Scheherazade

When Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes made its Paris debut in 1909, audiences were overwhelmed by the energy of its Russian dancers. For the 1910 season Diaghilev wanted something more: new works conceived from the start as total theatre, in which dance, music and painting carried equal weight. Scheherazade, which premiered at the Paris Opéra on June 4, 1910 - three weeks before The Firebird - was the spectacular result, and it became one of the defining successes of the company's early years.

Despite its title, the storyteller Scheherazade never appears. Instead, the ballet stages the episode from the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights that sets the whole collection in motion: King Shahriar, encouraged by his brother Shah Zeman, pretends to leave on a hunting trip and returns to find his wives betraying him with their slaves. In the Nights, this betrayal is what turns Shahriar into a tyrant who marries and executes a new bride each day - until Scheherazade stops him with her endless tales. The ballet, in other words, shows the crime that makes her stories necessary. The name of its heroine, Zobeide, was borrowed from other tales in the collection.

Credit for the scenario became a source of bitter dispute. The painter Alexandre Benois maintained that he had devised much of the story, but the printed programme credited Léon Bakst, the production's designer. Benois was deeply wounded and briefly fell out with Diaghilev. Today the libretto is usually attributed to Bakst and the choreographer Michel Fokine, with Benois' contribution acknowledged.

For many in the first audiences, the true star of Scheherazade was Léon Bakst. His set turned the stage of the Paris Opéra into a vast, enclosed tent of colour: towering swags of green and gold drapery, deep blues, reds and oranges, carpets, cushions and hanging lamps, all glowing in clashing jewel tones that no one had dared put on stage before. Bakst made no attempt at a historically accurate Persian court; instead he created a fantasy of colour designed to overwhelm the senses.

His costumes were equally daring - loose harem trousers, bare midriffs, ropes of pearls, plumed turbans and shimmering gold-and-silver fabrics - designed not just as decoration but to reveal and enhance the movement of the body. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the production as a major international triumph for Bakst, establishing the bold colour and sensual style that became the visual signature of the Ballets Russes.

The influence spilled out of the theatre almost immediately. Parisian fashion, interior decoration and jewellery all embraced the new taste for rich, saturated colour and orientalist motifs. The couturier Paul Poiret's turbans and harem trousers of the following years are often linked to Bakst's designs, though Poiret himself insisted he had arrived at his style independently.

Michel Fokine conceived Scheherazade as a "choreographic drama," a single unbroken story rather than a string of dances. He was so determined to preserve its flow that he forbade the dancers to stop and acknowledge applause during the action. Some of the dancers performed barefoot, and Fokine replaced the turned-out positions of classical ballet with sinuous, serpentine arms, swaying torsos and expressive gestures. He was frank that he was not reproducing authentic Eastern dance: his inspiration came from books and paintings, filtered through his own imagination.

The role of Zobeide was created by Ida Rubinstein, a wealthy, strikingly tall and slender performer who was not a classically trained ballerina. Her Zobeide was conveyed almost entirely through stillness, pose and mime, yet her imperious presence made her one of the sensations of Paris. Rubinstein went on to found her own company and to commission major works, including Ravel's Boléro in 1928.

Vaslav Nijinsky danced the Golden Slave in a costume of gold. Alexandre Benois famously likened him to something between a cat and a snake - rippling, sensual and dangerous, with a quality of movement utterly unlike the courtly princes of 19th-century ballet. Legend has it that in the death scene he spun on his head before collapsing, though the story may owe more to the awe he inspired than to fact. The great teacher Enrico Cecchetti played the Chief Eunuch, and Alexis Bulgakov the Shah.

Scheherazade is driven by a few powerful contrasts: desire against authority, freedom against confinement, and beauty against violence. The harem looks like a paradise of colour, music and pleasure, but it is also a gilded prison, and the lovers' escape from its rules lasts only as long as the Shah's absence. The same jewel-bright room that hosts the revel becomes the scene of a massacre - and the ballet's splendour makes its brutal ending all the more shocking.

Any modern appreciation of the ballet also has to recognise its Orientalism: the European artistic tradition of imagining the Middle East and Asia as worlds of luxury, sensuality, despotism and danger. Scheherazade's palace is a theatrical fantasy rather than a portrait of any real culture, assembled from European imaginings of the Arabian Nights, and its depiction of the harem draws on stereotypes that shaped how Western audiences saw the East. Scholars have also noted how many in the original audience conflated Zobeide with the famous storyteller of the title.

Recognising this does not diminish the ballet's historical importance. Instead, it allows Scheherazade to be understood more fully - as a dazzling theatrical achievement and as a revealing product of its time.