The One Thousand and One Dances of Scheherazade across time

Callysta Croizer

One Thousand and One Nights has been a source of inspiration for choreographers since the early 20th century. Drawing on the richness of the Arab-Persian folk tale collection that shaped the Western fantasies of the East, dance makers have reinvented the protagonist-narrator Scheherazade and her stories, navigating between representation and a subversion of Orientalism.

In July 2025, Cape Verdean choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas opened the Avignon Festival with NÔT on the stage of the Palais des Papes’ Cour d’honneur. This hybrid piece, combining dance, theater, and performance in a carnival of human puppets, associates grotesque mime and eclectic sounds. Despite appearances, its primary inspiration is a literary one: One Thousand and One Nights. Here, as in the original work, Scheherazade is conspicuously absent. In the famous collection of Arab-Persian tales, compiled between the 3^rd and 13^th centuries, in order to stay alive, she hides behind the characters whose stories she tells each evening to Sultan Shahriyar, her husband who threatens to kill her. Concealed behind these tales, this central figure of the collection has become, over the centuries, a figure of exotic fascination. 

On the western side of the Mediterranean, fantasies about the East spread from the 18th century onwards – after the first French translation of One Thousand and One Nights by Antoine Galland was published in 1711 – accentuating the sexualization of female bodies and the barbarization of male figures. While the famous story and the imagery it conjures up permeate literature, they are also embodied in the art of choreography. From 20th-century modern ballets to 21^st-century contemporary performances, choreographers have drawn inspiration from this elusive heroine, drawing on both literary tradition and Orientalist imagery.

When it was first danced at the Palais Garnier, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of Scheherazade deviated from the literary work. Michel Fokine and Léon Bakst’s choreographic drama, created in 1910 to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem, combines characters from the story of One Thousand and One Nights with those summoned by the narrator. The plot of the ballet, set in the home of Shah Zeman, brother to Schariar, focuses on an orgy organized for the sultana Zobeide – who appears on the 29^th night of the literary work – and her female companions. When they are caught cheating on their spouses, the women are sentenced to death and the sultana commits suicide at the feet of the shah.

Although Scheherazade, who is absent from the ballet, crystallizes in her name a fantasy of the East that permeated the European gaze of the time, the ballet’s excessive Orientalism is not entirely naive. Depicting a harem chamber covered with a display of precious gems, colorful carpets, and shimmering fabrics, Léon Bakst’s sets deliberately aim for a “picturesque, intense, and sensual exoticism,” as reported by critic André Levinson on June 12, 1922, in the French daily newspaper Le Temps. This sumptuous universe also inspired Michel Fokine to propose choreographic innovations: the dancers swapped their satin pointe shoes for demi-pointes that looked like oriental slippers and performed arm, chest, and head movements while seated on stage. As for the star of the ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky, he slipped into the role of the Golden Slave, a black character, with a dark plum paint blackface, this practice being common at the time. Wearing jewelry and gold brocade pants, he donned exotic attributes that accentuated the fascination already exerted by his aura as an exceptional dancer.

In the second half of the 20^th century, a modern Scheherazade appeared under the direction of Robert Hossein. With this new version, created in 1975 to music composed by his father André Hossein, the Franco-Iranian director sought to create a “ballet d’action” – that is, where dance serves the narrative and moves it forward – as opposed to the Ballets Russes production, which he described as a “pantomime” – where movement takes precedence over the development of a plot. The choreography, performed by the Ballet Théâtre Populaire de Reims, is by George Skibine, a former dancer with the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo. Far from being a direct historical descendant of Diaghilev’s troupe, the Reims version of Scheherazade takes the opposite stand to the orientalism fantasized by the elite at the beginning of the century. Gone are the opulent sets: the ballet is danced on a bare stage. Gone too are the lavish costumes: they are replaced by simple garnet trousers for the dancers and green unitards for the female dancers.

Robert Hossein also subverts the original plot by placing the narrator at the forefront of the ballet. Although she is engaged to Sultan Shahryar, Scheherazade finds herself in love with a prince named Azzedin, with whom she runs away before being kidnapped by bandits. Conversely, Sultan Shahryar, initially furious with his fiancée, forgives the lovers on his deathbed. For dancer Nora Esteves, who played Scheherazade, the character is more than just a cunning narrator, but “a strong-willed woman,” free and in control of her own destiny, while Shahryar, far from being a bloodthirsty ruler, shows mercy.

Scheherazade is once again eclipsed in the 21st century in NÔT – “Night” in Cape Verdean Creole – by Marlene Monteiro Freitas. In contrast to previous performances, the choreographer returns to the original texts and constructs her piece as a parallel to the fate of the fictional narrator. In the literary work, the tales are read and linked together in a monumental literary fresco, while on stage, short scenes follow one another in the immense courtyard of the Palais des Papes, featuring dancing “dolls” wearing white masks. Between carnival, rock, trance, and baroque, the performance stands as a counterpart to Scheherazade: like the narrator, the dance unfolds the plot of the piece, like a spring of stories – a “story tap” according to Monteiro Freitas. Just as the storyteller brings the characters of the Thousand and One Nights to life for her own survival, NÔT gives body and voice to her puppets in order to get through the night and try to survive.

Callysta Croizer is a doctoral candidate in history at Paris 8 University, affiliated with the IFG Lab and MUSIDANSE research centers. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS-PSL), her research—supported by the French Embassy in Brazil through the REFEB mobility grant—focuses on the construction of Ballet in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 2023, she has been writing theater and dance criticism for Les Échos, Mouvement, Danses avec la plume and Springback Magazine.

NÔT
Choreography: Marlene Monteiro Freitas
March 25 to 28 at the Grande Halle de La Villette
April 28 & 29 at the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble
May 6 & 7 at the Maison de la Danse, Lyon