De Basil was born Vassily Grigorievich Voskresensky in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1888 (his year of birth is given variously as 1880 or 1886) He is said to have been a colonel in the Cossack army, although his claim to the title "Colonel" is disputed.
De Basil was demobilised from the army in 1919 and worked as an entrepreneur in Paris. In 1929-1930 de Basil"s ballet troupe acted together with Aleksey Tsereteli’s opera troupe. De Basil and René Blum, ballet director at the Monte Carlo Opera, along with financier Serge Denham, founded the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo in 1931.
The ballet gave its first performance in Monte Carlo in 1932.
Blum and de Basil did not agree artistically, leading to a 1934 split, after which de Basil hooked up with financier Sol Hurok. Colonel de Basil initially renamed the company Ballets Russes de Colonel West. de Basil.
In 1937, René Blum and former Ballets Russes choreographer Léonide Massine organized a new ballet company and lured away some of de Basil"s dancers. In addition, Massine sued de Basil in London to regain the intellectual property rights to his own works.
He also sued to claim the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo name.
The jury decided that de Basil owned Massine"s ballets created between 1932 and 1937, but not those created before 1932. lieutenant also ruled that both successor companies could use the name Ballet Russe — but only Massine & Blum"s company could be called Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Colonel de Basil renamed his company again, as the Covent Garden Russian Ballet.
In 1939, he gave the company its final name, the Original Ballet Russe.
De Basil brought the Original Ballet Russe on a tour of Australia in 1939–1940. He had earlier organised tours to Australia in 1936–1937 and 1938–1939, although he did not travel with the company.
During his visit to Australia, de Basil commissioned work from Australians, especially from designers, who included Sidney Nolan and Kathleen and Florence Martin. He directed Ballets Russes companies, which performed under a variety of different names, until his death in Nice in 1951.
Following the death of Sergei Diaghilev in 1929, the members of his Ballets Russes went in many directions.
