VALOIS ARCHIVE

The staff of the Valois Archives express their deep appreciation and gratitude to art collectors, theater professionals, theater directors and managers, opera singers and ballet dancers, musicians, and others working in the performing and visual arts for their support and donations to the Archives.

The VF Archives collaborates with the EAF Museum on the study and collection of artifacts related to theater, music, and choreography. Museum specialists assist the festival organizing committee in preparing exhibitions commemorating significant events, creative evenings, and anniversaries of prominent cultural and artistic figures.

The EAF Museum has provided space and equipment for the storage of rare artifacts related to the life and work of Ninette de Valois and her contemporaries. EAF Museum specialists assist the VF Archives staff in researching the biographies of prominent figures who have had a significant impact on world culture. The VF Archive collections contain objects and documents reflecting the development of theatre, music, opera, ballet, drama, literature, fine arts, cinema, fashion and design in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The VF Archive contains archival materials about such outstanding personalities as Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Marie Rambert, George Balanchine, Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, as well as other famous choreographers, ballet dancers and theater figures. Among Valois's contemporaries were outstanding composers: Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and others.

The VF Archive presents works by famous artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Leon Bakst, Georges Barbier, William Russell Flint, Laura Knight, Walter Ernest Webster, Umberto Brunelleschi and Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Robert Demachy, Georges Barbier, Doris and Anna Zinkeisen, Zinaida Serebryakova, Adolf de Meyer, Adolf Munzer, Ray Kingsley, Rinat Kuramshin, Konstantin Lomykin and others. Some of the artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Leon Bakst, Georges Barbier, collaborated with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Other artists created sets and costumes for various theatres and ballet companies in the UK, France, the USA, Russia and other countries.

The VF Archive continues to purchase and accept as donations objects and documents related to the fields of theater, music, opera, ballet, drama and literature, fine arts, cinema, fashion and design of the 19th and 20th centuries. The VF Archive collections take part in VALOIS FEST exhibitions in the Historical and Cultural Heritage sector, as well as other exhibitions in museums, theatres, galleries and cultural centres.

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