Kosloff stages Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” for 80,000-seat Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum

You’re a young city, spreading your wings, and you build a humongous sports arena. Whadd’ya do to inaugurate it? What else? Stage “Les Sylphides”!

Dateline, Los Angeles Herald Tribune, July 29, 1923
LOS ANGELES TERPSICHOREANS. Theodore Kosloff [standing, at middle], dancing professor extraordinary, surrounded by a score of his premier pupils in the new Coliseum. (It seats 80,000) In Los Angeles, where these nimble-toed lads and lassies have been presenting a daily program as a feature of the Monroe Doctrine Centennial and Motion Picture Exposition in Los Angeles. 

Details such as securing the choreographer’s permission prove nettlesome. Fokine is in Europe, far, far away. Nonetheless, our friends at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum have letters in which Fokine gripes about Kosloff’s American borrowings.

Photo is clickable for a slightly better view.

Like this? Read more:

• Theodore Kosloff, ballet instructor