Leonide Massine

Leonide Massine was picked out of the Bolshoi school at eighteen to replace Nijinsky and became the Ballets Russes choreographer of the war years and after. Diaghilev found him in 1914, made him a lover and a protege, and set him to learn choreography; within three years he had made Parade, the 1917 collaboration with Satie, Cocteau and Picasso whose cubist costumes and typewriter-and-siren score produced a scandal and the word surrealism in Apollinaire's programme note. La Boutique fantasque and The Three-Cornered Hat followed. He was dismissed in 1921 for marrying, as Nijinsky had been, and spent the next fifty years working everywhere - the Roxy in New York, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Hollywood. His symphonic ballets of the 1930s, set to Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Beethoven whole, were enormously popular and are now generally judged the least durable thing he did. He is best known to a wide public as the shoemaker in The Red Shoes and as the dancer in Tales of Hoffmann. He was a demi-caractere dancer rather than a classicist, which suited comedy and character work, and his Spanish and Russian idioms were studied from the folk sources rather than invented. He kept a private island off Positano and died there. Parade s programme note by Apollinaire contains the first printed use of the word surrealisme. He made around a hundred ballets. Gaite parisienne and Le Beau Danube stayed in repertory for decades and paid for the rest. He staged Parade again in 1973 for the Joffrey Ballet, nearly sixty years after making it.

• Lived: 1896 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: artist