Fokine, Michel (EN)

Fokine Michel Mikhaylovich, *25 (13) April 1880 St Petersburg, †22 August 1942 New York, Russian dancer and choreographer. He graduated from the Imperial Ballet School. In 1898 he was recruited to the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, and in 1904 was appointed principal dancer; from 1902 he taught at the Imperial Ballet School. In 1905, he made his debut as a choreographer with the ballet Acis and Galatea (music by A. Kadlec) and the dance The Dying Swan, for A. Pavlova (music by C. Saint-Saëns). At the Mariinsky Theatre, he staged, among others, Le Pavillon d’Armide (music by N. Tcherepnin, 1907) and Chopiniana (music by F. Chopin, 1908). Influenced by I. Duncan and the new trends sweeping through the circle of young Russian artists, he formulated the following programme for the reform of traditional ballet: 1. taking classical dance technique as his foundation, he demanded freedom to compose new poses and movements according to the needs of the moment; 2. he restored the importance of male dancing; 3. he deemed it necessary to replace traditional pantomime with the expressiveness of the entire body; 4. he incorporated the corps de ballet into the action, treating it as a group of individual units; 5. he advocated for the shaping of the ballet performance into a dramaturgically coherent whole, based on the equal treatment of music, set design and dance, all subordinated to a common idea. This theoretical programme, published in a letter to the London “Times” (6 July 1914), was most fully realised by Fokine during his collaboration with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris (1909–12 and 1914), when he created his most outstanding works, including stagings of Stravinsky’s ballets – The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911); as well as Scheherazade (music by N. Rimsky-Korsakov, 1910), Le spectre de la rose (music from Invitation to the Dance by C.M. Weber, 1911), and Polovtsian Dances (music by A. Borodin, 1909). Between 1914 and 1918 he lived in Russia; after 1918 he collaborated with numerous European companies, such as the ballet of A. Pavlova, I. Rubinstein, Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, and the Paris Opéra (including Don Juan, music by C.W. Gluck, 1936; Les éléments, music by J.S. Bach, 1937), but settled permanently in the USA (ca. 1920), working as a choreographer and teacher with leading American ballet companies, including the Educational Ballet and the Ballet Theatre.

Literature: M. Fokine Memoirs of a Ballet Master, London 1961, Russian translation Protiv techeniya, Vospominaniya baletmeystera, Leningrad 1962; L. Kirstein Fokine, London 1934; C.W. Beaumont Michel Fokine and His Ballets, London 1935; S. Lifar Histoire du Ballet Russe, Paris 1955, A.L. Haskell Ballet, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1955, Polish edition Krakow 1963, 2^nd edition 1969.