Choreographic notation for Le Dieu Bleu

Choreographic notation for Le Dieu Bleu

Choreographic notation

This text was created by esteemed choreographer Michel Fokine in order to preserve the nontraditional poses of his original ballet Le Dieu Bleu. Fokine choreographed Le Dieu Bleu for the Paris-based Russian ballet company, Ballet Russes, premiering the work on May 13, 1912. Ballet Russes was internationally recognized for its groundbreaking choreography and avant-garde interpretation of classical ballet. The company was largely comprised of Russian dancers and artists fleeing the conservatism of the Russian art scene for the freedom of expression that Paris allowed. Fokine similarly found his creativity to be stifled as a young dancer in Saint Petersberg’s Imperial Ballet Academy, and he transitioned to choreographing pieces abroad in order to find a more receptive audience for his reinterpretation of ballet. Fokine’s term as choreographer-in-residence for Ballet Russes marked a period of great experimentation for Fokine and the company, catalyzing a Parisian renaissance of ballet. In this text one can see Fokine’s attempts to move past the classical definition of ballet in Le Dieu Bleu. Whereas every step in the ballet canon corresponds to a specifically defined French term, Fokine’s unusual poses must be represented by drawn human silhouettes. Each silhouette in the text corresponds to a number, and each pose would have been taught to the dancers as corresponding to this numbered count in the music. Thus, this text can be directly translated into a phrase of movement. The translation of movement into text was made by Fokine in order to preserve his choreography for future stages of La Dieu Bleu. This transition from dance described in French terminology to figures can be equated to a transition from a modern alphabetic system to a more ancient logographic system, in which a figure corresponds to a certain pose. In Fokine’s transition from classical choreography, which comes complete with its own language, to modern choreography, one can see the attempt to recreate a language of movement from the very beginning.

Michel Fokine

Currently stored in the Harvard Fine Arts Library

Spring of 1912

1 page of modern paper with notation in black pen

French