Mikhail Fokine, modernist choreographer

Feb 8

For Henrik Gustafson.

The original version of this essay was commissioned as a lecture in 2009 by the scholar Lynn Garafola, as part of a Boston University Diaghilev symposium. It was published in a 2011 issue of “Experiment”. My thanks to Garafola and to John Bowlt, the editor of that issue of “Experiment”.

We may be sure that, if Mikhail<1> Fokine himself could attend a Diaghilev symposium today, he’d use it as an opportunity to complain. He often voiced his grievances, both about the shoddy treatment he received from Diaghilev himself and about the ways his own choreographic successors borrowed some of his ideas while trashing others. One well-known example of Fokine’s voice on these matters is the interview he gave Arnold Haskell in Balletomania (1934); another is his Memoirs of a Ballet Master, translated after his death by his son Vitale Fokine and published in 1961. <2>

In these soundings, Fokine is an angry old man. He is bitter about the ballet that has come after him, and he is bitter about what has happened to his own ballets. To him, it is retrograde that Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine have put the Russian peasants of Les Noces (1923) and Greek muses of Apollo (1928) on point. Vaslav Nijinsky's idea of bas-relief in L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912) was borrowed from his own, Fokine's, choreography. Nobody has danced Petrushka <3> (1911) as Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina did. People have re-choreographed Schéhérazade (1910) since his day. The abstract ballet of today? He invented it in Les Sylphides (1909).

Where Fokine's voice sounds best is in his recollections of being an angry young man. His memoirs leave us a devastating account of the stylistic corruption and perversity of the Maryinsky Ballet he knew in 1898-1905. He is especially fierce on the cult of meaningless, gratuitous, and unstylish bravura.

About his great predecessor Marius Petipa, he is unresolved. He speaks about the faults of the ballet at that time as if they were not to do with Petipa; he goes out of his way to say that Petipa was in superb creative form right up to his final ballet at the Maryinsky; but he also analyzes stylistic inconsistencies that we know characterized Petipa’s ballets both then and now. Fokine’s main criticism of the Maryinsky Ballet repertory of that era is that “There was no transformation, no creation of an image.” <4>

And this became his own central pursuit. Each Fokine ballet created a separate image. The choreography worked to create a separate style that was peculiar to that ballet, a choreographic idiom that was made in harmony with the music and the design. This, when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes gave its first performances in Paris in 1909, was what stunned critics and audiences. On the triple or quadruple bill of any single Diaghilev program, the public saw three or more different images. In each one, the décor, the costumes, the music, and the dancing seemed to share the same thought; but each was utterly distinct from the other works also to be seen that evening. This formula became the characteristic method of the whole Diaghilev enterprise. It has also become a method for many choreographers ever since, outside ballet as well as in it. Today, when we go to a triple bill by Paul Taylor or Mark Morris or Christopher Wheeldon, we take it for granted that the three or more ballets in the program will be in three strikingly different styles. That’s a victory for Fokine.

Which, however, does not imply that, within any one Fokine ballet, everyone moved the same way. He insisted that each character, or genre of characters, must have his or her own movement style. This method is at its most advanced in two of his surviving ballets: The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). In both of these, he gives us multiple styles of dance and movement, with each person or group vividly conceived. I’ve watched the Royal Ballet dance Firebird many times since 1978 (the Kirov - Maryinsky - Ballet does it, too, but in a far more flippant style, as though the legend were Disneyfied). In the great Danse Infernale, the Firebird herself whips up all the many creatures of the sorcerer Kostchei’s court to dance; they are helpless under her spell, and they dance until, at a single stroke from her, they drop in exhaustion to the floor. At my most recent viewings, in May 2009 at Covent Garden, I noticed how, even though they are all moving together, they don’t step out of character. She begins with one group on the audience’s right, and gets it dancing its way. Then she brings in the next group. Then the next. And so on, around the stage. Finally, we see the Bilibochki, the harem wives, the princesses, the guards, and others, all dancing at the same time, each species moving in its own way and with its own phrasing, wonderfully patterned together like the segments of a half-orange, with the Firebird at the core. If I counted correctly at Covent Garden, there were fifty-five characters all dancing here in seven different ways (the Firebird herself is the seventh). This is, I believe, the most complex choreography that had ever been attempted in ballet when this was new in 1910. It still works.

To be able to choreograph this way, Fokine drew on vast resources. In Russia he had the Imperial Ballet; in the West, from 1909 until 1912, he had Diaghilev. After Diaghilev, to whom he returned briefly in 1914, he never made the same impact. Diaghilev gave him great orchestras and conductors and the chance to work with such living composers as Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel; with Diaghilev he had such designers as Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Alexander Golovin, and Nicholas Roerich. Can today's research establish just how many people were onstage in the biggest productions supervised by Fokine himself? At Covent Garden in 2009, I tried counting how many people were onstage in the finale of the Royal Ballet’s Firebird (the Firebird and Kostchei are offstage here, as are a number of Kostchei’s monsters); I think it was ninety-eight. True, quite a number of them are extras who don’t dance a step. They just walk slowly on, take position, and stand. But each one of them is elaborately costumed. That's quite some troupe to assemble.

When we look at Fokine’s choreography, we can see that he was thoroughly diverse in his attitude to gender. I find it noteworthy that the very first ballet presented in Paris in 1909 was Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907). The story, deriving from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, has to do with the enchantress Armida luring the handsome warrior Rinaldo and seducing him before he returns to his heroic duties in the human sphere. This formula – the femme fatale seducing the attractive young athlete – wasn’t new to theater in 1909. Late Romanticism abounded in femmes fatales, as in Richard Wagner’s 1882 Parsifal and Jules Massenet’s 1884 Manon. But this became a formula that the Diaghilev ballet was to apply again and again: in Fokine’s own Cléopâtre (1909) and Thamar (1912), and in Nijinska's Les Biches (1924) (where it becomes a joke, as the ultra-mondaine Hostess, with her pearl ropes and cigarette holder, lures two highly muscular Athletes who are none too bright even about the fact that they’re being seduced). Finally, in Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son (1929), the scene between the Siren and the title character becomes the ultimate treatment of this formula. The woman as seductress occurs in other Fokine ballets, too: in Schéhérazade, where Zobéide is certainly seductive and is more worldly than the Golden Slave (though the point of the story is not, of course, that the Golden Slave gets seduced) and in Daphnis and Chloé (1912), where Lykanion seduces Daphnis.

But there are many Fokine men – leading men, no less – who don’t fall into the category of attractively seducible athlete. The Warrior Chieftain in the Polovtsian Dances (1909) is attractive and athletic, but he’s all-dominant. By contrast, the Poet in Les Sylphides is far more stylistically caught up in this ballet’s nocturne than the hero of any nineteenth-century vision. The ballet sometimes suggests that it’s his dream, but more often that he is inside his own dream. His lightness, fluidity, and softness – all so perfect for the Romanticism of Chopin’s music – were a new conception of masculinity, though it was scarcely taken up by subsequent choreographers until some of Frederick Ashton’s roles for Anthony Dowell in the 1960s and 1970s. (Ashton studied Les Sylphides with Tamara Karsavina, learning from her what she said was Nijinsky’s version of the man's solo. He, Ashton, said in the 1980s that Dowell understood the role of the Poet better than anyone else he had ever coached.<5>)

In Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), Fokine gave audiences a reverse-gender treatment of La Sylphide. In the 1832 archetypally Romantic ballet (1836 in August Bournonville’s version), it’s the female who visits the mortal hero asleep in his armchair, flies through the air, enters through the open window, and represents another world. In Fokine’s 1911 Spectre, it's the woman who slumbers in the armchair and the man who flies in through the window to fill her head with desire and dance. The Rose Ghost here is one of the most demanding dance roles ever choreographed, and yet it’s fairly obvious that neither bravura nor hunkiness is the point of its long flowing phrases. This is not really a masculine role at all. It’s androgynous, or perhaps sexless, an embodiment of ballroom romance, the dead rose coming back to life as the invitation to the dance.

Likewise the femme fatale was only one of Fokine’s ideas of womanhood. He considered the Firebird an essentially androgynous role. Pointwork was used to convey her magic and otherworldiness, but he was angry when Natalia Goncharova, redesigning the ballet in 1926 for Diaghilev, put the Firebird in a red tutu. In the original, she had worn some kind of baggy culottes. Indeed, his second choice of dancer for this role, after Anna Pavlova, was Vaslav Nijinsky. It's said that Nijinsky only turned the role down because he lacked time before the premiere to master pointwork. When Karsavina, who did create it, coached Margot Fonteyn in the role in 1954, she revealed that the Firebird is a man-eating carnivore, and that Ivan Tsarevich, if he hadn't taken her by surprise and captured her, would have been her prey. <6> That's why, when she relents and gives him a magic feather that will assist him in his hour of need, Karsavina told Fonteyn, "Here is no human emotion." <7> In Petrushka, the Ballerina, a central character, is a caricature of stereotypical femininity at its most brittle. But Petrushka has numerous other kinds of women, including the Street Dancers, for whom ballet is a job by which they earn their keep, and the Gypsies, who are vital, warm, and flirtatious. This diverse spread of characters makes for a generous conception of humanity.

The ballets of the late nineteenth century, as they have come down to us, give us many different dance forms. They show us – however inauthentically – the genres of the Indian bayadères, the Hungarian czardas, Spanish dance, Arabian dance, Chinese dance, and other ethnic or national idioms; they include such historic styles as the minuet and the Grossvater; they have character numbers for Puss-in-Boots, Red Riding Hood, and more. They also have vivid mime characters: Dr. Coppélius, the High Brahmin, Baron von Rothbart, Carabosse, Drosselmeyer. But at their center, in ways that smack of cultural imperialism, is academic ballet. When Solor, the Indian hero of La Bayadère (1877), dreams of the ghosts of many Indian bayadères, he envisages them all dancing on pointe and in tutus. Ballet here is literally heaven: it has become the super-race.

Fokine rejected that. When he imagined how the Polovtsians dance in Prince Igor or the characters of the Arabian Nights in Schéhérazade or the ancient Greeks of Daphnis and Chloé, he didn't impose academic ballet style on his idea of them. Ballet style is certainly part of his vision, but not as his dominant mission. When his imagination allowed him to make ballet central, then he could choreograph that way successfully. Les Sylphides – or Chopiniana, as it is still titled in Russia – is the ultimate example of this. Though it's seldom revived by Western companies today, it was, for more than fifty or sixty years, quintessential to the popular idea of ballet, perhaps even more so than Swan Lake (1894-95). Several of Fokine's central ideas here actually came from outside ballet, and in particular from Isadora Duncan. From her, he surely took the Chopin music, the way one dancer lies on the floor and extends her line, the way a dancer stands and presents her back to the audience, the way a dancer, with simple steps, carries a single gesture across the stage or runs to arrive in a gesture, and the composition of a dance with no emphasis on acrobatic bravura. But he translated those Duncanisms into the terms of the ballet tradition. The idiom of Les Sylphides is, of course, a deliberate evocation of the Romantic ballet idiom of La Sylphide, Giselle, and other ballets blancs. The main structure is intimately related to the "Un poco di Chopin" section (Tchaikovsky piano piece as arranged by Riccardo Drigo) in Lev Ivanov’s choreography for the final lakeside scene of Swan Lake, in which there is a lead male-female couple, two supporting female soloists, and a corps de ballet that makes choral echoes of the main dances. The rings that occur in Fokine's Sylphides choreography have their precedent in the rings of Lev Ivanov's Snowflakes in the original Russian Nutcracker (1892) and his swan maidens in the final act of Swan Lake. <8> The way the Mazurka dancer crosses the stage on a diagonal and then leaves recalls Myrtha in Giselle (1841), as do her soaring jumps. Fokine, who was raised in the Russian ballet world and knew it intimately, could deliver its style poetically. Les Sylphides is one example; the title character of Le Spectre de la Rose is another.

But his vision was broader. In Petrushka, he parodies ballet twice over – in the brittle baby-doll manners of the Ballerina and in the acrobatic exhibitionism of the Street Dancers - and makes a work where there is plenty of appealingly expressive dancing that has nothing to do with the academic steps of the classroom. Folk and ethnic idioms, both actual and imaginary, were wellsprings no less vital to his art than the danse d'école he had learnt at the Maryinsky. To this day, it’s rare to find a ballet choreographer who does not need to impose the ballet idiom onto his world view; Fokine did not.

Fokine was a modernist. We can call him a late romantic, too, but the two are far from opposed. As Randall Jarrell argued in the 1940s, modernism is the end of the romantic line. <9> To Edwin Denby in 1944 the "first victories" of modernism in dancing occurred "through Isadora and Fokine, its boldest ones through Nijinsky and Mary Wigman.... Inside and outside of ballet, modernism has emphasized the interest in bit-by-bit gesture, gesture deformed, interrupted, or explosive. It has done everything to break up the easy-flowing sequence of a dance." <10> Examples in Fokine of what Denby meant are surely the Firebird's arm movements, with her wrists breaking the line as if to shake off sparks; Petrouchka's turned-in and knock-kneed movements, gloved hands, and limited arm movements; even the way those Romantic gestures in Les Sylphides (as in the Prelude and Waltz) are, in Edwin Denby’s phrase about Duncan’s gestures, “carried about the stage” <11>), and the Dying Swan's impassioned wing-beats and final fold down into death.

Another aspect of modernism in Fokine is his attitude to endings. He became a master of the anti-climax. According to him, it was Stravinsky who persuaded him to end Firebird not with a conventional suite of dances but with a colossal tableau. <12> I still find his staging of that ending (as danced by the Royal Ballet) superior to Balanchine's later one (as danced by New York City Ballet today), because his, Fokine’s, dares to employ more stillness. The dancers, group by group, simply process onto the stage, take their places, and stand. At the end, nothing moves except for the slowly rising hand of Ivan Tsarevich. It's basically the same idea that Nijinska, choreographing thirteen years later, used for the ending of Les Noces – where the only thing that moves is the slowly rising hand of the bridegroom's lead companion – though, of course, Nijinska's tableau is both more spatially intimate and more geometrically radical. The ending of Petrushka is a more drastic example of the anti-climax. The strangest touch is that, when Petrushka’s ghost appears to taunt the Charlatan and send him packing in alarm, it doesn't remain jubilant in eternal life; it – the ghost – collapses too, as if it were still made of the same sawdust as in life.

Then there's Fokine’s preparedness to use complex musical rhythms. The Danse Infernale in Firebird is far less regular in rhythm than any nineteenth-century ballet. We don't know much about his choreography for the original Daphnis and Chloé was, but we do know that the whole ensemble at the end was moving to a 5/4 tempo in Ravel's music. Sure, that was rhythmically tough than what the same company would tackle the following year in Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) - but 5/4 is still a rhythm that can be beyond many dancers today. <13>

Fokine's response to music is the area on which I wish to close. He worked on a number of commissioned scores, the most famous being Firebird, Petrouchka, and Daphnis and Chloé. The creative circumstances were different for each of these. For the composition of Firebird – even if you accept Stravinsky's more restrained account <14> rather than Fokine's version, which has them composing music and movement in the same room – composer and choreographer worked in extreme accord and with close consultation. For Petrouchka, the close collaboration was between Stravinsky and the designer and scenarist Benois. Fokine, always quick to bitterness in his memoirs, records his resentment of this, but otherwise admits that the score and working environment were excellent. <15> For Daphnis, Fokine's memories are clouded by regret: Diaghilev apparently allocated all too much rehearsal time to another premiere, that of Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune the same season, so that Fokine's Daphnis - made to a score that was new, far longer, and, for dance purposes, far more complex - was made to feel like a second-class citizen before it had even opened. (The music has survived, but the ballet hasn't.)

But all these three scores show us Fokine's appetite for theatrical and dance variety, for a wide range of color and incident. In a good production of Petrushka – the version I admire most is the one staged for the Royal Ballet by Serge Grigoriev and Lubov Tchernicheva, as recorded on a TV film in 1965 by the late Margaret Dale <16> - I still find the ballet’s outer scene engrossing. The inner scenes, for the puppets in their cells, look thin. The first cast seems to have given them a fullness they gradually lost over successive years, and Fokine himself found the first cast incomparable. (I accept that the characterisation of the Blackamoor is racially insensitive and offensive, the chief reason why the ballet is seldom seen today.) The ballet I find more remarkable, however, is Firebird. We know it chiefly through the version reconstructed by Grigoriev and Tchernicheva for the Royal Ballet (then the Sadler's Wells Ballet) in 1954, on which other productions – such as the Kirov/Maryinsky’s 1994 version – have been closely based; and at the Royal Monica Mason, for over forty years, has also passed on (as the Kirov/Maryinsky certainly does not) what Fonteyn in turn passed on, in 1978, from Karsavina. <17>

And I find that this Firebird is often musically remarkable. I have mentioned the ending, where Fokine allows Stravinsky's music to do so much while the dancers simply form a tableau. It's an impressive choreographer who knows where to follow the music and where not. There's even a passage where Fokine goes on doing something while the music changes – and it's wonderful. This is the kiss for Ivan Tsarevitch and the beautiful Tsarevna. (Fonteyn relates that Tchernicheva rehearsed the kiss “over and over to get this right.” <18>) They come together at the climax of the scene, after his courtship and after the khorovod they've danced with her companions. And what happens is a kiss, a real kiss, not a peck but a long, lingering kiss. Time seems to stop, even in the music. But then the music delivers alarm calls. The Tsarevna's companions, having settled down to watch this kiss in adolescent fascination, now start to move, and finally they pull the two lovers apart. The kiss has gone on longer than any one sequence in the music, and that's what makes it so theatrically remarkable: for those two, time has gone on stopping even when, for the rest of us, it's started again. And the Tsarevna does not go straight into joining her companions; she has to stand apart for a moment (facing the audience), acknowledging in seriousness her bewilderment at the life-changing impact of this kiss. It’s the greatest kiss in ballet. One reason why is the way Fokine places it on, but then against, the music.

Fokine was also a pioneer in choreographing to concert-hall music that had not been designed for dance. Almost certainly, he was influenced by Duncan in this respect, and we can also see how he picked up on certain aspects of nineteenth-century ballet, which had used concert-hall non-dance music in certain ways. But for Fokine, choreographing to Camille Saint-Saens (The Dying Swan) (1907), Robert Schumann (Carnaval), Carl Maria von Weber (Le Spectre de la Rose), and others, this became a central part of his creative endeavor. We take choreographing to such music for granted now. Then, however, it was effectively new, and even, when the music was old, it gave ballet a seriousness that made it modern.

Yet there are many ways to respond to music. I here simply point out two main ways in which Fokine used concert-hall music. When he made The Dying Swan to Saint-Saëns's Le Cygne, he made a dance image that may not have been what the composer had in mind – Saint-Saëns was surely thinking not of the swan's death but its serenity on the water – but one that picks up aspects of the music's imagery and does not clash drastically with others. The same is true of Schumann's Carnaval and of Weber's Invitation to the Dance (the music for Spectre).

In Schéhérazade, however, something else occurred. Rimsky-Korsakov seems to have never wanted a ballet set to this score, by the way. And we can bet he never imagined this one. His score is all about quite different aspects of the Arabian Nights, and in particular about Sinbad the Sailor. Fokine, however, gives us the story of adulterous sex between the harem wives and the slaves. When you work out how the Sinbad music is re-routed, the ballet ought to be bizarre. Yet it isn't. Schéhérazade is usually a terrible ballet in the theater, and people have been scoffing at it since the 1930s - but they don't scoff at its music, which is usually the most appealing aspect of it. Fokine imposes his own scenario on it; he finds cues in it that help him to make his story vivid, and he uses its surge and exoticism to make his drama sensuous.

It takes particular courage to work this way. Walt Disney did so – marvelously – in Fantasia, notably in the Pastoral Symphony and Nutcracker Suite episodes. Paul Taylor did so in Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) (1980) and, more recently, in Brief Encounters (2009, set to Debussy’s Children’s Corner). These are examples of dances where we know full well the music means to depict something quite different, and yet the choreographer/scenarist has the nerve to tell us another story and – cheekier yet – getting the music to help him. Fokine pointed the way. Musical purists may protest at such musical misappropriation. Fokine, however, is one of those choreographers skillful enough to suggest that the music was expressing something other than the composer’s stated intention: which takes us deep into the possibilities of musical and choreographic expression.

The great period of Fokine's career was short. Only a few of the ballets he made in it really have serious theatrical validity today, and only in some productions. (My heart tends to sink today at the prospect of seeing any ballet that was once made with Nijinsky as its lead man. It’s easier to see why any leading man fails to be Nijinsky than what he successfully brings to a Nijinsky role: the choreography and the Nijinsky photographs tell us plenty about what we’re missing.) But it really was Fokine who did most to launch choreographic modernism in ballet. Because of him, ballet began to change its ways with gender types, with ethnic dance and multiculturalism, with multiplicity of action and with new kinds of conclusion, with music and musicality.

@Alastair Macaulay 2023

1.Fokine’s first name is usually rendered as “Mikhail” in British publications, as “Michel” in American and French ones.

2.Arnold L. Haskell, Balletomania: The Story of an Obsession (London: Gollancz, 1934), pp. 133-45; Michel Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master, trans. Vitale Fokine, ed. Anatole Chujoy (London: Constable, 1961).

3. The British tend to spell it Petrushka, the French and Americans Petrouchka.

4. Fokine, Memoirs, p. 51.

5. Unpublished section of Frederick Ashton interview with Alastair Macaulay, June 1984.

6. For Fonteyn’s coaching of the role, see Barbara Newman’s interview with Monica Mason in Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing (London: Elm Tree Books, 1982), pp. 298-301.

7. Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography (London: W. H. Allen, 1975), p. 153.

8. In productions of Swan Lake today, we seldom see rings in the first lakeside scene. But they are recorded in the Stepanov notation of the pre-World War I Maryinsky production. And, as done by the child-swans around Odette, they were part of Anthony Dowell’s 1987-2016 Royal Ballet production. In the final act, they are a recurrent part of Ivanov’s choreography.

9. Randall Jarrell, “The End of the Line,” in Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 77. This essay was originally published in The Nation on 21 February 1942.

10.Edwin Denby, "A Ballet Lover's View of Martha Graham," in Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William Mackay (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 233. This review was originally published in the New York Herald Tribune on 28 May 1944.

11. Denby, “Isadora Reconsidered,” in Dance Writings, p. 87. This review was originally published in Modern Music in March-April 1942.

12. Fokine, Memoirs, pp. 171-72.

13. There is a variation in 5/4 time in the score by Cesare Pugni (1802-1870) for Jules Perrot’s three-act ballet Catarina. Marius Petipa, who revived Catarina in 1870 to commemorate Pugni in the year of his death, may have had that in mind when he commissioned a 5/4 tempo for the Sapphire Fairy variation in Act Three of The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Tchaikovsky composed it, but in the event Petipa never choreographed it, probably because the subtlety of Tchaikovsky’s rhythm was beyond his dancers.

14 Fokine, Memoirs, pp. 161-62; Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), pp. 27-29.

15. Fokine, Memoirs, p. 183.

16. Produced by Margaret Dale and telecast on BBC-TV on 18 February 1965, The Firebird was danced by the Royal Ballet with Nadia Nerina in the title role, Ronald Hynd as Ivan Tsarevich, and Deanne Bergsma as the Princess. A videorecording is in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (*MGZIC 9-164).

17. A film version of the Royal Ballet production -with cuts - was produced by Paul Czinner Productions for Poetic Films in association with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1960, with Margot Fonteyn in the title role, Michael Somes as Ivan Tsarevich, and Rosemary Lindsay as the Tsarevna. A videorecording is in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (*MGZIC 9-214). Two twentyfirst-century broadcasts of the complete Royal Ballet production have been on YouTube; the one starring Leanne Benjamin is particularly good.

18. Fonteyn, Autobiography, p. 154.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2023