Welcome to the Serge Lifar Foundation website. Our goals are to follow in Serge Lifar's footsteps and to protect, defend and perpetuate his name and memory.
Serge Lifar was among the artists who introduced neo-classical ballet. He was appointed Maître de Ballet of the Opéra de Paris, from 1930 to 1944 and again from 1947 to 1958. Serge Lifar endeavored to restore technical excellence of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, making it, from the 1930s to this day, one of the greatest ballet companies in the world.
Hommage à Attilio Labis, Président de la Fondation Serge Lifar, disparu le 26 Janvier 2023 à l'âge de 86 ans, dans cette vidéo de répétition du grand rôle d'Icare avec Serge Lifar.
Since you left the terrestrial stage for a world that I know nothing about, but in which you have surely found a place in keeping with your aura, every day I have felt the need to express my gratitude for the privilege that you gave me of sharing thirty years...
Serge Lifar by Attilio Labis (November 2001)
A great name in the dance world and a great master for those who had the privilege of navigating through their art under his benevolent guidance… An inspired choreographer and a consummate artist. A performer who was transfigured by the figures that he personified. When he played Napoleon, he was...
Yvette Chauviré, Star Ballerina of the Paris Opera
“His good humour, his enthusiasm, his patience, his amazing presence and his magnetism caused us to give him our best, the clock no longer mattered. We breathed an atmosphere of constant creativity. All this contributed greatly to my preserving an engaging and highly respectful memory of him. The Master remains...
Joseph Kessel
“Imagine a young boy who pretends to be eighteen, but looks fifteen, a slender and hard body with the shoulders of a child, the darkish and slant-eyed face of a Tartar, burned by quick, tender and merry green eyes, the eyes of a puppy amused by everything… His gestures have...
Jean Cocteau
“Whenever Lifar dances, I see blood: his knees are wounded, his mouth is a wound, his veins open. It literally flows, not the red blood that the crowd and families quickly hide in sheets, but the soul’s blood, the loss of which exhausts us and which is the perspiration of...
Paul Valéry
“Can the ballet exist without music? Lifar’s idea is a powerful one because it meets with truth. And what’s more astonishing for me is that I have begun to write poetry that is born only of rhythm… the dancer’s feet can not only speak and write but also think…”
Claude Bessy
Emission Kiev - en mémoire de Serge Lifar, France Inter, 1994
