Michel Fokine

Michel Fokine wrote the rules that turned ballet from a display of steps into a form that could carry an argument, and most of what the twentieth century did with dance follows from them. He was a Mariinsky dancer and teacher who set out his principles in a letter to a London newspaper in 1914: that steps should be invented for each work rather than assembled from a fixed vocabulary, that mime should not be a separate language of gestures but part of the dancing, that the whole body should express rather than the hands and face, and that music, design and choreography should be equal partners instead of a score being cut to fit a ballerina. He had been arguing this at the imperial theatres for a decade with limited success, and Diaghilev gave him the company to prove it in. Between 1909 and 1914 he made Les Sylphides, Scheherazade, Firebird, Petrushka, Le Spectre de la rose and Daphnis et Chloe, and The Dying Swan for Anna Pavlova, which is two minutes long and is still the most performed solo in ballet. He broke with Diaghilev over Nijinsky, whose Rite of Spring he thought a betrayal of everything he had built, and he never had a company of his own again. He emigrated to America in 1919, taught in New York for twenty years, and died there. His five principles were reprinted for decades as a manifesto he had not quite written as one. He created around eighty ballets in all. His son Vitale danced with him and his students in America included Pauline Koner. He became an American citizen in 1932. He also painted, and studied art seriously before choosing dance. Les Sylphides is still in the repertory of most major companies.

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