Kochno and Petit delighted in collaborating with other avant-garde artists in odd bands, loose alliances born out of conversations in cafés. We don’t often get to see his ballets nowadays (though there are also a great many other modern ballets from those years, even some of Michel Fokine’s, that don’t get much air either), but the Paris Opera Ballet is currently showing three of Petit’s short pieces, Le Rendez-vous (1945), Le Loup (1953) and Le Jeune Homme et La Mort (1946) which have been in the national company’s repertoire since 1992, 19 respectively.
Indeed, he worked with Margot Fonteyn several times. In 1948 Petit started his own small company, the Ballets de Paris, which only lasted a few years, but managed to cause great excitement in Paris and travelled well to London. Kochno, as artistic director, founded the company with writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer and choreographer Roland Petit, who had trained in the Paris Opera Ballet School and danced in the corps de ballet until the Liberation. Kochno had been Serge Diaghelev’s secretary in the Ballets Russes days, so in a way it was he who inherited the Ballets Russes tradition in Europe while Colonel de Basil and Serge Denham’s two respective Ballets Russes spin-offs were still touring the US and Australia. One of these was Boris Kochno’s Ballets des Champs-Elysées. In the decade after the second world war, Paris and London, in addition to the big national companies, supported a myriad of small and prolific ballet companies. The Étoiles, Principal Dancers and Corps de Ballet Georges Wakhévitch – Sets and costumes, Costumes after Karinska Johann Sebastian Bach – Music, Passacaglia en C minor
La Bohémienne (the gypsy girl) – Sabrina Mallem La Plus Belle Fille Du Monde – Eleonora Abbagnato Stéphane Bullion and Emilie Cozette in Roland Petit’s Le Loup
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