Kosloff stages Fokine’s “Les Sylphides” @ 80,000-seat L.A. Memorial Coliseum

Architecture & Design · Dance

You’re a young city, spreading your wings. You build a ginormous sports arena. What should you 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 was in Europe, far, far away from Los Angeles (it still is). London’s Victoria & Albert Museum houses letters in which Fokine gripes about Kosloff’s American borrowings.


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