The character as passed down from the Diaghilev Ballets Russes original is not only painted in outlandish blackface makeup, he is, as Wendy Perron puts it, “mean and aggressive [and] prodigiously stupid.” In the ’90s, the Oakland and then San Francisco Ballets decided to make the character’s face blue (“the Avatar solution”), and both Perron and Michel Fokine’s granddaughter (and Petrouchka rights holder) Isabelle had thought that was an excellent solution. But Perron’s dance history students at Juilliard last semester would not have it: they found the character grotesque, offensive and irredeemable. Perron and the class reached out to Isabelle, and Perron tells us how things came out. – Dance Magazine