Alla Osipenko, prima ballerina who chafed at Soviet grip, dies at 92

Boston Globe

18-05-2025

She was tall and willowy and embodied a new and evocative quality in Russian ballet, which reflected ballet's evolution in the West - particularly under George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet.
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The Soviet ballet repertory had been dominated by interpretations of 19th-century ballets based on fairy tales, as well as newly choreographed story ballets that usually conveyed an implicit political message. She was 'the most sensuous of ballerinas,' dance and theater critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1970 in the New York Times.
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The French ballerina Violette Verdy, Ms. Osipenko's contemporary and later a leading dancer for Balanchine, said that Ms. Osipenko employed 'the classical technique in a completely personal way to create shapes and emotions that one didn't expect.'
In 1956, Ms. Osipenko became the first of the new Kirov luminaries to receive acclaim in Europe. Dancing in Paris as a guest with Moscow's Stanislavsky-Nemirovich Danchenko troupe, she won the city's Pavlova Prize, named for the internationally idolized ballerina Anna Pavlova who died in 1931.
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When the Kirov (now known, as before the Russian Revolution, as the Mariinsky Ballet) made its European debut in 1961 in Paris and London, she danced hallowed classical roles in 'Swan Lake' and 'La Bayadère' as well as Yuri Grigorovich's 'The Stone Flower,' which she had premiered in Leningrad in 1957.
Then, at the height of her career, obstacles emerged. 'Your tongue is your enemy,' she recounted being told by elders when she was young. At the Kirov, her sometimes intemperate remarks and defiance of Soviet norms left her at odds with the Kremlin and its representatives in Leningrad.
She turned down an invitation to join the Communist Party and rankled at being lectured on morality by party representatives after an affair in Paris with the French dancer Attilio Labis while she was married to a Kirov dancer, Anatoly Nisnevich. She was not allowed to accompany the Kirov when it made its US debut in September 1961 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
For most of the next decade, Ms. Osipenko battled the Kirov and the Soviet political establishment to keep the status she had achieved. Visiting Leningrad in 1967, Barnes wrote in the magazine 'Dance and Dancers' that Ms. Osipenko was 'probably the grandest of the Kirov ballerinas,' but noted 'she does not now enjoy great opportunities to show her qualities.'
She was largely blackballed from the Kirov's top international tours but - as a replacement for another ballerina who was sidelined by Soviet authorities for an affair with an Australian - she returned triumphantly to London for a long season with the Kirov in the summer of 1970. The following year, Ms. Osipenko resigned from the Kirov.
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Ms. Osipenko danced for years with the small, experimental companies led by Leonid Jacobson and Boris Eifman - and was allowed an aesthetic range that was much less inhibited than the world of classical ballet. In Eifman's 'Two Voices' in 1978, she and Markovsky danced to the rock music of Pink Floyd.
Culture writer Gennady Smakov, in his 1984 book 'The Great Russian Dancers,' wrote that 'the more abstract the choreography, the more the various facets of her personality broke through it.'
Neither Jacobson's nor Eifman's troupes, however, were permitted to stage foreign tours. Her final appearance on the ballet stage was in Eifman's 'Requiem' in 1981 in the Soviet Union.
In 1995, she came to the United States to teach and coach with the Hartford Ballet and its school in Connecticut for five years. She also began acting in avant-garde Russian films, most notably in Alexander Sokurov's 2002 'Russian Ark,' an evocation of the past and present of St. Petersburg's Hermitage palace and museum, in which she played an eccentric gadfly haunting the Rembrandt gallery.
In 2007, she joined the coaching staff of St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Theatre - an association that continued for the rest of her life.
Alla Yevgenyevna Osipenko was born in Leningrad on June 16, 1932. Her mother, the daughter of a family that was prominent before the Russian Revolution toppled czarist rule in 1917, worked as a typist. Her father was a police detective, who in 1937 was arrested for a drunken rant against the Soviet state and was sentenced to five years in prison.
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In June 1941, soon after Ms. Osipenko was accepted into the state ballet academy in Leningrad, Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union. Ms. Osipenko was evacuated to Perm, on the Russian steppes, with the Kirov and the Rossi Street ballet school.
Her collaboration with contemporary choreographers began while she was still a student. After she returned to Leningrad in 1944, famed Russian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani choreographed a piece for her and two other dancers from the school. Jacobson created a duet, 'Meditation,' in which she danced the female lead.
After joining the Kirov's corps de ballet, Ms. Osipenko was the Lilac Fairy in 'The Sleeping Beauty' in March 1952, choreographed by Kirov director Konstantin Sergeyev.
One evening after a dress rehearsal, she slipped on the icy sidewalk as she got off a bus, tearing the membrane connecting the tibia and fibula bones in her right leg. She was told by doctors that she would never dance again, but was able to resume her career months later.
In April 1957, Ms. Osipenko created a sensation in Grigorovich's three-act ballet 'The Stone Flower' when she wore a figure-revealing unitard rather than a tutu or skirt - something not seen on the Soviet ballet stage since the early days of the Stalinist regime. To Soviet ballet audiences, the future had arrived.
Four years later, on the closing night of the Kirov's Paris debut, Ms. Osipenko danced 'Swan Lake' with young Nureyev. The next day at Le Bourget airport, Nureyev defected as the Kirov prepared to fly to London.
Nureyev was subsequently convicted in absentia for treason in 1962. Ms. Osipenko testified in his defense, arguing that he had no premeditated plan to defect. She claimed that he was terrified by the KGB's insistence that he cut short the Kirov tour and return home, where he feared his career would now be finished. Ms. Osipenko's support of Nureyev further eroded her standing with the Soviet political establishment.
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Ms. Osipenko was married four times: to art student Georgi Paysist, then to Nisnevich, film star Gennady Voropayev and Kirov dancer John Markovsky. All four marriages ended in divorce; the love of her life, she said, was film director Vladimir Naumov.
She leaves a grandson and great-granddaughter. Her son, Ivan Voropayev, died in 1997.
Ms. Osipenko often flashed a dry and whimsical wit. During a recreational therapy session in Hartford, in which she and others tossed a rubber ball back and forth, the physical therapist exclaimed: 'How beautiful your movements are! How graceful you are!'
'It's practically my profession,' Ms. Osipenko replied.