Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master
- May 3
- 3 min read
When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim.
Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ballets of the turn of the twentieth century — think Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker — as technically dazzling but emotionally flat. For Fokine, ballet should be "a multiform expression of the entire self" in which music, choreography, costumes and scenery matched the mood of a piece. These were radical ideas at the time.
This book is unlikely to appeal to many people beyond die-hard ballet aficionados, and I picked it up mostly out of curiosity. But I'm glad I did, even if many of the details about ballet staging were over my head. The book is both an intriguing portrait of a creative genius and a story about fighting the establishment. I was also fascinated by the historical backdrop of Fokine's life, beginning with his childhood in St. Petersburg during the waning days of tsarist Russia and ending with his years as an émigré in the United States.
I am drawn to stories about innovators and how they found their inspiration. In Fokine's case, it certainly was not his parents who encouraged his artistic ambitions. They were middle-class merchants who viewed ballet as frivolous. But Fokine had a cultured older brother who introduced little "Mimotchka" not only to ballet, but also to great writers like Leo Tolstoy and Jules Verne. Fokine was also passionate about painting and music, which helped shape his ideas about creating a unified artistic experience through dance.
Before reading this book, I had never considered how ballet evolved. I've enjoyed performances of crowd-pleasing story ballets as well as more abstract works, and I can now see how the latter embody the aesthetic that Fokine so fiercely championed. He revolutionized costumes, for example, by replacing stiff tutus and tights with flowing gowns in a ballet inspired by Greek myth, and he even had dancers go barefoot at times. In his zeal for realism, he once asked the celebrated ballerina Anna Pavlova to dance with a live snake in a performance of Cleopatra. Pavlova was surprisingly game for this, but Fokine ended up returning the snake to the zoo because it didn't slither around enough for his liking.
During his career, Fokine collaborated with an array of musical greats, including Maurice Ravel, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sergei Prokofiev. But his most meaningful partnership was with his wife and muse, the ballerina Vera Fokina.
The book does not dwell much on the political upheaval of the era, but it does recount how Michel and Vera made their way to Sweden after the Russian Revolution, performing across Scandinavia. In 1919, they left for New York, where they encountered a ballet wasteland and resorted to using semi-amateurs and ballroom dancers in their productions. Yet it didn't take long for Fokine to build a respectable ballet company and gain renown in the United States. The book recounts an episode in 1934 when the police had to be summoned as an overflow crowd of thousands of people were shut out of one of his performances in Upper Manhattan.
Fokine died in 1942. His son, Vitale, published this book in 1961, mostly writing in Michel's voice by translating and assembling his manuscripts. In his later years, Fokine's own writing must have trailed off, because the last third of the book switches to third-person biography, resulting in a choppy narrative.
Still, this book was a real discovery for me. I'm glad I rescued it from the discard pile and got the chance to learn about this towering figure of ballet.
