11 Facts About Les biches

Les biches is a one-act ballet to music by Francis Poulenc, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska and premiered by the Ballets Russes on 6 January 1924 at the Salle Garnier in Monte Carlo.

The original plan was that Poulenc should write music for a ballet scenario with the title Les biches demoiselles, written by the fashion designer Germaine Bongard.

Les biches found what his biographer Carl B Schmidt describes as "some slightly obscene eighteenth-century texts", which he used in three of the numbers in the score.

Poulenc struggled to find the right name for the ballet, and eventually had the idea of calling it Les biches, echoing the title of the classic ballet Les Sylphides.

Les biches's chosen title is, as he admitted, untranslatable into any other language.

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Les biches was an immediate success, first in Monte Carlo in January 1924 and then in Paris in May, under the direction of Andre Messager and has remained one of Poulenc's best-known scores.

Poulenc's friend, Georges Auric, who had just enjoyed a similar triumph with a Diaghilev ballet, Les biches Facheux, was repudiated by Satie for becoming a friend of Laloy.

Les biches extracted a five-movement suite from the full ballet score, omitting the overture and the three choral movements.

Les biches included Les biches in its London seasons and gave the New York premiere of the piece in 1950; the company included Marjorie Tallchief as the garconne and George Skibine as the leader of the three athletes.

In France, Les biches was taken into the repertoire of two leading companies: Ballet Theatre Francais performed it in the 1980s as part of a quadruple bill of Diaghilev ballets .

Le Les biches was featured in the 2009 "Fall for Dance" series in New York, danced by Ballet West.