Nicholas Sergeyev (1876-1951). Russian dancer and ballet master

Nicholas Sergeyev was born in St Petersburg in 1876 and trained at the Imperial Ballet School, graduating in 1894. He danced at the Maryinsky Theatre, becoming régisseur in 1904 and régisseur-général in 1914. He left Russia in 1918, taking with him the precious notebooks that had used Stepanov notation to record the repertory of the Imperial Russian Ballet (there were 21 ballets in all).

Having left Russia, Sergeyev set about teaching the classic repertory in the West. In 1921 he mounted The Sleeping Princess (Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty) for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and in 1924 he was engaged to stage Giselle for Olga Spessivtseva at the Paris Opéra. During the 1930s Ninette de Valois brought him from Paris, where he was then living, to the fledgling Vic-Wells Ballet, to mount Coppélia (1933), Swan Lake (1934), The Nutcracker (1934), Giselle (1934) and The Sleeping Princess (1939). He became régisseur for Mona Inglesby’s International Ballet in 1941, putting on the same ballets.
More than anyone else, Sergeyev was responsible for bringing the Russian versions of the classical repertoire to the West, especially to Britain. His contribution was vindicated when The Royal Ballet took its production of The Sleeping Beauty to the Kirov (formerly Maryinsky) Theatre in Leningrad in 1961, where it was recognised as what it was by many older generations of balletomanes and dancers who had seen the ballet produced in Russia before the Revolution. Nicholas Sergeyev died in Nice in 1951, and the Stepanov notations are now in the collection of Harvard University, where Alexei Ratmansky has consulted them for his own stagings of Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère, among others.