Les biches

Les biches ("The Hinds" or "The Little Darlings") is a ballet choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to music by Francis Poulenc, premiered by the Ballets Russes on 6 January 1924. Some consider this piece a milestone in ballet history. The composer, who was at the time relatively unknown, was asked by Serge Diaghilev to write a piece based on Glazunov's Les Sylphides, written seventeen years earlier. Poulenc, however, chose to base his work on the paintings of Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his "Parc aux biches." The word biche is usually translated as "doe," an adult female deer. "Does" was used as a slang for coquettish women. Poulenc described his work as a "contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness, which you sense if you are corrupted, but of which an innocent-minded girl would not be conscious."