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Michel Fokine could be described as a renaissance man. Along with being one of the finest dancers of his generation, he was an accomplished painter, musician, philosopher, and intellectual. It was with this background that he set about creating a revolution in dance.
- List of Ballets
Original “Chopiniana” Costumes: Michel Fokine. Set and...
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The ballets of Michel Fokine are under copyright. The...
- List of Ballets
Michel Fokine was a dancer and choreographer who profoundly influenced the 20th-century classical ballet repertoire. In 1905 he composed the solo The Dying Swan for the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.
- Kathrine Sorley Walker
- Skills Persuaded Father to Back Career
- Created Ballet Based on Chopin's Music
- Partially Eclipsed by Nijinsky
- Returned to Europe
- Books
- Periodicals
- Online
Fokine was the 17th of 18 children, but only five survived to adulthood. He was born on May 5, 1880 (April 23 or 25 in the old-style Russian calendar), in St. Petersburg, Russia; his birth name was Mikhail Mikhailovitch Fokin, but in francophile Russia it was not unusual for an artistically ambitious young person to use a French form of his or her ...
Fokine's 1907 ballet Le Pavillon d'Armide was his first to be staged at the Maryinsky Theatre and marked another breakthrough: he coordinated his work closely with designer Alexandre Benois to produce carefully wrought visual effects. His Chopiniana of the same year was a novelty; based on the music of composer Fryderyk Chopin, it may have been the...
The revolution that Fokine helped to unleash partially overtook him as Europe lurched toward political crisis. His star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, ventured into new realms where Fokine himself, with one foot in classical tradition, would not go, and Nijinsky displaced Fokine as the chief choreographer of the Ballets Russes, creating dances for Stravi...
Fokine continued to travel widely, premiering new works in South America as well as in the U.S. Between 1934 and 1936 he returned to Europe and choreographed several new works there for the Ballets Russes. In Germany he clashed with cultural officials from the new Nazi regime. Fokine and his wife returned to the U.S. in 1936 and purchased a large h...
Beaumont, Cyril, Michel Fokine & His Ballets, C.W. Beaumont, 1935 (repr. Dance Horizons, 1981). Bremser, Martha, ed., International Dictionary of Ballet, St. James, 1993.
Dance Magazine, October 2003; May 2005. New Statesman, September 18, 2000. Star-Ledger(Newark, NJ), June 20, 2005.
"Michel Fokine, Father of Modern Ballet," Yonkers History, http://www.yonkershistory.org/fokine.html (November 9, 2005).
Papers of the choreographer, dancer and teacher, including letters from Arnold L. Haskell, Cyril W. Beaumont, Sara Yancey Belknap, Alexander Levitoff and others, also essays and articles by Fokin and others, bookplates, calling cards and miscellaneous items.
Already in 1904, he submitted a letter to the directors of the Imperial Theatre that formed the basis for his famous five theses, which he formulated ten years later in a letter to the editor of the London daily newspaper The Times.
Jun 16, 2005 · In a letter published in The Times of London in 1914, Fokine proclaimed, "No one form of dancing should be accepted once and for all."
The story was centered on the sinister Magician ( Enrico Cecchetti) and his three puppets: Petrouchka (Nijinsky), the Ballerina ( Tamara Karsavina) and the savage Moor (Alexander Orlov). Fokine's ballet Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) showcased Nijinsky as the spirit of the rose given to a young girl.
