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The astounding synergism in the arts in the early decades of the 20th century is powerfully demonstrated in the striking correspondences between two of the most experimental and daring works of the time, the Ballets Russes' ballet Parade and TS. Eliot's The Waste Land.
The early decades of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of experimentation, innovation, and interpenetration in the arts throughout Europe. The battle-cry "Make it new!" reverberated across all the arts, enriching every individual field-painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, and literature. As Roger Shattuck perceptively notes in The Banquet Years, "To a greater extent than at any time since the Renaissance, painters, writers, and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each other's arts in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration" (23). In this extremely fertile period for the arts, the air was thick with new beliefs, subjects, and techniques which were discussed, experimented with, and ultimately adopted, altered, or rejected. Rather than suffering "The Anxiety of Influence," artists at this time experienced what might be called "The Synergism of Influence." While Paris was the undisputed center of such artistic collaboration, this phenomenon occurred as well in London and other major European cities. For example, from 1918 onward, London's Bloomsbury group passionately attended performances of the newest and most avant-garde productions of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, seeing in their Modernist elements "the design, rhythm, and texture [they] sought in literature no less than painting" (Garafola 334-35).
In the midst of this creative ferment, there occurred an event which could be said to have revolutionized the notion of the avant-garde itself. One night in 1912 while crossing the Place de la Concorde in Paris after a performance of the Ballets Russes, its director Sergei Diaghilev commanded the young Jean Cocteau, "Astonish me!" Five years later, he astonished not only Diaghilev but the entire artistic world. On 18 May 1917 at the Theatre du Chatelet, the Ballets Russes presented the premiere of the ballet Parade, a collaborative creation with scenario by Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, set, curtain, and costumes by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonide Massine, and programme notes by Guillaume Apollinaire (see Fig. 1). Innovative and shocking in a multiplicity of ways-various labels included electroshock, a revolution, a comet, an...