Ballets Russes

The celebration of the “Rites” has begun. “The Rite of Spring” (Le Sacre du Printemps) is the revolutionary 1913 ballet by choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, composer Igor Stravinsky and artist Nicholas Roerich that clamorously heralded a new age for dance, music and all the arts. The L.A. Music Center and others will spend many months this year marking the 100 th anniversary of this 36-minute Ballets Russes juggernaut, which debuted in scandale and now resides secure in the canon.

Irina Baronova, the last of the three "baby ballerinas" whose international careers were launched by choreographer George Balanchine, has died. She was 89. Baronova died in her sleep Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, according to the Australian News. Baronova came to fame at the age of 12 when Balanchine cast her in a 1931 Paris staging of composer Jacques Offenbach's operetta "Orpheus in the Underworld." French critic Andre Levinson wrote, "The sensation of the evening was the tiny child Baronova, who went through the final galop like a whirlwind."

ONE of the most intriguing programs in the UCLA Film and Television Archive's International Preservation series is tonight's presentation of three early Scandinavian silents. In 1910, Denmark's cinema arguably was the most sophisticated in the world, in no small measure because of Asta Nielsen, an actress with amazing naturalness and an equally impressive intensity.

"In the '30s," Tatiana Leskova remembered, "there was the smell of blood in the air." And that was what inspired Leonide Massine to create "Les Presages," a groundbreaking 1933 work for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo that reflected the era's turmoil, exuding doomful between-the-wars portents. Leskova joined the company in 1939 and was cast in corps roles in all four movements of the ballet, eventually taking the lead role of Frivolity in the third movement.

One woman dreams of genteel romance. Another learns she will have a baby. Others participate in societal courtship rituals. And all of them, without exception, are big losers in the mating game: led blindly, hurled about, victimized by their illusions and ultimately abandoned. The dance-theater of modernist Angelin Preljocaj looks at women with a pitiless curiosity, asking provocative questions about their passivity and collaboration in their own oppression.

"Le Train Bleu," a 1924 ballet choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, to have been performed Feb. 17 at UC Irvine by the Oakland Ballet in a newly reconstructed version, will be replaced by another Cocteau-Nijinska collaboration of 1924, "Les Biches." The change in the program, part of the Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival being sponsored Feb.

Composer Henri Sauguet, best known for his sophisticated but simple ballet scores, among them "Musique des Forains," died at his home in Paris on Thursday after a long illness, his family said. He was 88. Sauguet had been partly paralyzed for two years and had been suffering from heart problems, his son told the Associated Press. Sauguet, who was born Henri Pierre Poupard in Bordeaux but took his mother's maiden name, studied the piano and the organ as a child. After World War I, he moved to Paris and met such other musicians as Charles Koechlin, Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie.

Fame, forbidden love, madness and a mythic immortality: Vaslav Nijinsky experienced them all in a brief career as the first male superstar of 20th century ballet -- and a much longer period as a living symbol of the destruction of the artist at the height of his powers.