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In 1908, 1907 and 1912, when Fokine made these three ballets, respectively, he was reframing ballet’s history. Nostalgic for a time when Marie Taglioni—the first ballet dancer who brought down the house for simply rising on her points (rather than pulling out 32 fuettes as was the rage in Fokine’s time)—the choreographer made Chopiniana with virtuoso feats purposely occluded. The inspiration of Chopiniana also comes by way of Isadora Duncan, who performed her barefoot, un-corseted dances through Russia from 1904 to 1905 and who was referencing dancing from the 5th century BC as seen on Greek vases. Fokine (and Duncan) projected their aesthetic projects in the name of historical gravitas. They loved and championed their self-selected pasts.

This year Chopiniana celebrates its one-hundredth anniversary. But even in 1908, the ballet—despite its departure from a plot, its innovative practice of giving the corps more dancing, and its use of Chopin as orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov—looks old fashioned: It is very, very, very slow. It’s also a masterpiece in which each Chopin suite reflects an archetypal dream central to the human imagination. Ekaterina Osmolkina’s danced the dream of flight. She traversed the stage with boundless leaps so soft that her preparation and landings resembled inhalations and exhalations of air. Nadezhda Gonchar’s dancing evoked a sailing dream. She turned herself on one leg as though her back leg was a mast keeping her body balanced and afloat. Yulia Bolshakova’s dream was to rest. She lowered her weight, balanced on one leg, from relevé to plie as though sinking into sleep. As for the male principal, Igor Kolb, he didn’t do justice to his role as the Poet surrounded by this sublime vision. Perhaps the presence of 25 ladies in white blinded him, or proved plain uninteresting.

Diana Vishneva’s interpretation of Fokine’s The Dying Swan invoked the past too. Not the Romantic past, which was Fokine’s inspiration, but an American Hollywood past where silver screen stars fired the imaginations of Americans with glamour the likes they had never seen. Vishneva died like a celebrity. Her sculpted legs luxuriated against the floor rather than succumbing to it. Her swan’s death wasn’t sad, though it was stunning to behold. In 1907, when Fokine instructed Anna Pavlova, the original Dying Swan, to fold and invert her arms, he was defying the classical tradition, with its open, rotated lines and its presentational postures. Vishneva’s arms inverted so far inwards it looked like outward rotation all over again!

The Kirov Ballet’s Fokine program also included Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade. As the Golden Slave, Yevgeny Ivanchenko’s pounced into the oriental set designed by Anna Nezhnaya and Anatoly Nezny like a stage animal at his theatrical heights. His entrance reminded me of another Hollywood great—Charlton Heston in Ben Hur. Ivanchenko is beefy, masculine, and fabulously confident. When he jumped, his lines were erratic or plain messy, but his juicy embrace of his role—the sex-mad slave willing to die for erotic pleasure—made me cheer for him. In contrast, Leonid Sarafanov’s interpretation of the Rose in Spectre was fussy, though all of his jumps were beautiful, clean, and proportioned. Sarafanov’s object of interest was not the maiden, danced by Nadezhda Gonchar, but his arms, which he admired with dazed adoration. Before making the famous exit out the set’s window, Sarafanov patted Gonchar’s head like a dog that had gone around the block and done her business well.

Isabel Fokine, the granddaughter of the choreographer, helped reconstruct both Spectre and Scheherazade. Their overall effect was high camp. It’s hard to believe the serious-minded Fokine, who strove for theatrical cohesiveness in his ballets, would have been pleased with their performances. There was little that was soft and lyrical about the dancing in Spectre or Scheherazade. Significantly, Fokine lost artistic control of both of these ballets when he left the Ballets Russes in 1914, eventually moving to New York. And in New York on April 5, they looked burdened by excess, like a party ship carrying too many drunken guests.

As for Basil Twist’s Petrushka, made in 2000, its greatest moments occurred when the life-size puppets—representing Fokine’s Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina—defied gravity and danced together. Their movements looked magically unaided, thanks to the unseen hands of eight puppeteers, who gave these figures (built chiefly by Eric Novak) a demonstrable dance “technique.” The Ballerina, for example, had an excellent arabesque. Ballet captain and puppeteer Christopher Williams, a New York-based choreographer, deserves credit for knowing how to shape a leg and build a port de bras from stuffed material.

Twist’s 55-minute ambitious creation is not your Saturday afternoon puppet show. It attempts to describe the love triangle that tragically ends with Petrushka’s death by the Moor’ sword. The success of ballet hinges on identifying with the soulful, simple and ungainly Petrushka, who is manipulated by others like a puppet. But hoping a puppet can reveal the pathos of being puppet-ed, especially when the puppet’s face resembles a white pincushion, is like hoping that a paper flower will smell like a rose.