Chopiniana

Choreographic suite to music by Chopin.

Orchestration by Alexander Glazunov and Maurice Keller.

Choreography by Michel Fokine

The ballet was first staged in 1909. This version was first performed in Perm in 1979. It was revived in 2006.

Chopiniana was one of the first examples of the plotless ballet genre pioneered by Michel Fokine, which influenced the development of the art of dance in the twentieth century. The choreographer reproduced his intuitive concept of ballet in the 1830s and 1840s, basing it on a suite of Chopin’s music orchestrated by Glazunov. Fokine dispensed with virtuoso pirouettes and eloquent pas, striving to show not the perfect technique of modern dancers, but the mood of a bygone age. It was not a plot that played the linking role, but a theme: the dreams of a young Poet surrounded by sylphs, the spirits of the air that embody his dreams. Outside Russia, Chopiniana, which was first performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s company, is known as Les Sylphides, a title that refers back to Filippo Taglioni’s ballet, to which theatre historians trace the introduction of dancing en pointe.