Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces”, final tableau: 1966 Royal Ballet production

12. This photograph by Houston Rogers shows the final tableau of the Nijinska “Les Noces”. It looks back to the great tableau at the end of Mikhail Fokine’s “The Firebird” (1910) and forward to the end of George Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements” (1972).

The Bride and Groom have left the stage. At the centre, the bridesmaids have re-created the pile of heads from the first scene; the soloist Bridesmaid (Georgina Parkinson) is now the one who rests her head on her hands on the top of the pile. Behind her, the Best Man (Anthony Dowell) and his companions slowly raise their hands in cool benediction - the same gesture with which Fokine’s Ivan Tsarevich ends “The Firebird”.

The way in which groups to right and left lean down to the floor suggest how much humanity is pressed by other forces. André Levinson denounced “Les Noces” as a Marxist ballet: certainly it is about the old Russian commune that became a working model for the new Communist state, though it is about much else too. (Nijinska was in Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution occurred. On leaving in 1920, she did not return.)

Wednesday 3 February

12. Concluding tableau of “Les Noces”, Royal Ballet 1966 production: Georgina Parkinson as chief bridesmaid, Anthony Dowell as best man. Photo: Houston Rogers.