Serge Lifar — choreographer with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Serhii Mykhailovych Lyfar at Pyrohovo, now part of Kyiv, in the spring of 1905 - the year most sources give, though 1904 appears on the Ukrainian stamp issued for his centenary in 2004 and some accounts say 1903. His father was a civil servant; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine records the family as noble, descended from Cossack starshyna. He studied violin and piano at the Kyiv Conservatory and sang in the choir of Saint Sophia's Cathedral, and came to dance late.
He was introduced to it in 1920, at fifteen, in Bronislava Nijinska's Kyiv studio - the School of Movement. Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, left for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes soon afterwards, and in 1923 Diaghilev asked her to send him her five best pupils from Kyiv. Lifar was among them. He left the Soviet Union that year and never lived there again.
Diaghilev put him under Enrico Cecchetti in Turin and then kept Cecchetti near him wherever the company travelled. He became premier danseur in 1925 and the last of the Ballets Russes' leading men, creating the title roles in Balanchine's Apollo and, in 1929, The Prodigal Son. He choreographed his first ballet, to Stravinsky's Renard, in the same year.
Diaghilev died that August and the company dissolved. Lifar went to the Paris Opera Ballet, which had been in decline since the nineteenth century, as premier danseur and ballet master, and effectively ran it for the next three decades. He was made professeur de danse in 1932, reformed the school, instituted regular ballet evenings, and restored the company to the front rank. He also restored the male dancer to it: the Opera had been a ballerinas' house for a century, and he changed that deliberately.
His own choreography ran past a hundred works and was built on a theory he set out in writing - that dance is an independent art with its own rhythm, not an illustration of music, and that emotion should be carried by movement rather than mime. Icare in 1935, in which he danced the title role, was performed to percussion alone, with the score written after the choreography. He staged Prokofiev's On the Dnieper, and wrote later that the music had disappointed him.
He remained in charge through the German occupation of Paris. At the Liberation he was dismissed from the Opera over his social association with senior German officers, and spent the next three years in Monaco, where he formed the Monte Carlo New Ballet. He was reinstated in 1947 and stayed until 1958.
He retired from dancing in 1956, taught dance theory and history at the Sorbonne from 1955, and was appointed professor at the Ecole Normale de Musique. He also assembled one of the major collections of Diaghilev material, much of which is now in public archives. He died at Lausanne in December 1986, aged eighty-one.
"Left Kyiv for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, 1923"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv (Ukraine)
He left for Paris in 1923, among the five Kyiv pupils Diaghilev asked Nijinska to send him, and never lived in Russia or Ukraine again. He was dismissed from the Paris Opera at the Liberation over his social association with senior German officers, and reinstated in 1947.
Born Serhii Mykhailovych Lyfar at Pyrohovo, now part of Kyiv, in 1905 - the year most sources give, though 1904 appears on the Ukrainian centenary stamp and some accounts say 1903. Son of a civil servant; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine records the family as noble, descended from Cossack starshyna. Trained at the Kyiv Conservatory in violin and piano before taking up dance in 1920 under Bronislava Nijinska.
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Kyiv (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.