The Life of a Non-existent Ballet. Mjasin and Gončarova’s Liturgie

The Ballets Russes piece Liturgie (1915) was rife with radical conceptions of dance, costume design and the aesthetics of performance. But Liturgie never existed in any other than an unfinished, fragmentary form; a concept of a ballet that never came to a premiere. The aesthetic use of religious imagery in Natalia Gončarova’s designs and the gesture-based movement material for Liturgie brought out the transformative potential of performance, but were, ultimately, impossible to become a reality on stage. In the article we use the notion of liminality to scrutinize the complex relation between the sketches and the outline of the choreography as well as the relation between the artistic and religious modes.