ABSTRACT
On 1917, Parade: ballet réaliste was given its premiere by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. It was the culmination of more than a year's work by its four collaborators namely: Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Léonide Massine. Massine good, too, as the Chinese juggler. But Cocteau's central idea freeing dance from its conventions in favour of lifelike gestures and his modern themes, stylised in movement, didn't seem quite right. Just as Cocteau's aim was to return theatre to its roots, and Picasso's aim in cubism was to explore the reality of the two-dimensional canvas, so Satie remained true to the harmonic series. Picasso must soon have realised on joining the project that Cocteau had taken no account of the Managers that traditionally introduced a parade, as in Seurat's painting, where one of these iconographic figures stands, with a cane under his arm, to the right of the picture.
