ten years ago I finally cut 23 minutes for Alexander Balanescu to write a score for.

It was designed for live performance and there is a stand alone film/video version.

The dancers I met were all friendly and inspiring women, good role models for activity in ageing but in the end I felt they were right in wanting ‘to leave the myth alone’
What I have done is just play a little with the footage, the fragments I have.

SECTIONS FOR PLAY
I have only used footage shot on and around the beach for this film and not any of the performance fragments except the curtain calls at the end

1 Found Footage
This is a stretch of footage where colour and black and white have been joined together by Ewan, somewhat arbitrarily. It includes scenes of dancers picnicking and messing about for the camera on the beach. The location is the cliff top garden of a house Ewan rented. I liked this home movie with dancers and just let it run.

2 Bungen Ballet
Paul Petrov, a Dane, appears more in the film than anyone else. It looks like he instigates the little scenarios that pepper the footage. The most elaborate of these is acted out on Bungen Beach.
This is the footage which made Ania cry with laughter when she watched her young self rolling in the sand with Paul Petrov as they act out a little ‘drama’of shipwreck survivors washed up on the beach.
A man and a woman, Paul Petrov and Betty Low, stagger out of the water. She collapses. Paul staggers further looking for help.
Unknown to them they are being watched by two inhabitants of the land – Ania Volkova and Bobbie Bell.
Ania runs to check out the collapsed Paul.
Bobbie stalks Betty who has now revived and is looking around desperately. lost. Bobbie jumps on Betty from the rocks and carries her off.
Ania revives Paul and rolls in the sand with him.
I cut this according to the shots and order Ewan seemed to have intended.

3 I mess about
In this short sequence I have animated the dancers doing impossible repeat movements often in the air. I enjoyed making a new animated choreography of things impossible in live performance. This may be developed further.

4 Lift up Put Down
Because the film records fragments I wanted to turn it into sequences with a feeling of rhythm. I did this by looking at several duets where the man lifts the woman. I took all the ‘lift up’ moments and edited them together. I followed these with the same duet sequences editing the ‘put down’ moments.

5 Turning/Arabesques/Leaps
As with Lift Up Put Down I have selected other danced elements and edited them into sequences with uneven rhythms using shots, which individually are only fragments.

6 Curtain calls
The end is edited from all the stage curtain calls, which appear in the three hours of footage. It is taken from the performances held in Australia in the three visits made by the Ballets Russes in 1936-7, 1938-9, and 1939-40.