Russian revolution takes Ohio. (News).

The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the international touring company that disbanded forty years ago, returns this month, thanks to a collaboration between the Cincinnati Ballet and the Cincinnati Art Museum, a pair of documentary filmmakers, and former Ballet Russe principal dancer Frederic Franklin.

The museum is showcasing original sketches and costumes in "The Golden Age of Costume and Set Design for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 1938-1944." The Cincinnati Ballet's fortieth-anniversary season opener, "Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo--The Golden Years (Dance, Sets, and Costumes)," features George Balanchine's La Sonnambula and rare excerpts from Leonide Massine's Seventh Symphony (1938) and Sir Frederick Ashton's Devil's Holiday (1939), a "lost" ballet that hasn't been performed since the Ballet Russe's demise. The program also includes the waltz from Massine's 1938 Gaite Parisienne and a premiere by former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Julia Adam. At the opening night gala honoring Franklin, filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller will show Franklin-related excerpts from Ballets Russes, their tentatively titled forthcoming documentary on the company, which was partially shot in New Orleans at the June 2000 Ballet Russe reunion. The Cincinnati program runs October 18-19 at the city's Aronoff Center for the Arts.

The company is staging ballets of which Franklin is especially fond and in which he originated or performed roles, according to Artistic Director Victoria Morgan, who named Franklin artistic director emeritus in 1998 after he staged more than fifteen works with the company, including his own and those of the Ballet Russe. Morgan was drawn to Seventh Symphony after Ohio State University Dance Film Archive Director John Mueller showed her 16mm footage of the Ballet Russe performing it. "Seventh Symphony impressed me with its breadth and sweep of movement," she said. "I thought it would look dated, but it had real spontaneity, real musicality, and a great sense of expression and exuberance." Cincinnati Ballet is dancing the third movement, an ensemble piece about creation, set to Beethoven's symphony of the same name.

Morgan got Massine's ballets from his daughter, and the rights to La Sonnambula from the Balanchine Foundation, which is sending a videographer to tape Franklin's restaging of the work, in which he originated the role of the Poet. Cincinnati is also presenting the solo and pas deux from Devil's Holiday, which Franklin originally danced with Alexandra Danilova.

Franklin's relationship to Cincinnati extends beyond Cincinnati Ballet--the Ballet Russe often stopped in the city, where it had a benefactor, the late philanthropist Jules Fleischmann, whose family Franklin visited when the company was in town. Fleischmann's Ballet Russe memorabilia was donated to the museum after his death; Morgan got a call from the museum in 1999 asking for help in cataloguing the material. She took Franklin along and was astonished at his long memory: "I watched him go through hundreds of sketches and say `This is the movement, this is the dancer, it was choreographed by so-and-so,' and boom! He'd go on to the next one," she said. "He had a story for nearly every sketch."

The exhibit includes costume and set design sketches by Comte Etienne de Beaumont and Salvador Dali, with additional contributions from Butler University's Ballet Russe collection. The museum will host a lecture series on the exhibit, which shows through January 12, 2003. "Another interesting thing about the sketches--they give details on how influential the Ballet Russe was on dance in America," Morgan said. "You see these ballets that were introduced to Podunk communities--no matter where they were, they gave every performance their all. Look at America--it's dotted with ballet companies, and that's the Ballet Russe heritage."

Filmmakers Goldfine and Geller have captured much of that heritage with their film, which they expect to finish this fall. It covers all three incarnations of the Ballet Russe through archival footage (some provided by Dance Magazine Advisor/Senior Editor Ann Barzel) and interviews with dancers from the New Orleans reunion.

For more information on the event, call Cincinnati Ballet at 513/621-5219.