At a dress rehearsal on the stage of the Royal Opera House in the summer of 1954, a woman of sixty-nine in ordinary day clothes raised her arms and made them beat like wings. Watching her, dressed in a tutu and a feathered headdress, stood Margot Fonteyn, about to dance the Firebird for the first time. The older woman was Tamara Karsavina, and she was not demonstrating a role she had studied. She was returning a part she had created in Paris forty-four years earlier, at the world premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet. A photographer from the Keystone agency caught the moment, and the picture now sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance collection: the woman who invented the Firebird teaching the gesture to the ballerina who would define it for British audiences.
That single image explains why Karsavina belongs to London as much as to St Petersburg. She was the first great ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the company that swept across Western Europe from 1909 and rewrote the grammar of twentieth-century theatre. What sets her apart from her celebrated contemporaries is what she did next. Anna Pavlova toured herself to exhaustion across six continents; Vaslav Nijinsky’s career collapsed into illness. Karsavina married an Englishman, settled in London, and spent the rest of her life turning the Ballets Russes inheritance into something durable: a national academy, a body of teaching, and a direct line of coaching to the dancers who built British ballet.
Theatre Street and the Imperial school
She was born Tamara Platonovna Karsavina in St Petersburg in 1885, into a family already steeped in the art. Her father, Platon Karsavin, was a dancer and mime with the Imperial Ballet who later taught; her elder brother, Lev Karsavin, became a respected religious philosopher and medieval historian. Tamara entered the Imperial Theatre School, the academy on the St Petersburg street that would later give her memoir its English title, Theatre Street. There she trained under the exacting Italian master Enrico Cecchetti, among others, and graduated in 1902 into the Mariinsky company, where her repertoire came to include Giselle and the double role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake.
By the standards of the Imperial stage she was a lyrical rather than a bravura dancer, prized for line, musicality and dramatic intelligence rather than sheer pyrotechnics. Those were exactly the qualities a young choreographer named Michel Fokine was looking for as he set about dismantling the conventions of nineteenth-century ballet.
Diaghilev’s first ballerina
When Diaghilev brought Russian ballet to Paris in 1909, Karsavina was in the founding company, and she remained its leading ballerina until 1922. Paired for several seasons with Nijinsky, she created the central roles in the Fokine repertoire that made the Ballets Russes both notorious and endlessly imitated.
The list is remarkable. On 25 June 1910, at the Paris Opéra, she danced the title role in the premiere of The Firebird, Stravinsky’s first great score, choreographed by Fokine. The following year she created two more of the company’s defining parts: the Young Girl in Le Spectre de la Rose, first given at Monte Carlo on 19 April 1911 with Nijinsky as the spirit of the rose, and the Ballerina doll in Petrushka, unveiled at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 13 June 1911 with designs by Alexandre Benois. She was Columbine in Carnaval and took the title role in Fokine’s Thamar. These were not revivals she happened to lead. They were roles shaped on her own body, and that authorship is what would give her coaching its authority half a century later.
The turn to London
Karsavina’s move to England began as a matter of the heart rather than of strategy. In June 1918 she married Henry James Bruce, a British diplomat she had met in St Petersburg. As revolution and civil war closed in, the couple left Russia later that year, a difficult departure she recounted vividly in her memoir. She settled in London, in Hampstead, and might easily have become a genteel émigrée giving the occasional gala performance. Instead she made herself useful to a country that, in 1920, had almost no classical ballet of its own.
Britain then had no national company, no accepted training standard, and no institution to certify teachers. A dancer of Karsavina’s pedigree, arriving into that vacuum, was less a celebrity guest than a founding resource, and she was willing to be treated as one.
Founding a British institution
On 31 December 1920 a small group met in London to create the Association of Operatic Dancing of Great Britain, the body that would grow into the Royal Academy of Dance. The Danish-British ballerina Adeline Genée was its first president. Its founder members included Phyllis Bedells, Edouard Espinosa, Lucia Cormani and Tamara Karsavina, with Philip Richardson, editor of the Dancing Times, as the driving administrator. Karsavina served as the Academy’s vice-president and helped devise the graded syllabuses that gave British teachers a shared technical standard for the first time. The organisation was granted a royal charter in 1936 and became the Royal Academy of Dancing, known today as the Royal Academy of Dance, one of the largest dance-examination bodies in the world.
Her institution-building did not stop there. After Diaghilev died in 1929 and his company dissolved, a group of London balletomanes and artists formed the Camargo Society in 1930 to keep serious ballet alive in Britain through subscription performances, giving an early platform to the young figures, Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois among them, who would soon found the companies that became the Royal Ballet. Karsavina was among those who helped bring it into being, and in these same years she made her own final stage appearances with Marie Rambert’s dancers, reviving roles she had created, Le Spectre de la Rose among them, before turning to teaching and writing. Much of London’s cultural infrastructure for dance was laid down in this brief, decisive stretch of years, and she was present at almost every foundation stone.
Passing the Firebird to Fonteyn
The clearest proof of Karsavina as a living bridge came in 1954. That August, at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet danced Fokine’s Firebird for the first time, a quarter of a century after Diaghilev’s death and alongside Richard Buckle’s celebrated Diaghilev exhibition. The choreography was reconstructed by former Ballets Russes members, including the ballerina Lubov Tchernicheva, and the painter Natalia Goncharova supervised the recreation of her own designs. Fonteyn took the title role, and she was coached in it by the one person who had danced it first.
This was not a ceremonial cameo. Karsavina coached leading British dancers in the parts she had originated, passing on the intention beneath the steps: the way an arm should suggest a wing, the way a wrist should carry a phrase. She taught Frederick Ashton the mime sequences he wove into his production of La Fille mal gardée, worked with Rudolf Nureyev after his defection to the West, and contributed regularly to the Dancing Times through the 1950s and 1960s. A whole generation of the Royal Ballet learned its Fokine at one remove, from the woman Fokine had choreographed on.
The last word
Karsavina had already set down her own account of that vanished world. Theatre Street, her memoir, was published by Heinemann in 1930 with a foreword by the playwright J. M. Barrie, and it remains one of the finest first-hand records of Imperial and Ballets Russes ballet. She finished writing it in the summer of 1929, and in a later foreword she explained why she never returned to revise the pages about Diaghilev once she learned he had died: “I left him still alive as I had known him.”
She died on 26 May 1978 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, at ninety-three. Three years earlier her ninetieth birthday had been marked in London with toasts proposed by Frederick Ashton and Sir John Gielgud, a measure of how completely the Russian émigrée had become a figure of the British establishment. The arms that beat like wings on the Covent Garden stage in 1954 were still being taught long after she was gone. Every British dancer who has since raised them owes a debt, whether they know it or not, to the ballerina who chose to make her home in London and to give her Firebird away.
Image: Tamara Karsavina in the original 1910 production of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, with choreographer Michel Fokine. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
