Tamara Karsavina

Tamara Karsavina created the leading roles in Firebird, Petrushka and Le Spectre de la rose, and then spent her long retirement in England teaching the tradition to people who had never seen it. She was the daughter of a Mariinsky dancer, trained at the Imperial school, and joined the Ballets Russes at its founding in 1909, becoming the ballerina of the enterprise almost immediately and Nijinsky's regular partner. She was unusual among Russian dancers of the period in being willing to do what Fokine asked - dramatic, unpretty, sometimes ugly movement - and Firebird in 1910 and Petrushka in 1911 were made on her. She kept her position at the Mariinsky simultaneously and travelled between the two for years. In 1918 she left revolutionary Russia with her second husband, a British diplomat, in an escape across the Finnish border with a small child. She settled in London, danced into the 1930s, and then became the institution: vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dance, teacher, author of Theatre Street, and the person Ashton and de Valois went to when they needed a role remembered. She reconstructed Le Spectre de la rose for the Royal Ballet in her seventies and coached Fonteyn in Firebird. She died at ninety-three in Beaconsfield. Her husband Henry Bruce was at the British embassy in Petrograd during the revolution. Theatre Street, published in 1930, is among the best-written dancer s memoirs. She helped found the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus and examined for it into old age.

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