Maya Plisetskaya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Plisetskaya
Maya Mikhaylovna Plisetskaya (Russian: Ма́йя Миха́йловна Плисе́цкая; 20 November 1925 — 2 May 2015) was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, ballet director, and actress, and is considered one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century. She danced during the Soviet era at the same time as the great Galina Ulanova, and in 1960 took over Ulanova's title as prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi.
Plisetskaya studied ballet from age nine and first performed at the Bolshoi Theatre when she was eleven. She joined the Bolshoi Ballet company when she was eighteen, quickly rising to become their leading soloist. Her early years were also marked by political repression, however, partly because her family was Jewish, and she was not allowed to tour outside the country for sixteen years after joining the Bolshoi. During those years, her fame as a national ballerina was nevertheless used to project the Soviet Union’s achievements during the Cold War. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who lifted her travel ban in 1959, considered her "not only the best ballerina in the Soviet Union, but the best in the world."
As a member of the Bolshoi until 1990, her skill as a dancer changed the world of ballet, setting a higher standard for ballerinas both in terms of technical brilliance and dramatic presence. As a soloist, Plisetskaya created a number of leading roles, including Moiseyev’s Spartacus (1958), Grigorovich’s The Stone Flower (1959), Aurora in Grigorovich’s The Sleeping Beauty (1963), Alberto Alonso’s Carmen Suite (1967), written especially for her, and Bejart’s Isadora (1976). Also among her most acclaimed roles was Odette-Odile in Swan Lake (1947). A fellow dancer stated that her dramatic portrayal of Carmen, reportedly her favorite role, "helped confirm her as a legend, and the ballet soon took its place as a landmark in the Bolshoi repertoire." Her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, wrote the score to a number of her ballets.
Having become “an international superstar” and a continuous “box office hit throughout the world,” the Soviet Union treated her as a favored cultural emissary. Although she toured extensively during the same years that other dancers defected, including Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Plisetskaya always refused to defect. Beginning in 1994, she presided over the annual international ballet competitions, called Maya, and in 1996 she was named President of the Imperial Russian Ballet.
Plisetskaya's tour manager, Maxim Gershunoff, who also helped promote the Soviet/American Cultural Exchange Program, describes her as “not only a great artist, but also very realistic and earthy ... with a very open and honest outlook on life.”
During Plisetskaya's tours abroad she became friends with a number of other theater and music artists, including composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein, with whom she remained friends until his death. Pianist Arthur Rubenstein, also a friend, was able to converse with her in in Russian. She visited him after his concert performance in Russia.Novelist John Steinbeck, while at their home in Moscow, listened to her stories of the hardship of becoming a ballerina, and told her that the backstage side of ballet could make for a “most interesting novel.”
In 1962, the Bolshoi was invited to perform at the White House by president John F. Kennedy, and Plisetskaya recalled that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy greeted her by saying “You’re just like Anna Karenina.”
While in France in 1965, Plisetskaya was invited to the home of Russian artist Marc Chagall and his wife. Chagall had moved to France to study art in 1910. He asked her if she wouldn't mind creating some ballet poses to help him with his current project, a mural for the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which would show various images representing the arts. She danced and posed in various positions as he sketched, and her images were used on the mural, “at the top left corner, a colorful flock of ballerinas.”
Plisetskaya also made friends with a number of celebrities and notable politicians who greatly admired and followed her work. She met Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, then living in the U.S., after a performance of Anna Karenina Bergman told her that both their photographs, taken by noted photographer Richard Avedon, appeared on the same page in Vogue magazine. Bergman suggested she “flee Communism,” recalls Plisetskaya, telling her “I will help you.”
Actress Shirley MacLaine once held a party for her and the other members of the Bolshoi. She remembered seeing her perform in Argentina when Plisetskaya was sixty-five, and writes “how humiliating it was that Plisetskaya had to dance on a vaudeville stage in South America to make ends meet.” Dancer Daniel Nagrin notes that Plisetskaya was among those dancers who “went on to perform to the joy of audiences everywhere while simultaneously defying the myth of early retirement.”
MacLaine’s brother, actor Warren Beatty, also got to know Plisetskaya during that period, and is said to have been inspired by their friendship, which led him to write and produce his 1981 film Reds, about the Russian Revolution. He directed the film and costarred with Diane Keaton. He first met Plisetskaya at a reception in Beverly Hills, and, notes Beatty's biographer Peter Biskind, “he was smitten” by her “classic dancer’s” beauty.
Plisetskaya also became friends with film star Natalie Wood and her sister, actress Lana Wood. Wood, whose parents immigrated from Russia, greatly admired Plisetskaya, and once had an expensive custom wig made for her to use in the Spartacus ballet. They enjoyed socializing together on Wood’s yacht.
Friendship with Robert F. Kennedy
U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother to president John F. Kennedy, befriended Plisetskaya, with whom he coincidentally shared the same birth date. She was invited to gatherings with Kennedy and his family at their estate on Cape Cod in 1962. They later named their sailboat “Maya”, in her honor.
As the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended a few weeks earlier, at the end of October, 1962, U.S. and Soviet relations were at a low point. Diplomats of both countries considered her friendship with Kennedy to be a great benefit to warmer relations, after weeks of worrisome military confrontation. Years later, when they met in 1968, he was then campaigning for the presidency, and diplomats again suggested that their friendship would continue to help relations between the two countries. Plisetskaya summarizes Soviet thoughts on the matter:
Maya Plisetskaya should bring the candidate presents worthy of the great moment. Stun the future president with Russian generosity to continue and deepen contacts and friendship.
Of their friendship, Plisetskaya writes in her autobiography:
With me Robert Kennedy was romantic, elevated, noble, and completely pure. No seductions, no passes.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated just days before he was to see Plisetskaya again in New York. Gershunoff, Plisetskaya's manager at the time, recalls that on the day of the funeral, most of the theaters and concert halls in New York City went “dark,” closed in mourning and respect. The Bolshoi likewise planned to cancel their performance, but they decided instead to do a different ballet than planned, one dedicated to Kennedy. Gershunoff describes that evening:
The most appropriate way to open such an evening would be for the great Plisetskaya to perform The Dying Swan, which normally would close an evening’s program to thunderous applause with stamping feet, and clamors for an encore. . . . This assignment created an emotional burden for Maya. She really did not want to dance that work that night. . . I thought it was best for me to remain backstage in the wings. That turned out to be one of the most poignant moments I have ever experienced. Replacing the usual thunderous audience applause at the conclusion, there was complete silence betokening the feelings of a mourning nation in the packed, cavernous Metropolitan Opera House. Maya came off the stage in tears, looked at me, raised her beautiful arms and looked upward. Then disappeared into her dressing room
Plisetskaya died in Germany on 2 May 2015 from a heart attack, despite medical efforts to save her. She will be buried in Russia, General Director of the Bolshoi Theater Vladimir Urina said. She is survived by her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, and a brother, Azari Plisetsky, who was also a dancer. He is a choreographer in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he teaches at the Bejart Ballet Lausanne.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his deep and sincere condolences to the family, friends and all fans of the great Russian ballerina, and Russian
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that "a whole era of ballet was gone" with Plisetskaya.
Maya Plisetskaya, age 61, dances Dying Swan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Luz5g-doa34
Performing in Tokyo in the 1986 Maya Plisetskaya and Soviet Stars tour.
SWAN LAKE - Black Swan (Plisetskaya-Kovtun, 1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE8mkVxH7P4
Maya Plisetskaya (Odile) & Valery Kovtun (Siegfried) Music: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Choreography: Marius Petipa
Maya Plisetskaya in Don Quixote ca 1959
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmsokIChU-0
Легендарные выступления. Майя Плисецкая
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nehx3YOnx4M
Россия, 2010 Программа посвящена 85-летнему юбилею Майи Михайловны Плисецкой. Принимают участие Валерий Гергиев, Юрий Темирканов, Николай Цискаридзе, Ульяна Лопаткина, Николай Фадеечев, Борис Мессерер. Использованы архивные записи балетов с участием Майи Плисецкой разных лет: "Лебединое озеро", "Спящая красавица", "Легенда о любви", "Дон Кихот", "Ромео и Джульетта", "Спартак", "Дама с собачкой", "Гибель розы", "Анна Каренина", "Бахчисарайский фонтан", "Кармен-сюита", "Болеро", а также фрагменты автобиографической книги Плисецкой "Я, Майя Плисецкая..." и стихи Андрея Вознесенского и Беллы Ахмадулиной.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgJOnbHOi8U
Maya Plisetskaya - Bolero (choreography by Maurice Béjart)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsSALaDJuN4
Maurice Béjart's "Bolero" in the performance of a brilliant Jewish dancer Maya Plisetskaya