Roland Petit

The ballet dancer and choreographer Roland Petit has died at the age of 87 in Geneva.

"Roland Petit obituary" [Guardian], by Judith Cruickshank (July 11, 2011)
"Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87; Conquered Ballet Taboos and Hollywood" [New York Times] by Anna Kisselgoff (July 10, 2011)

The Guardian article in particular is excellently thorough. So I will leave it at that, but cite a passage from Margot Fonteyn's self-titled autobiography (Wyndham, 1976; pp. 114-5) which conveys something of his earlier career in Paris:

Paris certainly gave me a much needed change of atmosphere in work and play. The dancers wanted to show me everything from the Bois de Boulogne in spring to the night clubs of the rue de Lappe, where my mother was not at all dismayed to see men dancing together, and the famous Mme Arthur's all-male cabaret. Wandering about the city in the warm night air we once dived into the Seine for a midnight swim, and we always got home in the small hours, only to get up a few short hours later to be at the class of Boris Kniasev, a teacher of oversized personality and enthusiasm [. . .]. A big man, with powerful voice and generous laugh, talkng, correcting, explaining throughout the class until everyone excelled themselves in effort and accomplishment, he was exactly the teacher I needed at that time.

It was de Valois's favourite, Roland Petit, with the black eyes like Massine, who thought up our various exploits. He was a veritable dynamo of energy and ideas — dancing, choreographing, seeing new designers, composers, writers, his mind everywhere at once.

[. . .] We were perfect opposites in temperament. [. . .] I told him he needed the stability of the Paris Opéra, from which he had broken away. Neither of us took the other's advice. I was not too swept off my feet to forget that my success was based on the position I held in Sadler's Wells, while Roland knew he wanted complete freedom to create ballets in his own way.

(He incidentally introduced Fonteyn to the fairly fledgling house of Dior, and she had met him previously while he was a roughly nineteen-year-old dancing student who had choreographed his first ballet (pp.106-7).)

Lastly, the New York Times has a nearly bottomless archive of ballet reviews, etc., for Roland Petit. I didn't attempt to dip into it because of the 20-free-article limit. But if the link works, here it is:

Search results: "Roland Petit" [New York Times]

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"French choreographer Roland Petit dies at 87" [BBC News] (July 10, 2011)
"Disparition de Roland Petit" [Opéra national de Paris] (July 11, 2011)
Ballets des Champs-Élysées [Wikipedia.fr] Read July 11, 2011