Abstract

Music

To see choreographer Michel Fokine is to see the world's greatest genius of the dance. And although, unlike playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, he has inspired no uplift campaigns, yet his contribution to beauty has been equally great and perhaps in the end, more significant. For while the Belgian poet was busy peopling shadowy kingdoms with passionless puppets who moved as though in a dream, and whose speech was even more obscure than their silences, the Russian was creating living marionettes, and giving to their dumb art an eloquence beyond that of words. At a time when choreography had apparently reached its highest expression in the Italian ballet, commonly called "toe-dancing," with its mincing steps, its meaningless pirouettes, and formal figures Fokine, then head of the Czar's imperial ballet school, was transforming it into a rhythmic, if fleshly, utterance of lyric and dramatic moods.