Nina Verchinina, born in Moscow in 1910 and brought up in Shanghai and Paris, began her performing career in Paris in 1929 with the company of Ida Rubinstein. Throughout the 1930s she danced extensively with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo under various directors including René Blum, Léonide Massine and Colonel Wassily de Basil.
Verchinina came [...]

A Feast of Wonders: Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
Edited by John E. Bowlt, Zelfira Tregulova and Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (Milan: Skira, 2009)
In this very handsome volume published in conjunction with the exhibition Étonne-moi: Serge Diaghilev et les Ballets Russes, which opened in Monaco on 9 July 2009, Alexander Schouvaloff has an essay entitled ‘The [...]

The fire and the rose
The fire and the rose is a tribute to and obituary for Valrene Tweedie, Australian dancer, teacher and choreographer who died in August 2008. Tweedie danced with Colonel de Basil’s and Sergei Denham’s Ballets Russes companies and with an embryonic National Ballet of Cuba. She choreographed for stage and television in Australia, pioneered [...]

Swans and Firebirds (Schwäne und Feuervögel)
Austrian Theatre Museum, Palais Lobkowitz, Lobkowitz Platz 2, Vienna, 25 June to 27 September 2009

Tamara Karsarvina in ‘The Firebird’
Like many other museums, galleries and libraries around the world, the Austrian Theatre Museum in Vienna is staging an exhibition to mark the centenary of the first Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets [...]

Igor Schwezoff was born in St Petersburg in 1904, the third of  four children of a well-to-do family. His early life was, therefore, a comfortable one. But the Russian Revolution changed all that. In his autobiography, Borzoi, Schwezoff tells of the hardships he endured while living under the Communist regime until he finally defected, arriving [...]