Anna Pavlova

Anna Pavlova danced The Dying Swan perhaps four thousand times and took ballet to places that had never seen it. She was the daughter of a laundress in St Petersburg, was accepted at the Imperial school at ten after being turned away at eight, and had the wrong body for the style of the day - thin ankles, high arches, not the strong compact build then wanted - so she strengthened her shoes with leather and wood, which is one of the origins of the modern pointe shoe. Fokine made The Dying Swan for her in 1905, two minutes to Saint-Saens, and she performed it for the rest of her life. She danced briefly with the Ballets Russes in 1909 and left, disliking the ensemble emphasis and Stravinsky's music; instead she formed her own company and toured almost continuously for twenty years, covering hundreds of thousands of miles - India, Japan, China, Australia, Egypt, South America, small American towns with no theatre. Enormous numbers of people saw ballet for the first time because she arrived, and a generation of dancers in several countries took it up because of her. She kept swans at her house in London. She caught pneumonia at The Hague in 1931 and refused an operation that would have ended her dancing; she died at forty-nine, and the company played her scheduled performance with a spotlight on an empty stage. A dessert of meringue and cream is named after her in Australia and New Zealand, and the two countries still argue about which invented it. She had a company of her own for over twenty years and paid for it herself. Her ashes are at Golders Green.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history