Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Revisiting Modernism And The Ballets Russes: What Contemporary Choreography Can Learn From Diaghilev, Kelly Oden

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In order to discover some of the features of what contemporary choreographers, dancers, artists, and musicians can learn from the Ballets Russes and the defining artistic movement of which they were a part-modernism-we must first take a journey back to Paris in the early twentieth century and work to unravel modernism's meaning in relation to different artistic media. We must ask complicated questions: What is modernism? What defines artistic success? What does it take to make something truly new? By asking such questions we can come to a deeper understanding of the conditions necessary to create a thriving artistic environment …