“Oriental” debuts

Schéhérazade is a one-act choreographic drama by Michel Fokine to music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and designed by Léon Bakst which was created in St Petersburg especially for Sergei Diaghilev’s Saisons russes. In 1910 this ballet took Paris and then the world by storm, though it only returned to St Petersburg in 1994 when it was revived at the Mariinsky Theatre as part of a programme of Fokine’s ballets.

Schéhérazade was the quintessence of ballet’s “Silver Age” with its freedom of movement, eroticism, fateful passions and incredible designs. “I know that this is not how they dance in the Orient, this is not how they live... The Orient, although based on genuine Arab, Persian and Indian movements, was nevertheless an imaginary Orient. Dancers with bare feet dancing mainly with their arms and bodies... How far it was from ballet’s Orient of the time,” wrote Michel Fokine in his autobiography Against the Current.

This ballet became a legend connected for all time with the names of the great dancers of the age – Ida Rubinstein, Tamara Karsavina, Vera Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky.

On 4 November the role of the Slave will be performed by the young dancer Ernest Latypov, now in his first season with the company.
Ernest Latypov is a 2012 graduate of the Academy of Russian Ballet, a pupil of Professor Gennady Selyutsky who has trained several dozen outstanding dancers, among them Farukh Ruzimatov, Vyacheslav Samodurov, Radjep Abdyev, Sergei Kozadaev, Igor Zelensky, Yevgeny Ivanchenko, Sergei Popov, Dmitry Pykhachev and Alexander Sergeyev.