Southampton - Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes, a film of three one-act ballets performed by the Mariinsky Theatre with music by Igor Stravinsky, will be presented at the Parrish Art Museum as part of its on-going Opera and Ballet in Cinema series. The screening is scheduled for Sunday, September 5 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12 for Parrish members, $15 for non-members.

The Ballets Russes was an itinerant company that performed under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev between 1909 and 1929. The company's productions, which combined new dance, art, and music, created a huge sensation around the world, altering the course of musical history, bringing many significant visual artists into the public eye, and completely reinvigorating the art of performing dance.

The most notable of the Ballets Russes's composers was Stravinsky, who was discovered as a young man by Diaghilev and commissioned to compose a new work inspired by the legend of the Firebird. Choreographed by Michel Fokine and premiered in Paris in 1910, The Firebird was an immediate success.

"The Rite of Spring," choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, premiered in Paris three years later to almost unanimous disapproval. The audience was shocked by the primitive violence of the ballet and the complex rhythmic structures and dissonance of Stravinsky's music. The ballet was cancelled after eight performances, but the music is now recognized as a seminal 20th-century composition. Leonard Bernstein said of the work, "It's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."

Stravinsky started to compose "The Wedding" using folk texts he adapted to relate the story of a Russian peasant wedding. While the score for the first two scenes was finished in 1915, the ballet was not premiered until 1923, when it was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the famous dancer.

The running time of Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes is approximately 110 minutes.

The Museum's programs are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties, and the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.