Serge Lifar

Serge Lifar born 2 April 1905 (d. 1986)

Born in Kiev, Sergei Mikhailovich Serdkin was the last of Sergei Diaghilev's dancer-lovers. He used his looks, charisma and talent, fuelled by his fierce ambition to become one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of the 20th century.

He enrolled in the Kiev Opera Ballet at age 15, and in 1923, Diaghilev asked Bronislava Nikinska, his ballet teacher, to provide her five best students for the Ballet Russes. Nijinska, who was not keen on Lifar, did not select him but one of the five dropped out and Lifar lept at his chance.

Some say that Diaghilev was instantly drawn to the handsome 18 year-old dancer, others suggest that Lifar made sure Diaghilev noticed him, but his charm, persistance, whatever, paid off and he joined the list of Diaghilev star dancers/lovers in the footsteps of Nijinsky, Leonide Massine & Anton Dolin. This meant he was cast in leading roles and encouraged to choreograph, as Diaghilev had done before.

Given an inch of acclaim, Lifar kept taking so much that even the world-devouring Diaghilev became exasperated at his extreme ambition and self-promotion. By that point, however, Lifar was indispensable as a star and the only choice for plum roles such as Apollo in Balanchine's history-making Apollon musagète (1928) and the title role in Balanchine's The Prodigal Son (1929).

Lifar's own first ballet, Renard (1929, to a score by Igor Stravinsky), though energetic and athletic, proved to be no masterpiece. His later work, however, demonstrated that he had learned much from Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Stravinsky.

He was at Diaghilev's bedside when he died in 1929, but the maestro's death left the Ballet Russes in chaos. However, Lifar was invited to star in a production at the Paris Opera Ballet, to be choreographed by George Balanchine, but his illness saw Lifar taking his place and he successfully went on to become ballet master and director of the Paris Opera Ballet until 1957 - although he was accused of collaborating with the German High Command during the Occupation of Paris and banished between 1944 and 1947.

In Paris, he maintained the Diaghilev tradition, reviving not only Ballet Russes classics, but the fortunes of French ballet itself, developing the profile of male dancers and employing great choreographers - Balanchine, Massine and Frederick Ashton.

He remained a major figure in international ballet for the rest of his life and was, with Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's last love, the last of the line from the great Diaghilev. He died in Switzerland in 1986.

Sergei Diaghilev

Sergei Diaghilev born 19 March 1872 (d. 1929)

Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian impressario and founder of the Ballet Russes. He is one of the most significant artistic figures of the early 20th century.

In 1905 he staged an exhibition of Russian portrait painting in St Petersburg, and the following year took a major exhibition of Russian art to Paris. He went on to present concerts of Russian music and opera in Paris, and this lead to the invitation which prompted him to create the Ballet Russes - with the most exciting young Russian dancers, among them Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky. They were an instant success.

Diaghilev's contribution to the artistic growth and richness of his era was his dedication to the notion of 'total theatre', which saw him bring together not only the finest dancers, but commission exciting new music from Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Ottorino Respighi and Igor Stravinsky; he sought design contributions from Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Leon Bakst. He took ballet and made it exciting, cutting edge and gave it massive popular appeal - the Ballet Russes had a wide cultural effect. He fathered the rebirth of ballet through supporting pioneering choreography to dynamic and challenging new music, with astonishingly original set designs and costumes - erotic and exotic.

Initially choreographed by Michel Fokine, Diaghilev encouraged his lover and star dancer to choreograph for the Ballet Russes, and Vaslav Nijinsky duly rewrote the visual vocabulary of dance. Lovers from 1909 until 1913, when Nijinsky married and was briefly exiled, they were the most celebrated gay couple of their age.

Diaghilev had a series of relationships with his younger star dancers, but each was loving and long-term, and each was encouraged to grow artistically and each went on to make a huge contribution to ballet as choreographers and artistic directors. He not only loved them for their youth and beauty but in each he identified and nurtured their genius: Leonide Massine - one of the greatest 20th century choreographers; Anton Dolin - great British dancer; Serge Lifar - later director of the Paris Opera Ballet; and Boris Kochno - his last love who became an associate director of the Ballet Russes.

Other members of the Ballet Russes went on to found great ballets in the US and England - George Balanchine, Ninette de Valois, Marie Rambert.

Although he could be possessive and controlling, he inspired love and admiration, as his lovers' autobiographies bear witness. Stories that he corrupted Nijinsky and contributed to his mental illness are an innacurate re-write of history. Diaghilev created a massive gay-friendly international organisation of incredible creativity and influence, passionately committed to excellence and modernism; and his sexual relationships with men were central to that creative force. In fact, the enduring and fantastically creatively productive link between gay men and ballet - as performers, creators and audience - can be traced directly to Diaghilev.

He died in Venice, Italy in 1929 of complications from diabetes. Lifar, Kochno, and friends Coco Chanel, Misia Sert & Baroness Catherine d'Erlanger were at his bedside.

Anton Dolin

Anton Dolin born 27 July 1904 (d. 1983)

Anton Dolin was the stage name of Sydney Francis Patrick Healey-Kay, an English ballet dancer and choreographer.

Born in Slinfold in Sussex, the young Sydney Healey-Kay started his ballet studies in Brighton with Serafina Astafieva and Bronislava Nijinska. He worked as a child actor and when Sergei Diaghilev produced The Sleeping Princess in London in 1921, Dolin, under the name of Patrikief, was hired as a member of the corps de ballet. At this time Russia did not let their dancers emigrate to the West, so Diaghilev was forced to hire dancers from many countries and give them Russian names.

Dolin left the company after The Sleeping Princess only to rejoin the Ballets Russes in 1924 and was swiftly promoted to soloist. He created roles in Nijinska's Le Train bleu in 1924, and Balanchine's The Prodigal Son and Le Bal, both in 1929. Dolin became one of Diaghilev's lovers, in competition with Sergei Lifar and Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's secretary and librettist. Kochno accepted the situation and turned a blind eye to Diaghilev's other amours. It would be impossible to write about the male stars of the Ballets Russes without revealing that many of them were lovers of the great impresario. The competition between Dolin and Lifar lasted until Dolin left to form his own company with Vera Nemtchinova in 1927. During the brief existence of the Dolin-Nemtchinova company he choreographed Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Chopin's Revolutionary Etude.

Dolin returned to Diaghilev's company in late 1927 and remained until Diaghilev's death in 1929. He then choreographed a number of musical revues and became co-founder of the Camargo Society in 1930. The Camargo Society was founded in London to further the cause of ballet. Dolin created the role of Satan in Ninette de Valois' Job in 1931, and during that same year he joined the Vic-Wells Ballet (later called Sadler's Wells and then The Royal Ballet).

Dolin became the first premier danseur with Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) in 1940. For Ballet Theatre he restaged Swan Lake, Giselle, Princess Aurora, and choreographed Quintet, Pas de Quatre, Capriccioso, and Romantic Age. In 1935 Dolin and Alicia Markova founded the Markova-Dolin company which performed until 1938, and was reorganised in 1945.

Anton Dolin danced and choreographed for most of the major ballet companies in the West. Dolin was knighted in 1981 and was involved in ballet until he died in Paris on November 25, 1983.

Dolin wrote several books, including the autobiography Ballet Go Round (1938) and Alicia Markova: Her Life and Art (1953). For many years he lived with the ballet dancer John Gilpin.

Boris Kochno

Boris Kochno born 3 January 1904 (d. 1990)

Boris Kochno was a Russian poet, dancer and librettist.

He was a lover of Karol Szymanowski while a schoolboy of fifteen in Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad) in 1919, where he received as a gift a Russian translation of the chapter The Symposium from Efebos, the composer's unpublished novel on male love. Szymanowski also dedicated four love poems to the youth.

In 1920 he became Sergei Diaghilev's secretary, librettist, and eventually main collaborator. They were also lovers until Diaghilev's death in 1929 at 57. Kochno wrote the libretto of Mavra (1921), the Fâcheux (1924), La Chatte (1927) and of le Fils prodigue(1929). He also had an affair with Cole Porter in 1925, with whom he carried on a lengthy correspondence.

Upon Diaghilev's death he and Serge Lifar tried but failed to hold the Ballets Russes together. The two inherited part of Diaghilev's archives and collections, which Kochno completed and part of which was acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His later career included a position as Monte Carlo ballet director, where he became an influential figure in post-WWII French ballet. In 1933 he co-founded, together with George Balanchine, the short-lived company Les Ballets 1933, which made its debut that summer at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. At the end of WWII, Kochno entered into collaboration with Roland Petit, with whom he founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées.

There are a number of published works by him. One, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, is a record of the Diaghilev era. The other, Christian Bérard, is a scrapbook of reminiscences about, and art of, his former friend and collaborator.

Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky born 12 March 1890 (d. 1950)

Probably the greatest male ballet dancer of all time, Nijinsky's two greatest achievements, assisted by his impresario lover Sergei Diaghilev, were to bring the role of the male dancer to the fore, and to revitalise a world of classical ballet which had entered a period of decline.

Born in Kiev, Ukraine to Polish dancer parents, he was admitted to the St Petersburg Imperial School of Ballet aged 10, where he received an excellent general education as well as a thorough grounding in classical ballet. He was a brillant student and on graduation joined the Imperial Ballet as a soloist in 1907.

He had two love affairs with two Russian noblemen, Prince Pavel Dmitrievitch Lvov and Count Tishkievitch but then he met Sergei Diaghilev and joined the Ballet Russes - history was in the making. He went with the company to Paris in 1909 and became an international star.

Diaghilev used all his considerable skill and flair to create ballets which showcased his star and lover's incredible sensuality, athleticism and charisma, such as Petrushka, Daphnis & Chloe and Le Spectre de la Rose . He also gave Nijinsky the freedom and encouragement to choreograph to his own extraordinary vision. He created four ballets in all - L'Apres-midi d'un faune (1912) , Le Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring) (1913), Jeux (1913) and Till Eulenspiegel (1916) - each so technically innovative that Nijinsky could be credited with creating modern dance. His ballets were equally groundbreaking for their explorations of sexuality and sensuality.

In 1913 he married a young Hungarian woman, Romola Pulszky, who had travelled throughout Europe in pursuit of her dieu de la danse, whilst on tour in Buenos Aires. Devastated by his betrayal, Diaghilev dismissed his star from the company leaving Nijinsky stranded with wife and child and no career - furthermore, it was the First World War and Nijinsky was a Russian citizen in Hungary, and technically a prisoner of war.

Diaghilev attempted a reconciliation with Nijinsky, inviting him to rejoin the Ballet Russes on more than one occasion, but relations between the two former lovers and Nijinsky's wife frustrated every attempt to recreate his former success.

In the later years of the First World War signs of Nijinsky's mental illness became increasingly obvious to his wife and colleagues. In 1919 he suffered a mental breakdown. Increasingly unhappy with his marriage, his ruined career, and a world in turmoil, Romola committed him to a mental institution where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and subjected to years of drugs and experimental shock treatment. He became a broken man and spent the rest of his life drifting between institutions, even having to be rescued from one asylum when the Nazis began to inter the mentally ill. He died in London in 1950.

Some people are just too beautiful and extraordinary for life.

Léon Bakst

Léon Bakst born 10 May 1866 (d. 1924)

Léon Nikolayevich Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume-designer who revolutionised the arts he worked in.

Léon Bakst was born as Lev (Leib) Rosenberg in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. After graduating from gymnasium (school), he studied at St Petersburg Academy of Arts as a non-credit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.

On his first exhibition (1889) he took the name of Bakst based on his maternal grandmother's family name, Baxter -  Rosenburg was considered too Jewish and not good for business. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. During 1893-1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian while still visiting St Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.

In 1899, he co-founded with Sergei Diaghilev the influential periodical World of Art. His graphics for the World of Art magazine brought him fame.

He continued easel painting as well producing portraits of Filipp Malyavin (1899), Vasily Rozanov (1901), Andrei Bely (1905) [pictured left], Zinaida Gippius (1906). He also worked as an art teacher for children of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. In 1902 he took a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to paint Meeting of Russian sailors in Paris.

In 1898 he showed his works in the Diaghilev-organised First exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists; in World of Art exhibitions, as well as the Secession in Munich, exhibitions of the Union of Russian Artists, etc.

After the end of the decade of the 1900s, Bakst worked mostly as a stage-designer. Bakst designed settings for Greek tragedies, and in 1908 made a name as a stage and costume designer for Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes (Cleopatra 1909, Shakherezada 1910, Carnaval 1910, Narcissus 1911, Daphnis et Chloé 1912). For this work, Bakst was to make a massive contribution in changing the visual vocabulary of theatre and dance.

During his visits to St Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva's school. One of his students was Marc Chagall (1908-1910).

In 1914 Bakst was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1918 he severed  his ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He died in 1924 in Paris from lung problems.

Top right: Self-portrait by Leon Bakst. Bottom left: Portrait of Leon Bakst by Amadeo Modigliani


Design by Léon Bakst for Phedre and Theseus in 1923

Leonide Massine

Leonide Massine born 9 August 1896 (d. 1979)

Born in Moscow, Leonide Massine was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer.

Massine studied dance at the Bolshoi Theatre School. From 1915 to 1921, he was principal choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, creating new work with composers such as Erik Satie and Stravinsky with sets and costumes by the likes of Picasso and Matisse. Following Nijinsky's departure, he became one of the principal male leads for the Ballet, as well as another of Diaghilev's string of prodigiously gifted lovers.

After Diaghilev's death, Massine kept the flame of the Ballet Russes burning through his involvement with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo - one of two ballet companies to rise from the ashes of Diaghilev's genius. He is established as one of the most important choreographers of the 20th century.

Massine appeared in two Powell and Pressburger ballet films The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1952). He died in Cologne aged 82.

Richard Buckle

Richard Buckle born 6 August 1912 (d. 2001)

Christopher Richard Sandforth Buckle, better known as Richard Buckle, was a lifelong devotee of ballet, and a well-known ballet critic.

Buckle came from an army family. His father, a major, was killed in 1918 when Buckle was just two. His childhood was dominated by women, including his mother who lived until well into her 90s. He was educated at Marlborough, where he discovered that he was an aesthete, and went up to Oxford to read modern languages, but failed to obtain a scholarship and left after the first year.

Subsequently, he was sent to Heatherley's Art School, although by then he had already alighted upon his metier. In 1933, on Liverpool Street station, he saw a copy of Romola Nijinsky's biography of her husband. That changed his life. Seventeen years on, Buckle was to be one of the pall-bearers at the great dancer's funeral.

He founded the magazine Ballet in 1939, and revived it after the war (during which he served with the Scots Guards, being mentioned in despatches in 1944 during the Italy campaign). Between 1948 and 1955 he was ballet critic for The Observer.

He organised a number of highly successful exhibitions, including most notably one in 1954 on the life and work of Diaghilev, first at the Edinburgh Festival and then at Forbes House in London. He also organised the quatercentenary Shakespeare exhibition at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1964-5. His long series of exhibitions during the decade 1954 to 1964 were hugely innovative. They orchestrated an army of talents, from Cecil Beaton to David Hockney, from Leonard Rosoman to Nicholas Georgiadis. Their eventual impact on the staid world of art exhibitions and indeed on permanent museum display was considerable, even if never really acknowledged. Buckle was the first person to raise exhibition making of this kind to the level of an art form in its own right.

In 1967 he began to work to create a museum of the performing arts, and he was instrumental in the purchase from the sale of the remaining Diaghilev scenery the Picasso backcloth to the ballet Le Train Bleu. In 1973 the project merged with the old British Theatre Museum under the aegis of the Victoria & Albert museum and became the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.

Richard Buckle's contribution to dance criticism was significant during a period when modern ballet style was emerging. He praised the Russian style which used the whole body and contrasted it unfavourably with the British style. He could be brutal and his criticism of the July 1951 production of the ballet Tiresias by the choreographer Frederick Ashton and composer Constant Lambert was particularly resented. However, his writing became uneven as drink got the better of him.

His health deteriorated and he had mental breakdowns in 1971 and 1976, and he had a heart attack in 1979. In 1976 he left London and settled in Wiltshire where he continued to write, and he produced two more autobiographies.

His publications include the most comprehensive biographies of Nijinsky (1971) and Diaghilev (1979), and he edited several books, including the autobiography of Lydia Sokolova and the selected diaries of Cecil Beaton.

He was appointed a CBE in 1979.

Karol Szymanowski

Karol Szymanowski born 6 October 1882 (d. 1937)

Karol Maciej Korwin-Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.

Szymanowski was born to a wealthy land-owning family of the Polish gentry in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in present-day Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus' Elizavetgrad School of Music from 1892. From 1901 he attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw, of which he was later director from 1926 until retiring in 1930. Musical opportunities in Russian-occupied Poland being quite limited at the time, he travelled widely throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the USA. These travels, especially those to the Mediterranean area, provided much inspiration to the composer and esthete.

With his friend Stefan Spiess, he visited Sicily in 1911 and Algiers and Tunis in 1914. Szymanowski, not unlike other European gay artists, such as Baron von Gloeden, Oscar Wilde, and André Gide, found the spectacle of unabashed boy-love in the less inhibited southern climate to be psychologically liberating and, thereby, an inspiration to his art.

Szymanowski celebrated his newly liberated sexuality in his music. After the Sicilian visit, the melancholy of his earlier work was vanquished by the joy that would be present throughout the rest of his creative life.

The fruits of these trips included not only musical works, but poetry and his novel Efebos, parts of which were subsequently lost in a fire in 1939, although not the main part, which was translated by him into Russian and given as a gift in 1919 to Boris Kochno, his 15 year-old beloved.

Boris Kochno was a precocious boy from a noble Russian family and a budding poet. Szymanowski fell deeply in love and wrote poems to him. Among these are Ganymède, Baedecker, N'importe, and Vagabond. His passion was for a time reciprocated. However, unknown to Szymanowski, Boris also became the lover of the redoubtable Sergei Diaghilev.

Szymanowski was influenced by the music of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin and the impressionism of Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. He also drew much influence from his countryman Frédéric Chopin and Polish folk music. Like Chopin he wrote a number of mazurkas for piano. Carefully digesting all these elements, eventually Szymanowski developed a highly individual rhapsodic style and a unique harmonic world of his own. He was one of the most original of 20th Century composers. He is interesting not only for his music, but also because he was well-known to be gay in his time and his artistic development is clearly linked to his sexual orientation.

Among Szymanowski's better known orchestral works are four symphonies and two dream-like violin concertos. His stage works include the ballets Harnasie and Mandragora and the operas Hagith and Król Roger ('King Roger'.) He wrote much piano music, including the four Etudes, Op. 4 (of which No. 3 may be his single most popular piece), many mazurkas and the exquisite and highly individual Métopes. Other works include the Three Myths for violin and piano, two masterful string quartets, a sonata for violin and piano, a number of orchestral songs (some to texts by Hafiz and James Joyce) and his Stabat Mater, an acknowledged choral masterpiece.

Homoeroticism is discernible in much of his music, especially in such works as Love Songs of Hafiz and Third Symphony - Song of the Night, for tenor solo, a setting of a poem by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. Homosexuality becomes visible in his works through ancient themes (Myths), and the choice of implicitly homosexual texts.

He died in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland after a long from tuberculosis or as other sources say, throat cancer.

UNESCO declared 1982 as the International Year of Karol Szymanowski.

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew born 21 September 1898 (d. 1957)

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born surrealist painter.

Tchelitchew was born near Moscow on the estate of his aristocratic family. He was educated by a series of French, German, and English governesses, who encouraged his interest in the arts.

His father, a follower of Tolstoyian principles, supported his desire to become a painter. In spite of his father's liberal views, however, the family was expelled from its property in 1918 following the revolution of 1917.

Tchelitchew joined the White army, and the family fled to Kiev, which was not yet under Communist control. While in Kiev he continued his studies and produced his first theatre designs.

By 1920 he was in Odessa, escaping the advancing Red armies. He went on to Berlin via Istanbul. There he met Allen Tanner, an American pianist, and became his lover. In 1923 they moved to Paris and Tchelitchew began painting portraits of the avant-garde and homosexual elite. His work was much admired and bought by Gertrude Stein.

In addition to becoming an accomplished painter, he also became one of the most innovative stage designers of the period and designed ballets for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in Paris.

His first US show was of his drawings, along with other artists, at the newly-opened Museum of Modern Art in 1930.

In 1934, he moved from Paris to New York City with his then partner, writer Charles Henri Ford. He and Ford were at the centre of a social world of wealthy, artistic homosexuals, such as Lincoln Kirstein, for whom he also designed ballets. He also designed for Balanchine's fledgling American Ballet.

From 1940 to 1947, he provided illustrations for the Surrealist magazine View, edited by Ford and writer and film critic Parker Tyler.

Tchelitchew's critical reputation declined in the 1950s and 1960s along with the decline of interest in figurative art.

In 1952 Tchelitchew became a US citizen, but shortly afterwards moved to Frascati, Italy. He suffered a heart attack in 1956 and died on July 31, 1957 in Rome, with Ford by his bedside.

[Centre picture: Charles Henri Ford reads as Tchelitchew paints Peter Watson's portrait]

Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau born 5 July 1869 (d. 1963)

Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and film maker.

Paris cafes, boulevards, theatres, salons, galleries, and lovers provided Cocteau a lifetime of education and entertainment. The ballet brought him into contact with Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, who in 1912 demanded of the youth: 'Astonish me.'

Taking this advice to heart, Cocteau began an unending quest for the new. He met and worked with Amedeo Modigliani, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Andre Gide and a host of other literary, artistic, and musical innovators. By the 1950s he had managed to be part of four avant-gardes

As a young man, Cocteau had sought collaborations with older men such as Eduoard de Max or Igor Stravinsky but soon he found what he called his 'enfants', a series of younger lovers and collaborators.

In 1937, Jean Marais, a young actor, joined Cocteau, who spurred him to become a matinee idol of French cinema. Marais, who allowed himself to be moulded in Cocteau's image, inspired the writer to become a filmmaker and scriptwriter. Today, Cocteau is best remembered for his cinema. He has been recognised as a pioneer in film - he was significant in introducing Surrealism - a word coined to describe his Ballet Russes work Parade (1917) - into film and later was an influence on French New Wave cinema, and his films continue to inspire viewers and other film-makers.

Cocteau is best known for Les enfants terribles (1929), his 1948 play Les parents terribles, his film of Beauty and the Beast (1946) and his stylish and iconic line drawings.

He struggled with an opium addiction for most of his adult life - searching for a higher consciousness - and was openly gay, though he had a few brief and complicated affairs with women. He died from a heart attack aged 74, within a few hours of hearing of the death of his friend, Edith Piaf.

Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Kuzmin born 6 October 1872 (d. 1936)

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian writer and translator.

Kuzmin was initially attracted to theatre and music. He developed his interest in theatre early in life, attending operettas in Saratov, near Yaroslavl, where he was born. Kuzmin became a member of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's music composition class at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1891, completing three years of the seven-year program, while also learning German and Italian.

During his life, Kuzmin translated writing not only from German and Italian, but also from English, French, Greek, and Latin, including works by Apuleius, Aubrey Beardsley, Lord Byron, and Johann Goethe, as well as 110 of William Shakespeare's sonnets and 9 of his plays.

In 1904, the homosexual Georgy Vasilevich Chicherin (1872-1936) introduced Kuzmin to Mir iskoustva (The World of Art), an artistic circle centred primarily on Sergei Diaghilev, best known for making the Ballets Russes a major influence in the European art world, and for his relationship with the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

The group attracted Kuzmin because of its theatrical concerns, its Art Nouveau aesthetic, and its relation to Symbolism. Mir iskoustva also appealed to Kuzmin because of its large homosexual membership and its penchant for dandyism.

Kuzmin's first publications appeared in 1905 in Zelenyi sbornik (Green Miscellany), including the homosexual and idealist play Istoriia rytsaria d'Alessio (The History of the Knight d'Alessio). His literary career gained noticeable momentum when the Moscow Decadent and Symbolist Valeri Bryusov published twelve of Kuzmin's 'Aleksandriiskie pesni' (Alexandrian Songs) and his novel Kril'ya (Wings, 1906) in the journal Vesy (The Scales, 1904-1909). Wings was published separately in 1907.

The Alexandrian poems constitute the first major body of Russian free verse to be published. They contain lush descriptions of male beauty and a steady flow of mystical, orientalist imagery reflecting the author's travels in Egypt and Italy in the mid-1890s.

Dealing with love for young men, as described by various male and female narrators, the Alexandrian songs make up the last section of Kuzmin's first published collection of verse, Seti (Nets, 1908), which was compiled on Bryusov's request.

Wings is Kuzmin's most popular prose work, having been published in numerous editions. A sympathetic depiction of gayness, the novel narrates the relationship between the adolescent Vanya and the older, urbane Larion Dmitrievich Stroop, who helps the younger man acknowledge and accept his homosexuality.

In the ten years following the initial success of Wings, Kuzmin wrote a number of literary and theatrical works, including the plays Opasnaia predostorozhnost (Dangerous Precaution, 1907), complete with gender transgressions and a concluding affirmation of homosexual love, and Venetsianskie bezumtsy (The Venetian Madcaps, 1915), which, like many of Kuzmin's works, depicts a woman interfering in male-male affections.

The publication of Kuzmin's essay 'O prekrasnoi yasnosti' (On Beautiful Clarity) in 1910 led many of Kuzmin's contemporaries to affiliate the author with the newly formulated poetic movement of Acmeism, which countered Symbolist obscurity with clarity, economy, and precision. Though he states in his personal writings that he saw Acmeism to be an obtuse and passing fad.

In 1910, Kuzmin met his first major love, the poet Vsevolod Knyazev. In the same year, he published Kuranty lyubvi (The Carillon of Love), a collection of poems written in the style of eighteenth-century pastorals and set to music by Kuzmin himself. Two years later, he published Osennie ozera (Lakes in Autumn), possibly the work by him that most idealises homosexuality.

Knyazev committed suicide in 1913, and Kuzmin met Yury Yurkun, also a poet, soon after. The two men lived together with Yurkun's mother, and they were joined, for a short while, by Yurkun's wife, Olga Arbenina. Kuzmin and Yurkun's relationship lasted until Kuzmin's death.

After the Communist government came to power in 1917, Kuzmin sat on the Praesidium of the Association of Artists in Petrograd, and worked as an official translator under Maxim Gorky. He also helped found the daily Zhizn iskuostva (The Life of Art) in 1918 and worked as one of its editors.

He published two more collections of verse at this time, Ekho (Echo, 1921) and Paraboly (Parabolas, 1922), as well as two chapters of Roman Wonders (1922), which is set in the reign of Marcus Aurelius and which he felt was his finest work of prose.

Ultimately, however, Kuzmin's writing fell into political disfavour, with Leon Trotsky stating, in his Literature and Revolution (1924), that Kuzmin's books were disreputable and useless.

Kuzmin's final great work was Forel' razbivaet led (The Trout Breaks the Ice, 1929), a poem sequence in often highly imagistic and symbolic form that focuses predominantly on one man's idealiszed, and ultimately reciprocated, love for another. The sequence is also characterised by an economy of language, an aesthetic sensitivity, and decadent characters.

When Kuzmin read sections of the sequence in his last public performance in 1928, the gate-crashing crowd of homosexuals and other supporters showered the writer with flowers. Knyazev appears in the sequence as the 'stripling with a bullet through his brain', and Yurkun appears as Mister Dorian, an allusion to Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Kuzmin died in 1936 of pneumonia, two years before Yurkun and many other writers were arrested under the Stalinist regime and shot.

Robert Joffrey

Robert Joffrey born 24 December 1930 (d. 1988)

Robert Joffrey was an American dancer, teacher, producer and choreographer, known for his highly imaginative modern ballets.

He was born in Seattle, Washington. Joffrey was born Anver Bey Abdullah Jaffa Khan Joffrey, the only child of a loveless marriage between a Pakhtun Afghani father and an Italian mother.

Joffrey studied ballet and modern dance in New York City and made his debut in 1949 with the French choreographer Roland Petit and his Ballets de Paris. From 1950 to 1955 he taught at the New York High School for the Performing Arts, where he staged his earliest ballets.

In 1954 he formed his own company with his partner, Gerald Arpino, who he had met as a dance student in the late 1940s, which premiered Le bal masqué (The Masked Ball, 1954; music by French composer Francis Poulenc) and Pierrot Lunaire (1955; music by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg).

Joffrey's other works include Gamelan (1962) and Astarte (1967), which was set to rock music with special lighting and motion-picture effects.

The Robert Joffrey Ballet took up residence at New York City Center in 1966. In 1982 it moved its principal activities to Los Angeles and in 1995 to Chicago, partly to escape the shadow of the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre.

Noted for its experimental repertoire, the company was called the 'Joffrey Ballet of Chicago' after its move but has since returned to being called simply the Joffrey Ballet.

Besides Joffrey's works its repertoire includes many works by Gerald Arpino, Joffrey's long-time co-director and eventually artistic director emeritus until his 2008 death, and ballets commissioned by Joffrey from new choreographers, as well as works by such established choreographers as George Balanchine, Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp.

Like Diaghilev, Joffrey did much to elevate the status of the male dancer and made male virtuosity a defining characteristic of much of his company and ballet school's output. This is in contrast with the more 'genderless' approach of abstract-modernist choreographers such as Merce Cunningham.

The company has also been notable for painstakingly recreating 'lost' ballets of the early-20th century - notably the groundbreaking Nijinsky-choreographed Ballet Russes production of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Despite his long personal and professional relationship with Arpino, Joffrey sought the company of other lovers and in the 1980s contracted AIDS. Like many others in the media spotlight, Joffrey requested that the cause of his illness be concealed.

Joffrey died 25 March 1988 of AIDS at the age of 57.

Oliver Messel

Oliver Messel born 13 January 1904 (d. 1978)

Oliver Hilary Sambourne Messel was an English artist and one of the foremost stage designers of the 20th century.

Messel was born in London, the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Messel and Maud, the only daughter of Linley Sambourne, the eminent illustrator and contributor to Punch magazine. He was educated at Hawtreys, a boarding preparatory school in Kent, Eton — where his classmates included Harold Acton, and Brian Howard — and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College.

After completing his studies, he became a portrait painter and commissions for theatre work soon followed, beginning with his designing the masks for a London production of Serge Diaghilev's ballet Zephyr et Flore (1925). Subsequently, he created masks, costumes, and sets — many of which have been preserved by the Theatre Museum, London — for various works staged by C. B. Cochran's revues through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He socialised with London society's most glamorous and celebrated figures, including Noel Coward, Peter Watson and his one-time love rival Cecil Beaton.

In 1953, he was commissioned to design the decor for a suite at London's elegant Dorchester Hotel, one in which he would be happy to live himself. The lavishly ornate Oliver Messel Suite combines baroque and rococo styles with modernist sensibility and a considerable dose of fantasy. The suite, along with other suites that he designed in the Dorchester, are preserved as part of Britain's national heritage. It was restored in the 1980s by many of the original craftsmen, overseen by Messel's nephew, Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong-Jones), the former husband of Princess Margaret.

Oliver Messel came from a wealthy, well-connected family and when his nephew, Anthony Armstrong-Jones married HRH Princess Margaret, a life-long relationship with the British royalty began. Messel was later to design Princess Margaret’s home on Mustique Island in The Grenadines. In 1959, Messel, exhausted by a demanding theatre season and recurring arthritis, retreated to Barbados and the lush beauty of the eastern Caribbean. He was 55 and at the peak of a career in which he had dazzled three decades of theatre-goers with his fantastic, romantic and inspired stage sets and costumes. The warmth, colour and vibrancy of the tropics seemed to liberate new sources of energy and imagination, leading him to what would eventually become a whole new career in designing, building and transforming homes. Not content to rest there, he also designed many furnishings for these homes, particularly for outdoor use.

Messel bought an existing house called Maddox, a simple bay house perched above a small beach on the St James coast. With the help of his companion Riis-Hansen and a Barbadian staff, he gradually transformed it using all the trademarks of his theatrical design: slender Greek columns, flattened arches, white-on-white interiors splashed with bright spots of colour, elaborate plaster mouldings - an easy mix of baroque and classical. It was his use of the materials and traditions of island architecture that was truly innovative. Wealthy friends clamoured for Messel to design houses for them, both on Barbados and Mustique He designed and supervised the renovations of many houses. He designed and built Mango Bay from scratch and was commissioned by the Barbados government to restore the old British officers' Garrison headquarters in Queens Park, creating an elegant adaptation of it to a theatre and art gallery.

He would probably have gone on to do much more on Barbados, but was lured away by his friend Colin Tennant, Baron Glenconner and his private island home, Mustique. Glenconner commissioned Messel to design all the houses built on the island. Between 1960 and 1978 Messel created some 30 house plans, of which over 18 have so far been built - a tangible and lasting tribute to his genius. But Barbados remained his first island love and his home, and he died there in 1978, at the age of 74.

One lasting legacy is that his preferred light sage green shade of paint, now known as 'Messel Green' by paint companies in the Caribbean, has been immortalised as many property owners choose this colour for the it’s quintessential Caribbean-ness.