How A Group Of Students Convinced The Fokine Estate To Get Rid Of The Blackface Moor In 'Petrouchka'
The character as passed down from the Diaghilev Ballets Russes original is not only painted in outlandish blackface makeup, he is, as Wendy Perron puts it, "mean and aggressive [and] prodigiously stupid." In the '90s, the Oakland and then San Francisco Ballets decided to make the character's face blue ("the Avatar solution"), and both Perron […]