Where is the point from which we say “I see”? We begin with our eyes (“all eyes,” we say), and we watch. We become spectators, those who watch, and who are defined by that act alone. The act is old, but each perception is new, and each is individual: “I see,” I say, not someone else. Do others see indeed? What do they see? Turn to your left, to your right; enquire, and arguments abound. Believe your eyes, we say: I do, of course, but do I believe yours? There's the rub — and I rub my eyes; the problem vexes. No spectacle provides its spectators with an identical experience. I close my eyes; the spectacle dissolves, yet a vision persists: persistence of vision, we say. Yet how can I see what someone else has seen, if the eyes that saw are gone, if the spectacle they saw is gone? Your eyes, his eyes, those eyes long dead and gone — can I believe them? How does the vision persist?

In Moscow, Goleizovsky was the leader who attracted the younger generation to experiment. Kasian Yaroslavich Goleizovsky had been a student at the Petersburg School; he was accepted in 1902 and spent seven years there along with the future participants in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes abroad. At that time, Fokine was already working in the Maryinsky Theater with students and young dancers. In the school, he conducted the women's class parallel to the one in which Goleizovsky was studying. For the examination performance, Fokine presented Les Saisons, to the music of Tchaikovsky, in which Goleizovsky appeared partnering Fokine's student Elena Lyukom.

In 1914, as Europe went to war, Serge Diaghilev launched an artistic revolution that profoundly altered the identity of the Ballets Russes. By and large, historians have dated this artistic shift to Parade. Unveiled in Paris in 1917, three years after Diaghilev's last full-scale season in the French capital, the work served public notice of the switch in his allegiance to the avant-garde. Parade came with impeccable modernist credentials: designs by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, a libretto by Jean Cocteau, program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Only Léonide Massine, the ballet's choreographer, was an unknown quantity, although by the early 1920s, his name, too, would be synonymous with modernism. It is not difficult to understand why historians have identified this work as the cradle of Ballets Russes modernism.

Ida Rubinstein made her first Western European appearance in the title role of Cléopâtre at the Théâtre du Châtelet on June 2, 1909. It was the second evening of Diaghilev's dance programs of that memorable first Paris season, and Ida Rubinstein would have to compete not only with Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, both of whom had created a furor on the opening program, but also with Anna Pavlova, whose reputation as a dancer had preceded her to Paris.