RIP Maya Plissetskaya

Maya Plissetskaya and Galina Ulanova, were the artists who made me admire and love dance and somehow direct myself to this art still a very youg child. My first memories of Maya are hazy, I know it was a TV broadcast of one of her famous roles, Swan Lake must have been. It was the first time I remember seeing ballet, and it had a mesmerizing effect on me. The beauty, the lasting impression of her agility, the music, the passion, the different-from-everyman's life, it was all there. Together with my father's jokes who was holding on to the door, rose on his toes and said, "Look, I am dancing ballet!" We all laughed innocently, not so innocently myself as I had already bid dedication and obedience to dance. So, thanks Maya...

I think that had she gone a few decades ago, her death would have made much bigger headlines than today. And yet...Maya Plissetskaya, claimed the world's attention once more, even now at a time in which stardom means different things than in the time of her prime.

Do young dancers know Maya? Have they heard her name outside Russia? I mean the dancers who were born at the time of the post-Chernobyl era. They probably have and if they don't it's worth googling the name. Maya and Galina (Ulanova) were not exactly rivals and not exactly of the same age, but they were famous around the same time and they were somewhat a reminiscent of the Salle-Camargo idiosyncracies on stage: one fiery the other lyrical. Only that Galina was the most typical example fo the dedicated Stahanovite Soviet dancer, while Plisstskaya, of Jewish descent, directly experienced the absurdity and violence of Stalin's regime in her own family, through executions and exile.

Both prima ballerinas wrote theri memoirs. Ulanova mainly focused on her dedication on art and her daily exercises, even on holiday, to become better, to justify her role as an artist and as an artist of the people. Maya wrote a more magnificent story; a story that begins at a very tender age and goes through the corridors of power and bureaucracy and careful phrasing of opinions different to those of the directors, the party officials, those caring for the safety of the regime. Maya danced ballet, her back kick was famous in Don Quixote. She danced all the great roles of the romantic and classic repertory, and her Dying Swan to the music by Saint-Saens gained her an even bigger world recognition. She danced in Ruth Saint-Denis reconstructed dances ("Incense"), she was the Muse of many great artists, she had her signature work in ballet, her Carmen Suite for which she fought a lot in order to be shown as she had dreamed of showing it. A more abstract ballet with psychological traits, made her look sexy on stage, something rather unusual in that manner, because Maya became the role, and her Carmen's sex drive melted into Maya's temperament.

Active until her old age, she was loved even by people that had nothing to do with the world of ballet. A tough lady, an extraordinary woman, she never fled her country as Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov and Godounov did. However strange, it did nothing to diminish her stardom. Maya always seemd to choose wisely.

 From "Anna Karenina"

From "Carmen Suite" (photos from the bicentenary publication Bolshoi Theatre CCCP, 1976).