Léger and the creation of the world" exhibition

The ballet "The Creation of the World" was created on October 25, 1923 by Les Ballets Suédois, with the collaboration of some of the major creative talents of the interwar period: dancer Jean Börlin (1893-1930), poet Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) and painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955) for the sets and costumes. After a first show entitled Skating Rink in 1922, La Création du monde is the second time that Fernand Léger has taken part in a show by the Ballets Suédois, a dance company directed by the collector Rolf de Maré and based in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées from 1920 onwards. For this artistically and choreographically innovative ballet, Blaise Cendrars drew his inspiration from the legends of African mythology to recount the genesis of the world, its flora, fauna and human beings. Unfamiliar with the genre, Léger became passionate about the project, with the ambition of making it "the only possible 'negro' ballet in the whole world, and the one that will remain as typical of the genre...". Emblematic of Léger's relationship with modernity in the 1920s, the ballet, conceived as a synthesis of the arts inextricably uniting painting, music, dance and poetry, will be evoked through an exceptional and previously unseen loan of preparatory drawings from the rich collection of the Stockholm Dance Museum. The exhibition at the Musée national Fernand Léger will spectacularly illustrate the ballet's posterity through the presentation of geometric and colorful costumes, recreated in 2000 for the Grand Théâtre de Genève by British choreographers Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer.