tamara karsavina

1885-1978
Anglo-Russian ballerina whose partnership with Vaclav Nijinsky in Mikhail Fokine's avant-garde ballets helped to revive interest in ballet in western Europe.

The daughter of a famous dancer, Platon Karsavin, Karsavina was educated at the Imperial Ballet School, St. Petersburg, under such teachers as Cecchetti, Christian Johansson, and Paul Gerdt, graduating in 1902. As ballerina at the Maryinsky Theatre she included in her repertoire Giselle and Odette-Odile in Swan Lake.

Karsavina is best known as the leading ballerina of Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes from its beginning in 1909 until 1922. She championed Mikhail Fokine's ideas of expressive dance and between 1909 and 1914 (paired with Nijinsky until 1913) she created the majority of famous roles in Fokine's neo-romantic repertoire, including Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose, Carnaval, Firebird, Petrushka, and Thamar. Her performance as the doll in Petrushka has been considered the definitive interpretation. During World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution she continued to dance in Russia.

After marrying the English diplomat Henry James Bruce, Karsavina fled to London in 1918. She returned to Ballets Russes in 1919 to star in Léonide Massine's The Three Cornered Hat and Pulcinella, and in 1926 she returned to dance in Bronislava Nijinska's and George Balanchine's Romeo and Juliet. Karsavina came out of semi-retirement in the early 1930s to revive some of her more famous roles for the Ballet Rambert and to create new ones for Frederick Ashton.

Tamara Karsavina was associated for many years with Great Britain's Royal Academy of Dancing, for which she organised the Teachers' Training Course and the Camargo Society, from the time it received its charter in 1936. Margot Fonteyn and other ballerinas were coached by Karsavina in many of the classical roles that she had created for Ballets Russes. Her writings include articles on technique for the journal Dancing Times, her autobiography Theater Street (1930), and the text Classical Ballet: The Flow of Movement (1962). Karsavina died on May 26, 1978, in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England.

the muse of dance's lyricism

article by edward stark
I do not know any other dancer who practices the art of shaping lyricism - the tenderest virtue of the human soul, the source of purest intimate pleasure - into a more perfect form of dance than Tamara Platonovna Karsavina does.

The secret of the charm exuded by the ballerina lies in her exclusive gift for turning the dance she performs into poetry. Each ballet role, independent of its purely technicalities, or whether it belongs to the world of classical dance, or is a new creation - is always enveloped in the weightless, transparent veil of a dream, a poetic mist that muffles glaring outlines and avoids any angularities.

The dance performed by Karsavina, imbued with charming softness and endlessly attractive womanhood, swaddled with the freshness and the purity of youth is alien to any bravura, to any tricks which often only conceal the void of inner feelings by means of the effects of dazzling brilliancy. It remains always and everywhere on plane of finished technical mastery. It cannot be otherwise, because it is only through mastery that on artist gains an understanding of all the mysteries of beauty.

Karsavina's dance is congenial to the finest poem, to the most delicately formed sonnet, in which every line is a tribute to the altar of poetry and rejoices the soul. Her dance pours out tunes of pure lyricism, which contrast the stern fanfares of the stern, lacerating drama. The lines of this dance are pure, soft, flowing and musically flexible, noble and at the same time sincere. This sincerity is just the supreme beauty in the creative genius of Karsavina, as well as in art in general; in her atmosphere blossoms the tenderest flowers of the poetry of dance, which the ballerina scatters around the whole world, flying above the forests, valleys, mountains and seas like a magic fairy with a radiant smile on her lips.

Main picture: Tamara Karsavina in 1916