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Vaslav Nijinsky in Fokine’s Schéhérazade. A print by George Barbier (1913). Happy new year. 02013? Read this. “Taking your measure”: October, 1913. “The elevated sidewalk: How it will solve transportation problems”: July 26, 1913. November 15, 1913.

Poster on the left designed by Major Felten (1931). In 1914, [Ruth] St Denis married a twenty-two-year-old gay man, the ambitious and sexually charismatic Ted Shawn (1891–1972), who became her dance partner. Shawn appeared at any opportunity in the scantiest of costumes. In 1915, they founded the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles, which became [...]

Following some leads about American dancer Ted Shawn (1891–1972) turned up this series of photos from 1923 in which he adopts the Flandrin pose whilst enacting “The Death of Adonis”. The series is from a large collection of Shawn photos at the NYPL Digital Gallery. The dancer had dark hair which has here been covered [...]

The music links this weekend were all related to my favourite Talking Heads period, 1979–1982, which not only encompasses the release of the band’s Fear Of Music and Remain In Light albums but also saw the individual group members produce some great solo records. I’d been playing one of these, the first Tom Tom Club [...]

This is a strange book. Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures (1929) was written and illustrated by Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks (1903–1963), a man better known these days for a substantial collection of memorabilia and archive material related to 20th-century dance. Paget-Fredericks studied with Léon Bakst then went on to create his own costume designs as well as [...]

Mateo (2011), carved wood sculpture by Bruno Walpoth. “Dennis Potter’s [The Singing Detective] is 25 years old but still feels avant garde,” says Stephen Armstrong. No fucking kidding, I watched the DVDs again last weekend. Potter’s drama featured non-linear flashbacks, song-and-dance hallucination sequences, an intertextual sub-plot, and a central character who was vitriolic, misanthropic, misogynist [...]

Another small and obscure volume hiding in the Internet Archive, Vaslav Nijinsky is a portfolio of six ink drawings by Paul Iribe (1883–1935) with a few lines of appended verse by Jean Cocteau. Iribe was a French designer and fashion illustrator who for a while was a member of the Ballets Russes circle, hence these [...]

What’s going on here then? An epigraph from Yukio Mishima…an Air-like song…a pair of boys stripping down to their underwear to play bondage games…gorgeous dancers in white briefs performing amid statuary… Yes, it gets my vote. Dënver are from Chile, and the song is Los Bikers from their 2010 album Música, Gramática, Gimnasia. I’d tell [...]

Norman McLaren’s 1968 film is not only one of the greatest ballet films ever made, it’s also an astonishing combination of high-contrast photography and optical printing. Choreography by Ludmilla Chiriaeff, dance by Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren, music by Dobre Constantin and the Folk Orchestra of Romania. YouTube isn’t the ideal medium to watch anything [...]

Stowitts photographed by Nickolas Muray. The title is from two gallery pages at the Queer Arts Resource which runs through a history of the old subterfuge whereby homoerotic pictures were decorated to look suitably Greek or Roman. This seldom fooled anyone, even in Oscar Wilde’s day, but it no doubt helped to keep the studios [...]

Niels Klim’s descent to the planet Nazar from the 1845 edition of Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Travels) (1741) by Ludvig Holberg. BibliOdyssey posts illustrations from different editions of Ludvig Holberg’s satirical fantasy, appends the usual informative links and draws our attention Stories of a Hollow Earth at The Public Domain Review. I’d [...]

Mathieu by Jean-Philippe Guillemain. A collection of male dancers pose beside the usual complement of agency models in the portfolio of French photographer Jean-Philippe Guillemain. Are all European dancers this attractive or does he just have a good eye? See the others on his site. Previously on { feuilleton } • Danseur Noble • The [...]

From the Ornamental Age series (2009) by Seher Shah. Seher Shah has recently updated her website giving us a better view of her extraordinary art. • The Demon Regent Asmodeus, my short film of Alan Moore’s reading from the first Moon & Serpent CD, has been posted to YouTube. In other self-promotion news, Mahakala, a [...]

The Final Programme (1973). Philip Castle’s poster art implied the androgynous finale of Moorcock’s novel which the film itself evaded. They were musty-smelling 10p messages from the futuristic past, complete with cover designs (and content) that were unlike anything I’d seen before. I’m fairly certain that this was how I first came across Michael Moorcock, [...]

It’s been mostly graphic aesthetics of one sort or another recently so here’s some bodily aesthetics via the always reliable Homotography. Shrouded is an exhibition by Australian photographer Brenton Parry which runs at the Pine Street Gallery, Chippendale, Sydney, until February 13th. Homotography has further pictures. Another recent post there was a set of nude [...]

Dancer Ruth St Denis in a costume for Radha from 1904, sporting a fine example of the fascinator headdress. I’ve always been, er…fascinated by these things so it’s encouraging to see them making a slight comeback, as with the unique piece below by artist Lisa Falzon. Ms Falzon has a new Etsy shop, Moth and [...]

Blue Sky Noise (2010) by Esao Andrews. • Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to the 18th-century sculptor. Related: an earlier post about the artist’s work. • How are the team behind War Horse planning to follow up their smash hit? With a gay love story performed by [...]

Cover by Evgeny Lanceray for Prospectus of the Magazine, 1901. Previous posts here have concerned fin de siècle art magazines like The Savoy, Pan and Jugend; yesterday we had Sergei Diaghilev so it seems fitting to mention Diaghilev’s own magazine, Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), founded in 1899 with similar intentions to the European magazines [...]

Ida Rubinstein as Zobeide and Vaslav Nijinsky as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade (1913) by Georges Barbier. Another great exhibition at the V&A, London, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes gathers a wealth of costumes, stage designs, photographs and ephemera—including some of Stravinsky’s manuscripts—to present a history of the legendary ballet company and their visionary impresario. [...]

The Dance of Salomé (1885) by Robert Fowler. There’s always more to find… Unfortunately, Robert Fowler’s academic tableaux is a prime example of bad Victorian art: carefully modelled but overlit, dull and lifeless. And worst of all for the subject at hand: deeply unerotic. We’re supposed to believe that this woman wrapped in a bedsheet [...]