It feels as if we are only a breath away from the centenary of the first Ballets Russes season in Paris. Boston USA are hosting an eight-day festival dedicated to the centenary of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from 16-23 May 2009. http://www.ballets-russes.com/

As a conclusion to the festival, Ballets Russes 2009 will launch a permanent cultural exchange programme between Russia and other American and European cities. The programme is set up to celebrate the Ballet Russes achievements by promoting a pandemic for sharing global cultural resources.

Nijinsky and Romola © Hamburg Ballet

In 2010, the V&A in London, will show a major retrospective, examining the origins, development and the long term influence of the Ballets Russes, to celebrate the centenary of their first appearance in 1909. The legendary performance in May 1909 at the Theatre du Chatelet, the Ballets Russes did far more for Parisians than merely evoke a new style of choreography. They were seeing a new definition of ballet that was to enlighten and engender a new lease of life throughout Europe.

L'Apres-midi d'un faune was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, with Nijinsky dancing the role of the Faun. The ballet and Claude Debussy's score were inspired by the poem of the same title by Stéphane Mallarmé.

Stéphane Mallarmé By Eduard Manet

Mallarmé was a major symbolist poet. He was rightly famed for his salons, and for his occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house for discussions of poetry, art and philosophy. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays. His earlier works owe a great deal to the style established by Charles Baudelaire. His fin-de-siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were about to bloom and blossom. They were the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page were regularly explored.

Mallarmé was considered to be most difficult to translate into English due to the inherently vague nature of much of his work.

The highly literate and often witty Belgium artist Marcel Broodthaers was strongly influenced by Mallarmé, as evidenced by his Un coup de Dés, based on the typographical layout of Mallarmé's, but with the words blacked over by bars.

The original poem is difficult and ambiguous both in French (where it is more musical) and English where some say it is more comprehensible. It describes the half-awake rememberings of a faun who earlier had encountered and abducted two nymphs. One demure. One passionate. What occurred next is confused and probably shouldn't be dwelt upon. Eventually the faun gives up trying to disentangle his erotic memory or fantasy and falls asleep again. There are echoes of the story of Pan and Syrinx - she being the chaste nymph who was transformed into reeds to escape the lustful Pan, who then cut the reeds to make his pipes.

The flute solo in Debussy's score is a reference to the music of the pan pipes, though Nijinsky's faun plays something more like a bamboo whistle. In Nijinsky's ballet, the faun is awoken by nymphs going to bathe. He frightens them. One carelessly leaves her scarf behind which he appropriates. He retires to his rock where he lays the scarf out. He lies on it. The rest caused a scandal in pre-war Paris. The narrative is simple. What is remarkable is the choreographic style lifted from the bas-relief of antique vases.