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Rediscovering Michel Fokine: by challenging Russian tradition, this modernist choreographer wrestled ballet into the twentieth century.

Article Excerpt
In 1942, when choreographer Michel Fokine died in New York, the dance world mourned, lie was the grand old man of ballet modernism, the first to break with the "old" (nineteenth-century style) ballet and create classics that embodied the new. Numerous companies danced his works, and dancers yearned to work with him.

When Ballet Theatre (as American Ballet Theatre was initially called) made its debut in 1940, Fokine headed the roster of choreographers, and Les Sylphides, his oldest extant ballet and the first plotless ballet, opened the company's very first bill. Balanchine, who saw Les Sylphides as a student in St. Petersburg, called it his favorite ballet.

Born Mikhail Mikhailovich Fokin in St. Petersburg in 1880, he attended the Imperial Theater School, studying with such outstanding teachers as Pavel Gerdt and Nikolai Legat. In 1898, he entered the Maryinsky company (later known as the Kirov Ballet) as a soloist. Cavalier roles soon came his way, and often he was paired with the exquisite Anna Pavlova, a rising...