A striking pairing of quotations from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes by Lynn Garafola (Oxford University Press, 1989).
First, on the innovativeness:
“In the History of twentieth-century ballet, no company has had so profound and far-reaching an influence as the Ballets Russes. It existed for only twenty years—from 1909 to 1929—but in those two decades it transformed ballet into a vital, modern art … For twenty years the Ballets Russes seemed engaged in an ongoing experiment, the result of which was to extend the expressive possibilities of ballet. Nothing was left untouched: subject matter, movement idiom, choreographic style, stage space, music, scene design, costuming, even the dancer’s physical appearance — all felt the imprint of the quest for new forms” (pp. vii-viii).
Second, the entrepreneurism:
“Unlike the government-subsidized Imperial Theaters, the company was a creature of the marketplace, and from the first it had to scrounge for money” (p. xi).
Another datum for the ongoing debate about whether free markets or government patronage best fosters artistic creativity.