Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya died – The Fighting Swan – Frankfurter Rundschau

03 May 2015

Maya Plisetskaya during a rehearsal for the choreographed for her by Maurice Béjart ballet” Isadora “at New York’s Uris Theatre on March 22, 1977. Photo: AP

The great Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya has died at the age of 89 years, a tribute to a courageous dancer.

She was just following the standards of the ballet world already an old lady when she at the Wiesbaden State Theatre mid-90s, a “Swan Lake” -Einstudierung the ground gave. But it gave her mischievous delight rather than visible effort to place for the ladies and gentlemen of the press, a slim leg to the bar, then, fine smiling, snuggling her head against his leg. Can someone copy me, seemed to her sparkling dark gaze to ask, who never lost a certain watchful hardness in the subsequent press conference.

Maya Plisetskaya, born in 1925 in Moscow, died on Saturday in age of 89 years in Munich, where she lived with her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin said, was not only the last great Soviet still trained and embossed Ballerina. She was due to an iron constitution and iron discipline around five decades on stage. Without that you had to have the feeling that she was recently a kind of charity grants.

With nine years, Maya is taken from the ballet school of the Bolshoi. Her father is a fervent communist, but also a Jew. In 1937 he was arrested as part of the Stalinist “Great Purge” in 1938 executed, deported her mother to a camp. The drudgery of the ballet bar must have given support even in the figurative sense of the orphaned, growing up with her uncle and aunt Maja. And courage. Ironically, it is in 1943 a member of the famous, worldwide advertising for the achievements of Soviet culture Bolshoi Ballet and in the following years, if not actually the prima ballerina of the regime.

Maya Plisetskaya in in March 2009 at a dedicated to her exhibition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Photo: AP

Nevertheless, harassed them for years, are not their specific roles, they can certainly not with the ensemble abroad. Only Khrushchev personally allowed 1959 that it participates in a guest performance in New York. She does not sit on (“Good girl,” he is said to have greeted on their return, “will not let me look like an idiot”). Maya Plisetskaya is soon an international star – and at the same time except that not as many colleagues disdainful overflows in the West

.

Technically bold

She danced for the Bolshoi most major classical roles, of course, was also often a dying swan. But Plisetskaya was less but the tip of the dancer Longingly-Hinge type (such as the ailing, essential Anna Pavlova), as a technically daring, brilliant by flashing Fury Black Swan, as a glutvolle Carmen or Russian resolute Anna Karenina. The ballet historian Jennifer Homans describes her style as: “Your dancing had nothing to do with beauty or harmony: It was a battle.” Even the dying swan she gave oppositional, different, new. Not with a broken wing from the beginning, but as “excited, unbalanced, an eagle-like bird” (Homans).

Again and again they put on with the artistic directors of the Bolshoi, because she wanted to dance differently or just more modern. And unfortunately, the opening of the Iron Curtain for it came too late to be able to try their stupendous, fascinatingly austere power of a true modernity can. The world might have been astonished.