Tamara Karsavina
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Tamara Platonovna Karsavina [link] [link] (March 10, 1885 – May 26, 1978) was a famous Russian ballerina who eventually settled in England, where she helped found the Royal Academy of Dancing in 1920.
Personal life and career
Karsavina was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the daughter of the dancer Platon Karsavin. Beautiful and talented from an early age, Karsavina quickly moved through the ranks of professional ballet. After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she was a leading ballerina of Tsar's Imperial Ballet, dancing the whole of the Petipa repertory. Her most famous roles were Lise in La Fille Mal Gardee, Medora in Le Corsaire, and the Tsar Maiden in The Little Humpbacked Horse.
The choreographer George Balanchine said he had fond memories of watching her when he was a student at the Mariinsky. It was during the late 1910s that she began travelling regularly to Paris to dance with the Ballet Russe of Sergei Diaghilev. It was during her years with the company that she created many of her most famous roles in the ballets of Mikhail Fokine, including Petrushka, and Spectre a la Rose. She was perhaps most famous for creating the title role in Fokine's The Firebird (a role originally to be created by Anna Pavlova) with her occasional partner Vaslav Nijinsky.
She left Russia in 1917 after the revolution, and subsequently continued her association with the Ballet Russe as a leading Ballerina.
Her wonderful memoir, Theatre Street, focus on her training to be a ballerina, and her career at the Mariinsky and for the Ballet Russes. In these memoirs Karsavina comes across as intelligent, funny, and a wonderful story-teller. Tamara Karsavina was renowned for her beauty, and in the ultra-competitive world of ballet, she was almost universally beloved. However Karsavina did have a rivalry with Anna Pavlova. In the film A Portrait of Giselle Karsavina recalls a "wardrobe malfunction": during one performance her shoulder straps fell and she accidentally exposed herself, and Pavlova reduced an embarrassed Karsavina to tears.
In 1917 she married diplomat Henry James Bruce and moved to London, where she taught and wrote about ballet. Among her pupils was the English ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Although married, she did have a brief affair with notable Hollywood socialite and writer Mercedes de Acosta. The two were as much friends as they were lovers, and Karsavina was one of the few who continued to be friendly toward de Acosta following the controversial autobiography released by the latter, exposing many of her (de Acosta's) lesbian relationships with Hollywood's elite to the public.
External links
Pictures
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