A Timeless Ballerina
(Ballet Dancer by the name of Anna
Pavlova)
Born as a frail child, experiencing
one illness to another, yet surprisingly showed enormous strength
and drove herself at an incredibly intense pace, doing 9- 10
performances a week for more than 20 years. That is Anna Pavlova,
the most famous ballet dancer of the early 20th century.
She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia
to an exceedingly poor peasant family. At the age of eight, her
mother brought little Anna to the Imperial Theater to watch the
performance of The Sleeping Beauty. Enchanted by what she saw, she
was then convinced that her life will be dedicated as a ballet
dancer. It was also at that time where she was rejected at the
School of Imperial Ballet because she was too young. When she was
10, she was accepted and was among the few who were chosen out of
the 100 applicants.
After 7 years of daunting training
under the rigid discipline of the school, Pavlova joined the
Imperial Ballet at the age of 17. Her rise to the top was rapid that
only for less than 10 years, she became the company’s prime ballet
dancer. Technique was not really her influential asset, it was often
her acting as much as her dancing that cause spectators to be
completely spellbound.
Pavlova forever changed the ideal for
ballet dancers. In the 1890’s, ballet dancers at the Marinsky
Theater were expected to have a muscular and compact body. She,
however, looked so fragile, perfect for romantic roles such as that
of Giselle. Her feet were extremely arched, she strengthened her
pointe shoe by adding a piece of hard leather on the soles for
support. At that time, a lot considered it as cheating, so she
retouched all her photos to hide the boxy platform. This modern age,
it has become the model for pointe shoes so it will have less pain
and easier footworks.
Her best- renowned piece was The
Dying Swan choreographed for her by Michel Fokine, one of her fellow
pupils in the School of Imperial Ballet. C.W. Beaumont, an English
ballet critic who saw her perform in London wrote, “the emotion
transferred was so over-powering that it seemed a mockery to applaud
when the dance came to an end. Our souls had soared into empyrean
with the passing of the swan. Only when the silence was broken could
we feel that they had returned to our bodies.”
Few days before her 50th
birthday, Pavlova passed away because of pleurisy in The Hague,
Netherlands while she was on tour. Her last request was to grasp in
her hands her costume from The Dying Swan. In accordance with
tradition, on the day she was scheduled to perform, the show still
went on but only with a single spotlight encircling an empty stage
where the ballet dancer would have been.
Ruth St. Denis, a popular modern
ballet dancer said, “Pavlova lived on the threshold of heaven and
earth as an interpreter of the ways of God.”
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