Michel Fokine

Michel Fokine — choreographer with roots in the Russian Empire

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Fokin, known in the West as Michel Fokine, was born in St Petersburg in the spring of 1880, the son of a prosperous merchant; sources give his birthday as 23 or 26 April, or 5 May. At nine he was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School, where he studied music, painting and stage design as well as dance, and on his eighteenth birthday, in 1898, he made his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in Paquita.

From 1902 he taught at the Imperial Ballet School, and he became a principal dancer of the company. His first ballet, Acis and Galatea, was made for a school performance in 1905, and in the same year, by most accounts, he created the short solo The Dying Swan for Anna Pavlova. In 1905 he married his pupil Vera Antonova, who as Vera Fokina danced in many of his works. Three of his Mariinsky ballets, among them Chopiniana, presented in Paris as Les Sylphides, were revised for the first Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1909.

As Diaghilev's chief choreographer from 1909 he created Schéhérazade, Carnaval and The Firebird (1910), Le Spectre de la rose and Petrushka (1911) and Daphnis et Chloé (1912), working with Igor Stravinsky, Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. He held that movement, music and design should serve the drama of a single action, and in 1914 published five principles of reform. He left the company in 1912, returned briefly in 1914, and then went back to Russia.

In 1918 he left Russia with his family for Sweden and later settled in New York, where he opened a ballet school in 1921 and continued to appear with his wife. He staged his works for companies in the United States and Europe, created new ballets in Europe in the mid-1930s, among them L'Épreuve d'amour and Don Juan (1936), and from 1937 worked for Wassily de Basil's company, later the Original Ballet Russe, and saw his Ballets Russes repertoire taken up by American companies.

In the summer of 1942 he went to Mexico City to rehearse a new ballet, Helen of Troy, but cut the trip short because of illness. He died in New York on 22 August 1942, aged sixty-two, and is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale.

Tracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)

Born in St Petersburg in 1880, he trained at the Imperial Ballet School, danced and taught at the Mariinsky, created The Dying Swan for Anna Pavlova and, from 1909, was chief choreographer of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; he left Russia in 1918.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition