Tamara Karsavina — dancer with roots in the Russian Empire
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina was born in Saint Petersburg in March 1885 into a family at the centre of Russian dance and Russian thought. Her father, Platon Karsavin, was a principal dancer and mime of the Imperial Ballet, a pupil of Marius Petipa and later the teacher of Michel Fokine. Her brother was the religious philosopher Lev Karsavin, who would end up in newly independent Lithuania.
She trained at the Imperial Ballet School under Pavel Gerdt, Christian Johansson and Enrico Cecchetti, went to Italy to work with Caterina Beretta on her technique, and graduated in 1902. She rose from the corps to soloist quickly and was made ballerina in 1909, dancing Giselle and Swan Lake at the Mariinsky.
In the same year Diaghilev took her to Paris for the first Ballets Russes season, and for the next decade she created more of the company's defining roles than anyone else. Fokine built Les Sylphides, Le Carnaval, Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka, Thamar and Daphnis and Chloe around her, and in 1910 she created the title role in The Firebird - a part first offered to Anna Pavlova, who could not make terms with Stravinsky's score. She was paired with Nijinsky until 1913, and later created leading roles for Leonide Massine in The Three-Cornered Hat and Pulcinella.
Unusually, she kept both careers running at once, returning to dance at the Mariinsky until 1918 between Ballets Russes seasons. That year she married the British diplomat Henry James Bruce and left Russia as the civil war deepened. She was among the last of the imperial company to get out.
She settled in Hampstead and spent sixty years turning herself from a Russian ballerina into a founder of British ballet. She danced with the Ballets Russes until 1922, toured recitals through the 1920s, came out of semi-retirement in the 1930s for Ballet Rambert and for Frederick Ashton, helped establish what became the Royal Ballet, and was a founder member and then vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dancing from 1920 to 1955 - now the largest dance teaching body in the world. Her memoir Theatre Street, published in 1930 and named for the street where the Imperial Ballet School stood, remains a principal source for how that school worked.
Her most consequential act may have been an act of transmission. In 1959 she advised Ashton on his revival of La Fille Mal Gardee for the Royal Ballet, teaching him Petipa's original mimed dialogue for the scene known as When I'm Married, and his choreography for the Pas de Ruban. Both are still danced in that production. Petipa's actual staging reached the modern Royal Ballet through her memory.
She also coached Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in Le Spectre de la rose, the role she had created half a century earlier. She died in England in May 1978, aged ninety-three.
"Left Russia in 1918; settled in London for the rest of her life"
Migration storyTracing the roots — St. Petersburg
She left Russia in 1918 after marrying the British diplomat Henry James Bruce, and spent sixty years in London as a founder of British ballet. In 1959 she taught Frederick Ashton Petipa's original mime and choreography for La Fille Mal Gardee, which the Royal Ballet still performs.
Born in Saint Petersburg to Platon Karsavin, principal dancer and mime of the Imperial Ballet, a pupil of Marius Petipa and the teacher of Michel Fokine. Her brother was the religious philosopher Lev Karsavin. Trained at the Imperial Ballet School under Gerdt, Johansson and Cecchetti, graduating in 1902.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.