Super Troupe

Reviewed - Ballets Russes: A TWO-HOUR movie charting the history of a ballet company might seem of little interest to non-aficionados, but viewers who surrender themselves to Ballets Russes will be rewarded with a compelling and endearing documentary that has been meticulously researched and assembled.

"This is the story of the birth of modern ballet as we know it," states narrator Marian Saldes, a dancer turned Broadway star, and the film goes on to function as both social and cultural history as it relates the story of the Ballet Russe company from 1909, when Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev formed the original troupe in Paris.

In 1932, three years after Diaghilev's death, a Russian former cavalry officer, Colonel Wasily de Basil, reformed the company. The dancers were Russian immigrants who never danced in Russia, and were so lowly paid in the early years that they had to make their own tutus, observes Dame Alicia Markova, who joined the company when she was 14 and died two years ago, aged 84.

Their choreographer was George Balanchine, who chose three young girls, who were dubbed "baby ballerinas", as the principal dancers.

Just as in countless rock bands, creative and personal tensions led to a split and rival Ballet Russe companies were formed, the more adventurous under choreographer Leonide Massine, who used symphonies as the music for productions, outraging critics and packing in the public.

Two of the "baby ballerinas", Tatiana Riabouchinska and Irina Baronova, lived to share their reminiscences in this documentary, while the third, the late Tamara Toumanova, went on to work in films for Alfred Hitchcock (Torn Curtain) and Billy Wilder (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes).

Many other members of the troupe moved towards film: Tamara Tchinarova, who married actor Peter Finch; Yvonne Craig, who featured in the TV series Batman and Star Trek, and Wakefield Poole, who directed gay porn pictures before becoming executive chef to Calvin Klein.

One of the remarkable features of this film is how many of the Ballet Russe dancers are alive and thriving in their eighties and nineties, and shown giving dance classes, exercising at the gym - and still dancing.