He entered in 1889 at the Marinsky Imperial Theater Ballet School in St. Petersburg, where he graduated in 1898, and, almost immediately, became part of the company. He soon stood out for his magnificent technique and expressiveness, which allowed him to ascend to a solo dancer in 1904 and to a school teacher the following year. Almost simultaneously, Fokine began his career as a teacher and choreographer, with the Ballet Dream of a Summer Night (Mendelssohn, 1902), Acis and Galatea (Kadletz, 1905) and La Viña (Rubinstein, 1906), staged by Your own students.

In 1905, the dancer Anna Pavlova commissioned a ballet for a concert in the Hall of Nobles in St. Petersburg. Fokine created for her The Death of the Swan (Saint-Saëns, 1905), a two-minute solo that became the symbol of the new reform of Russian ballet, tending to abandon the classical formulas of Marius Petipa.

He was the main protagonist of the success in the West of Russian ballet, possibly greatly influenced by the antithechnic of Isadora Duncan, although his revolutionary style did not cause any dent in the Russian public conservative.

According to him, the only reason for the technique was to serve expression, and music must be entrusted to true composers and not to simple compositional professionals; Only then would ballet achieve a complete unit of expression of all its elements. Thus, when in 1909 Diaghilev invited him to join the Ballets Russes as the main choreographer, Fokine accepted willingly, because he could finally put his ideas into practice, which rejected conventional mimicry and advocated the integration of dance, music, plot, scenery and costumes in one unit.

3 0

3 years ago