Characters and performers
Additional photos
Les Presages
Ballet in one act
to music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony
The world premiere took place on April 13, 1933,
at Opera de Monte Carlo.
The ballet was staged for Rene Blum and Colonel de Basil Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
Choreographer on his Ballet
Ever since my visit to Sicily I had been pondering over the problem of how one could create a correct ballet interpretation of a symphonic work. I had often listened to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and I felt now that its theme of man and his destiny could provide me with the right material on which to base my experiment. But I knew that my work ought not to be simply an abstract interpretation in visual form.
For the first time I dispensed with the traditional formula of male and female partnering and the usual balanced interplay between men and women dancers. I decided to avoid all symmetrical compositions and to render the flow of the music by fluctuating lines, and forms both static and mobile. I deliberately chose to follow the movements of the symphony in a logical evolution of choreographic phrases, successively amplifying and regrouping themselves into new shapes and patterns.
I conceived the production in four sections: first, life, with its ambitions and temptations; then passion, and the contest between sacred and profane love; thirdly, frivolity; and lastly, the culmination of man’s destiny through conflict. In choreographing these I drew my inspiration from the ancient ruins of Selinus, Agrigento and Paestum. It was the mass and volume of these structures which offered a challenge. I was interested too in their contrasted blending of rounded and angular forms. In constructing Les Presages, as I named this ballet, I endeavoured to establish the equilibrium between curved and straight lines that I had seen in so many classical buildings.
An excerpt from the book My Life in Ballet.
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