Transmental Sheherazade on the interwar avant-garde balls in Belgrade and Paris

Abstract

In expert circles, attention has been drawn to the ?1002nd Night Ball? created by the protagonists of Yugoslav and Serbian avant-garde, in particular on its dance and musical segments, moreover, the ballet ?Le balai du valet? by Marko Ristic and Miloje Milojevic, as well as the ensuing series of balls related to the Association of Friends of Art ?Cvijeta Zuzoric?. On the other hand, it is an (almost) completely unknown fact that Rade Drainac?s original idea to throw a ball for the benefit of artists and writers that needed financial assistance because of difficult financial situation (later replaced with an initiative to raise funds to build an art pavilion ?Cvijeta Zuzoric?) matched the idea of the Union of Russian artists in Paris to organize a ball with the aim of contributing to mutual aid. The ball in Paris, with the participation of the most prominent avant-garde artists, took place exactly one week after the Belgrade ball, which also suggests the possible connection / synchronization of these two artistic events. Having this in mind, I offer a brief analysis of the concept and scope of the aforementioned artistic events from the perspective of the intermedia and multimedia strategies. I demonstrate that the Belgrade spectacle was envisioned and performed far more ambitiously than the Parisian one, and the thoroughness of the interweaving of various arts ranks it among those works (including Parade by Cocteau, Picasso and Satie, Skating-Rink by Canudo, Leger, and Honegger, La creation du monde by Cendrars, L?ger and Milhaud, with Russian and Swedish Ballet) that aimed to achieve a Gesamtkunstwerk, i.e. a total work of avant-garde art.