Dance Web

(from the associated press)
MOSCOW - Sofia Golovkina, who danced for the Bolshoi Theater for nearly three decades and directed its school for more than 40 years, has died. She was 88.

Golovkina died on Feb. 17, the theater announced on its Web site, without specifying the cause of death.

She began dancing for the Bolshoi in 1933 and continued through 1959. Her roles included Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty” and Odette in “Swan Lake.”

When she started dancing, Soviet ballet was under intense pressure to conform to dictator Josef Stalin’s concepts of “socialist realism,” eschewing abstract moves and artistic pretensions regarded as decadent.

She danced the key role in “Bright Stream,” which was denounced by the Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1936 as “false ballet” and removed from the Bolshoi’s repertoire.

The ballet, a collaboration of composer Dmitry Shostakovich and choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, tells of a dancer who comes to a collective farm to introduce high-art concepts to the workers.

In 1960, she left the stage and became director of the Moscow Academic Choreography School, where she also taught classical dance. She retired from the school in 2001.

Her tenure “wasn’t just a directorship, it was a dictatorship,” the newspaper Vremya Novostei wrote the day after her death. The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta described her as “Odette with an iron character.”

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Golovkina complained that state funding for the Bolshoi and its school had dried up. She helped expand its reach, including establishing an academy branch in the U.S. resort town of Vail.

“You used to steal Russian stars. The time has come for you to create your own,” Golovkina told The Associated Press in a 1993 interview in Vail.

No information on survivors was immediately available.

in memoriam….

Ludmila Tcherina, dancing star and choreographer of the Grands Ballets of Monte Carlo, became at the age of 15 under the stage name ?Tcherzina? the youngest star in the history of dance.

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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) Josephine Schwarz, who co-founded the nation’s second-oldest regional ballet company 67 years ago, died in her sleep Friday, her family said. She was 95.

With her older sister Hermene, Schwarz co-founded the Dayton Ballet in Ohio in 1937.

Schwarz was a pioneer of the regional ballet movement that instituted professional dance classes, performing standards and choreographic training in cities outside major population centers.

The New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and Atlanta Ballet, which also began as a regional troupe, are the only professional ballet companies in the United States older than the Dayton Ballet.

She directed the company for 43 years before retiring in 1980. Although she choreographed more than 75 works, she was best known as an exacting teacher and director.

She sent dancers to Broadway and to companies including the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and the Joffrey Ballet.

(from the Associated Press)