Tamara Karsavina
...”. Tamara followed in his footsteps of her famous father, Platon Karsavin, who was a well-known dancer of the Maryinsky stage. Tamara was highly educated and was taught to play music and speak French at an early age. She was not the only member of her family with a fine education, her mother, who was educated in the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens in St.Petersburg, was the niece of A.S. Khomyakov, a famous Russian thinker, philosopher and the founder of the Slavophile trend in Russian thought. After graduating from the Imperial Ballet School in 1902, Tamara moved on to perform as Giselle and Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” at the Maryinsky Theater. By 1909 she had joined the Diaghilev’s “Les Ballets Russes” in Paris. Being also the prima-ballerina of the Maryinsky Theatre, Karsavina danced leading and central roles in many productions such as Le Corsair, Nutcracker, La Bayadere, Ciselle, Paquita, Sleeping Beauty, Raymonda, Don Quixote, La Fille Mal Gardee, Cleopatre, to name a few. She continued with the company until 1929 and the leading exponent of Mikhail Fokine’s “Dance Theories”. Dancing with Vaslav Nijinsky until 1913, she created most of the leading roles in Michel Fokine's neo-Romantic repertoire, including Les Sylphides, Carnaval, Le Spectre de la rose, and The Firebird. She decided to come out of her semiretirement in the early 1930’s to revive some of her more famouse roles for the Ballet Rambert and to also create some new ones for Fredrick Ashton. She s...