Chopiniana. Divertissement

Chopiniana is one of the most famous ballets by Michel Fokine who, according to his contemporaries, heralded the start of a new era in Russian ballet one hundred years ago. Fokine himself said of this ballet that “I have tried not to surprise people with the newness, but rather to restore conditional ballet dancing to the point of its greatest advances. I don’t know if this is how our antecedents danced. And no-one else knows that. But in my dreams this is precisely how they did dance.
At the Mariinsky Theatre, the first performances of Chopiniana glittered with the dancers Tamara Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Vaslav Nijinsky.

The divertissement includes pearls of classical ballet spanning two centuries – from pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty and Michel Fokine’s The Dying Swan to Mekhmeneh Bahnu’s monologue and adagio from Yuri Grigorovich’s The Legend of Love and George Balanchine’s Tarantella. The programme also includes a captivating duet from Michel Fokine’s ballet Schéhérazade, a simple pas de trois from Die Puppenfee by the Legat brothers and Anton Dolin’s Pas de quatre – a memoir in miniature of the great stars of the Romantic era: Marie Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Elssler and Lucile Grahn.