Nicholas Sergeyev

Nicholas Sergeyev walked out of revolutionary Russia carrying notation for two dozen ballets, and that luggage is why the nineteenth-century classics survive. He was a dancer and then regisseur of the Mariinsky, responsible for rehearsing and maintaining the repertory, and in that role he had the company's ballets recorded in the Stepanov notation system - a method of writing movement on musical staves, taught at the Imperial school in the 1890s and used by almost nobody else. He was disliked at the Mariinsky, where dancers found him pedantic and obstructive, and he was dismissed in 1917. He left Russia in 1918 with the notation books, twenty-one ballets' worth, and made a living for the next thirty years staging them in the West. He mounted The Sleeping Beauty for Diaghilev in 1921, and from 1932 worked with Ninette de Valois: Giselle, Coppelia, Swan Lake, Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty entered the Vic-Wells repertory from his books, which is how the young British company acquired a nineteenth-century inheritance it had no other route to. What he staged was not identical to Petipa - the notation is incomplete and he filled gaps - but it is the closest thing that exists. The books are now at Harvard. The Stepanov system records only the steps and floor patterns, not the phrasing or the arms in full, which is why what he staged is a skeleton that later producers fleshed out. He also staged for Olga Spessivtseva and for the Latvian ballet. He died in Nice in 1951 and the notebooks were bought for Harvard the following year.

• Lived: 1876 CE – 1951 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: artist