Michel Fokine, born Mikhail Fokin

Michel Fokine, born Mikhail Fokin in Saint Petersburg in 1880, entered the Imperial School of Ballet at nine and debuted with the Maryinsky Imperial Ballet in 1898. He rose to first soloist in 1904 while also teaching at the Imperial Ballet School. From the outset, Fokine challenged the dominant aesthetic of his time: he rejected virtuosity deployed as spectacle interrupting dramatic action. Instead, he argued that the entire body should convey emotion, that choreographic style should respond to its subject matter, and that pantomime should be woven into danced movement rather than separated from it.

In 1909, Fokine joined Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes as chief choreographer, a position that would define both his legacy and the company's identity. During the company's most fertile years, 1910 to 1912, he created and developed works that remain in the international ballet repertory: *The Firebird*, *Schéhérazade*, *Le Spectre de la rose*, and *Petrouchka*. Earlier, in 1907, he had created *The Dying Swan* for dancer Anna Pavlova. Each of these works embodied his conviction that ballet should be a unified dramatic art form.

After his time with the Ballets Russes, Fokine continued his career in the United States as a dancer, teacher and choreographer until his death in New York in 1942. His reforms—joining expressive movement, music, design and dramatic action as an integrated whole—fundamentally altered how ballet understood its own possibilities and responsibilities.