§Les Noces 1923
Along with Le Coq d’Or in 1914, Les Noces was Natalya Goncharova’s most momentous commission and was the most important company production of the 1920’s. Choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska , who the year before had created the ground breaking Les Biches , the project had been plagued with problems for 11 years before reaching the stage. By combining the talents of three important artists, Igor Stravinsky for musical composition, Nijinska and Goncharova for decor Diaghilev fused the various arts to create a work, which was an unusual stylistic departure from previous productions. It has been recognised that this owed a lot to Nijinska’s individual conception, as it was she who, from the outset, conceived the production as austere and primarily functional. This was certainly an unconventional idea for a theme, which lent itself more than any other to an inherently folk-art image. The depiction, in four scenes, of a Russian peasant wedding was envisaged by Nijinska , not as Goncharova’s trademark bold patterns and vivid colours , but as a stern, simplified production with the emphasis distinctly on dance.
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Initially Goncharova made a series of characteristically bright, sumptuous costumes in correspondence with her vision of peasant wedding festivities, however, Nijinska was not satisfied with the designs and gave the following directions " There should not be any colourful ostentation.....I see the costumes as being of the utmost simplicity and all alike". |
As the work of Les Noces progressed musically and choreographically a distinctly austere, impersonal and almost unemotional potential of a wedding came into being. Commenting on his composition of the first tableau Stravinsky said "It would be at the same time perfectly homogenous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical".
| With no conventional narrative to speak of Les Noces became a pure choreographic work alluding to the "mechanical" to which Stravinsky refers. Goncharova therefore provided the visual backdrop for her collaborators fulfilling Stravinsky’s notion of homogeneity by providing the dancers with monochromatic outfits of brown and off-white. |
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For the sober colour scheme Goncharova was apparently inspired by the sadness of wartime weddings whereby the groom was immediately sent off for service while his new bride was to replace him as labourer in the fields. Certainly the uniform brown pinafores and cream blouses of the women and brown trousers and peasant shirts for the men evoke the drabness of the typical Russian peasant in wartime. |
| For the stage decor Goncharova provided a very basic but highly effective backdrop in blue/grey with only an outline of a window of varying colours which indicated changes of place. Altogether the musical, choreographic and visual elements combined perfectly to create a unified sense of communal and ritualistic elements of a peasant wedding. |  + |
Nijinska lifted movements from folk dance and stylised them into a modern mechanical type, while Stravinsky derived his score and libretto from popular Russian literature particularly,from the collection of folk songs compiled by Pavel Kireyevsky, Goncharova enhances the starting point of her collaborators by creating costumes inspired by Russian peasant dress.
The public reception to Les Noces was conspicuously enthusiastic and met with high praise due to what was seen as a sophisticated melding of primitivism and mechanisation, the peasant and the civilised.
