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Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978) was a famous Russian ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was most noted as a Principal Artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. After settling in Hampstead, England, she began teaching ballet professionally and would become recognized as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance teaching organization.
Her most famous roles were Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, Medora in
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (10 March 1885 – 26 May 1978) was a famous Russian ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was most noted as a Principal Artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev. After settling in Hampstead, England, she began teaching ballet professionally and would become recognized as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance teaching organization.
Her most famous roles were Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, Medora in Le Corsaire, and the Tsar Maiden in The Little Humpbacked Horse. She was the first ballerina to dance in the so-called Le Corsaire Pas de Deux in 1915.
The choreographer George Balanchine said he had fond memories of watching her when he was a student at the Imperial Ballet School. It was during the late 1910s that she began traveling regularly to Paris to dance with the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. It was during her years with the company that she created many of her most famous roles in the ballets of Mikhail Fokine, including Petrushka, and Le Spectre de la Rose. She was perhaps most famous for creating the title role in Fokine's The Firebird (a role originally offered to Anna Pavlova, who could not come to terms with Stravinsky's score) with Vaslav Nijinsky, her occasional partner.
She left Russia in 1919 after the revolution, and subsequently continued her association with the Ballet Russe as a leading Ballerina. (Her brother Lev Platonovich Karsavin moved to newly independent Lithuania, where he was awarded a university chair in cultural history; when the Soviets occupied Lithuania in 1940, he was arrested and died in a gulag.)
Her memoirs, Theatre Street, discusses her training at the Imperial Ballet School, and her career at the Mariinsky Theatre and the Ballet Russe. In the ultra-competitive world of ballet, she was almost universally beloved. However Karsavina did have a rivalry with Anna Pavlova. In the film A Portrait of Giselle Karsavina recalls a "wardrobe malfunction": during one performance her shoulder straps fell and she accidentally exposed herself, and Pavlova reduced an embarrassed Karsavina to tears.
In 1904, guided by her mother, Anna Iosifovna, Karsavina rejected a marriage proposal from Mikhail Fokine, which led to a simmering unease between the two and which coloured their future relationship. She later stated that Fokine rarely spoke to her outside the ballet studio.
In 1907, once again guided by her mother, she married the civil servant Vasili Vasilievich Mukhin (1880 - post 1941), in the chapel of the Ballet School. Mukhin occasionally travelled with her on Diaghilev tours.
In June 1918, a year after her divorce from Vasili Mukhin, Karsavina married the British diplomat Henry James Bruce (1880 - 1951), the father of her son Nikita (1916 - 2002).
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