Often overlooked compared to better-known and well-researched dance companies from the first part of the twentieth century, the Ballets Suédois was a short-lived but trailblazing venture. Formed in Sweden, which was a relatively marginal geographic area for dance at the time, the company combined Jean Börlin's talent as a choreographer and performer with the organizational acumen of the wealthy art collector Rolf de Maré. Between 1920 and 1925, the Ballets Suédois, which had 26 new productions “performed 2,800 times in 146 cities across Europe and the US” (14), paved the way for a new understanding of interdisciplinary collaborations and daring experimentation, and for the foregrounding of the star dancer's queer body. The company's innovations culminated in the interdisciplinary pieces Relâche (1924) and Cinésketch (1924), but not being financially viable, it disbanded; Börlin did not survive long afterward, dying in New York in 1930. However, his work's lasting influence extended to Merce Cunningham and John Cage's Untitled Events, which premiered in 1952.

The book Dancers, Artists, Lovers: Ballets Suédois 1920–1925, edited by Dansmuseet's curator Erik Mattsson, and published on the occasion of the company's centenary, is an anthology written by a team of art, dance, theater, and music scholars. It gives a comprehensive insight into the company's history from varied and usually overlooked perspectives, such as that of the company's costume manager, Lilly Åsberg, and of the manager, promoter, and administrator, Jacques Hébertot. The volume has been published alongside an exhibition at the Dansmuseet and an accompanying catalog, celebrating the company's longstanding connection with the museum: the Dansmuseet collection actually began with the objects de Maré exhibited in Paris in 1931 at Les Archives internationales de la Danse (AID), in memory of Börlin. The book is addressed to a scholarly and nonscholarly audience. The variety of perspectives offered nicely complements the most important works on the topic done previously. Thus, the heterogenous narrative of the company offered by Bengt Häger's Ballets Suédois (Reference Häger1990) and Nancy Van Norman Baer's Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920–1925 (Reference Van Norman Baer1995) is completed by this volume focusing on the internal workings, ruptures, and gaps in the narrative of the Ballets Suédois. The nonacademic audience will find the book accessible and entertaining, full of interesting facts and anecdotes.

Subdivided into two sections of five chapters each, with a photographic interlude, the book's structure is clearly inspired by that of Relâche, the company's most experimental work. The ten chapters and eleven international contributors strike a balance between juicy tales and hard facts, offering convincing explanations for the success of Börlin's and de Maré's venture. The chapters recount the experience of female and male dancers in the company (“It Was Like a Circus,” by Erik Mattsson, and “The Danish Dancers in the Ballets Suédois,” by Karen Vedel, respectively), the costume manager (“One Costume Manager and Hundreds of Costumes,” by Eva-Sofi Ernstell, the Dansmuseet's director), and the French manager, promoter, and administrator Jacques Hébertot (“Jacques Hébertot,” by Mathias Auclair, director of the Music Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France). There are also contributions on the musical approach (“Music of Total Theatre,” by musicologist Karin Dietrich); on the interaction with visual art (“Iridescence and Interaction,” by art historian Charlotta Nordström); on the relation between Börlin's body, his queerness, and nationalism; and on the democratic claims regarding the company's working approach (in John Potvin's and Frank Clustrat's chapters, respectively).

The book covers often-neglected aspects that are vital for a detailed understanding of this venture: intrigues involved in hiring the dancers (which became a national scandal in Sweden); the reality of underpaid and undervalued performers in the outdated Swedish and Danish opera house system (discussed in the chapter “Conflicts in the Age of Modernism,” by the theater expert Karin Helander); and the high costs of the company's costume making. Last but not least, the book highlights the importance of each of its individuals, such as the costume manager of that time, in the success of the company. (Unfortunately, very few of the costumes have been preserved, now on display at the Dansemuseet.) The images in the photographic interlude focus on the offstage life of the company, and are taken from the private collection of one of the dancers, Margit Wåhlander.

Flipping through this volume's pages, we learn about the rivalry between Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, and Börlin and de Maré's company. In many ways, the more innovative dance company, the Ballets Suédois, was under constant pressure to set itself apart from its more famous Russian counterpart. And it did, in respect to staging and interdisciplinary collaborations, and development of movement material. After World War I, Diaghilev invested more in technical virtuosity than radical experiments, and he never reached the point of challenging the illusion of the fourth wall (41, 245). This was left up to the Ballet Suédois and to Börlin's experimental approach, featuring a multidisciplinary collaboration with the “foremost modernist and artistic provocateurs” (25). They blurred the boundaries between art forms and surpassed the theatrical conventions of the time, thus the productions of the Ballets Suédois moved in the direction of total theater even more than those of the Ballet Russes. Börlin's choreography was strongly influenced by Michel Fokine's ideas of the expressivity of the whole body, and of the equal importance given to all forms of art. He learned about them when he studied with Diaghilev's first choreographer in Sweden and Denmark during the 1910s.

As proven in the chapter “Music of Total Theatre,” the Ballets Suédois's hybrid works could not be categorized under existing genres, thus the collaboration across art forms called for new labels reflected in the titles of the company's works, such as Poème Plastique, Ballet Pantomime, or Ballet Instantanéiste (110). Themes varied across works that were attuned to contemporary French tastes, like the reworking of Jeux (1921), as well as works with clear Swedish references and elements taken from Nordic folklore. The most radical aspect of these various collaborations was the overcoming of the fourth wall and the use of audience participation, as in the Dadaist-inspired works Relâche and Cinésketch. The former was a “multidisciplinary ballet, with mythical status” (238), reconstructed in 2014 by the choreographers Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley at the National Choreographic Centre, Ballet de Lorraine. The show was ironic, resting on parodies and references to everyday life or “low” art forms such as music hall and film, with scenario and backdrop by Francis Picabia. Between the two acts, René Clair's film Entr’acte was projected, featuring, among others, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. As with photography's repercussions on painting, the introduction of film a few years before had made realism on stage redundant, allowing a new sensibility of the theatrical performances and a radical questioning of ballet's aesthetics: it was no longer a matter of what was shown on stage, but how it was shown. Cinésketch, taking the form of a revue with tableaux vivants by “the most open-minded sympathizers” (41), and members of the company, demanded active participation from the audience, and ended with a costume ball. These last two works of the Ballets Suédois were the culmination of various Parisian avant-garde experiments that were inspired by Dadaism, Jacques Copeau's theater reform, and the Ballet Russes, among other influences.

The chapters “Vision of Democracy,” by Frank Claustrat, and “Nationalism, Dance and the Male Body,” by John Potvin, discuss the way in which Börlin pushed Fokine's “whole-body” expressivity to the extreme by aestheticizing life and inserting it into his works. Openly queer, he and his lover, de Maré, had been viciously attacked by the conservative press in Sweden, where avant-garde art was often associated with decadence. Börlin's works exploring sexual and gender questions only deepened a scandal that ended up being framed in terms of national betrayal by the Swedish press, through a series of articles by an anonymous writer. In Paris, Börlin “was at the very center of debates around art, new developments in dance, and the ever-evolving definitions of modern masculinity” (215). He “was not simply queer; […] he queered the very foundation of cultural and social life itself, and threatened the stability of hegemonic masculinity that inspired national ideals across an entire continent” (215). Börlin's body became at once an object of aesthetic curiosity, but also influenced a broader discussion about another type of masculinity that had not been seen before. On stage, as with Vaslav Nijinsky, in Börlin's work the male body moved from being a dispensable accessory to being the center of scrutiny: at once subversion and affirmation of masculinity. With his almost naked body covered in Vaseline in L'homme et son désir (1921), Borlin transformed it into an aesthetic object that was ultramasculine and hyperfeminine at the same time, but he also triggered the audience's fears of the objectification of the male form. His androgynous look and his muscular physique, recalling the classical ideal, helped bring the male dancer into the limelight, and with it, evoked associations with the physical culture's New Man, an athletic superman who shaped a new way of thinking about masculinity after World War I. Börlin's varied movement material, mixing elements from folk dance and ballet with influences from Dada and Cubism, was connected to an ideal of democracy and tolerance. The Ballets Suédois aimed to be a place of full acceptance and development of one's full potential in complete freedom, including sexual freedom. Yet Börlin's images of queerness were at odds with the nationalist pride in the male body and the anxieties circulating around its health and sexual well-being in the wake of the Great War. The ambiguous mixture of athletic poses and “unusual primitive and modernistic postures” (213) in L'homme et son désir was apt to fuel such anxieties.

How did a company travel an unusual journey, from a city relatively unknown for dance, to finding a home in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and dazzling the world of dance and Paris, which during the Roaring Twenties was the center of international avant-garde experimentation? How did a relatively unknown artist, Jean Börlin, come with his works to challenge the divisions between genres, creating new ones, and with his onstage presence and his personal life queering the rigid approach to gender of the time? This book answered these questions, while eliciting vivid images of a Paris populated by a large number of companies, such as Ballet Russes and the companies of Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Ida Rubinstein, among others.