Deutsches Haus at NYU presents an illustrated lecture about “Till Eulenspiegel” by choreographer/dance historian Millicent Hodson. Her talk will feature stills from the original 1916 Ballets Russes production as well as stills and video from the reconstruction of “Till Eulenspiegel” that Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer created at the Paris Opera in the mid-1990s and again at the Rome Opera in 2001.
Among the Ballets Russes reconstructions Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer have staged, “Till Eulenspiegel” is the only one that was originally created in the U.S. The ballet was based on “Till Eulenspiegel,” the tone poem from 1895 which Richard Strauss agreed for Vaslav Nijinsky to choreograph. Nijinsky had been under house arrest in Budapest since the beginning of World War I, but Otto Kahn of the Metropolitan Opera and others worked to free Nijinsky to lead a U.S. tour of the Ballets Russes. Before leaving Europe, Nijinsky met with Strauss who offered to write more music for “Till Eulenspiegel” as a ballet, but Nijinsky said he had imagined the work exactly as it stood. “Till Eulenspiegel” opened in October 1916 at the Manhattan Opera House on West 34th Street, the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet stage in those years. Nijinsky commissioned the designs from a young off-Broadway artist he had discovered, the now famous dean of American stage design, Robert Edmond Jones. It was a big production based on an episodic solo by Nijinsky as the doomed prankster surrounded by fifty characters in eccentric and vivid medieval costumes. The tragicomic “Till” was Nijinsky’s reflection on the Great War, just before its end. The ballet had 15 curtain calls in Manhattan and toured in triumph to some twenty cities in the U.S. However, Sergei Diaghilev and his coterie in Paris declared it a failure as Nijinsky was out of favor in the Ballets Russes. Only recent writing on the subject contradicts the fabricated verdict against Nijinsky’s “Till Eulenspiegel,” despite massive evidence to the contrary, some of which Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer have published.
Participants:
Millicent Hodson (choreographer/dance historian) and Kenneth Archer (scenic consultant/art historian) are a dance and design team based in London. For three decades, they have reconstructed lost ballets and created original productions through their partnership Ballets Old & New, staging their work with major companies worldwide, including the Joffrey Ballet, Paris Opera, Mariinsky Ballet, Hamburg Ballet, Royal Ballet, London, Polish National Ballet, Rome Opera Ballet, and Ballets de Monte-Carlo. Hodson and Archer have given lectures and workshops at such US venues as MoMA, Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Chicago Art Institute, and Gallatin School of the Arts. The couple write books and articles and exhibit their production drawings. Their book “The Lost Rite” (2014) was recently published in Russian by the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg. Currently they are writing “Balanchine’s Twenties” about their reconstructions of his early ballets. They have received such grants and awards as National Endowment for the Arts (choreography); International Research & Exchanges Board and Indian Council for Cultural Relations (research travel); British Council and USIS (lecture-demo tours); Nijinsky Medals, Poland; Patten Lectures, Indiana University, and Fulbright Lectures, Athens; Monaco Prize for documenary “4 Emperors & 1 Nightingale” about their reconstructed ballet, “Le Chant du Rossignol”; BBC Music DVD of the Year for their Mariinsky reconstruction of “The Rite of Spring”; Positano Prize for ballet legacy, Italy; fellowships in ballet production at Princeton University, US, University of Surrey, UK, and Kingston University, UK.
Events at Deutsches Haus are free and open to the public. If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat. Thank you!