Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin (Russian: Леони́д Фёдорович Мя́син), better known in the West by the French transliteration as Léonide Massine (9 August [O.S.
[1] He created some of his most famous roles in his own comic works, among them the Can-Can Dancer in La Boutique fantasque (1919), the Hussar in Le Beau Danube (1924), and, perhaps best known of all, the Peruvian in Gaîté Parisienne (1938).
The next year, the director of the Bolshoi Theater, Alexander Gorsky, was looking for a small boy to play the role of Chernomor in the ballet Ruslan and Ludmilla.
In August 1913, Massine graduated from the Moscow Imperial Theater School and almost immediately joined the Bolshoi Ballet.
Diaghilev was attracted to Massine's onstage presence and acting, and invited him to audition for the choreographer, Mikhail Fokine.
The score was composed by Erik Satie, who used sounds from an airplane's engine, pistol shots, and a ship's siren to accompany the music.
Massine's ballets during this period were reminiscent of Fyodor Lopukhov's Tanzsymphonia, in that an emphasis on the music drove the choreography.
[7] In 1932 he created Jeux d'enfants [ru] to libretto by Boris Kochno, scenic design was by Joan Miró.
Undeterred, Massine continued work on Choreartium, set to Brahms' Fourth Symphony, which had its premiere on 24 October 1933 at the Alhambra Theatre in London.
Massine also choreographed a ballet to Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique and danced the role of The Young Musician with Tamara Toumanova as The Beloved at its premiere at Covent Garden, London, on 24 July 1936 with Colonel Wassily de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.
Massine sued Col. de Basil in London to regain the intellectual property rights to his own works.
It premiered on 5 May 1938 in Monte Carlo, with Alicia Markova, Nini Theilade, Frederic Franklin, and Igor Youskevitch as the principal dancers.
In 1977 Massine moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin a series of choreographic workshops, as well as revive his work Le Beau Danube for the Marin Ballet.
[16] Massine appeared in two feature-length films by the British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
In 1941, Warner Bros made an attempt at a film version of the ballet of Gaîté Parisienne, entitled The Gay Parisian.
The attempt was not well received, partly due to the fact that the signature role, played by Alexandra Danilova in the original work, was recast with a lesser dancer, Milada Mladova.
He subsequently married Hannelore Holtwick, with whom he had two sons, Peter and Theodor, and made his home in Borken, West Germany, where he died on 15 March 1979.