Agrippina Vaganova

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Agrippina Yakovlevna Vaganova (Russian: Агриппина Яковлевна Ваганова) (July 6, 1879 - November 5, 1951) was an outstanding Russian ballet teacher who developed the Vaganova method - the technique which derived from the teaching methods of the old Imperial Ballet School (today the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet) under the Maître de Ballet Marius Petipa throughout the mid to late 19th century, though mostly throughout the 1880s and 1890s. It was Vaganova who perfected and cultivated this form of teaching the art of classical ballet into a syllabus of the utmost wisdom. Her Fundamentals of the Classical Dance (1934) remains a standard textbook for the instructio of ballet technique.

Vaganova's whole life was connected with the Imperial Ballet (later the Kirov Ballet) of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. She was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School in 1888, the great institution of classical dance founded by Anna of Russia and funded by the Tsars. She graduated from the Classe de Perfection of the former Prima Ballerina Eugeniia Sokolova (she was also trained by Ekaterina Vazem, Enrico Cecchetti, Christian Johansson, and Pavel Gerdt). Ballet did not come easily to Vaganova in her first years as a student, but slowly, through the efforts of her own will power, she was able to join the illustrious Imperial Ballet upon her graduation. Although she did not attain the rank of Prima until one year before her retirement, she nevertheless became known among the St. Petersburg balletomanes as the queen of variations for her unlimited virtuosity and level of technique. Interestingly, the old Maestro Petipa cared very little for Vaganova as a dancer - any mention of her performances in his diaries are usually followed by such comments as "awful" or "dreadful".

In 1917 she retired from the stage and started teaching at the khortekhnikum, as the Imperial Ballet School was by then known. Though she did have a respectable career as a dancer, it would be through her mastery of teaching classical dance that would forever give her a one of the most respected places in the history of ballet. Her own early struggle with deciphering ballet technique had taught her much, and the students she would train would go on to become legends of the dance. After the Revolution of 1917 the future of ballet in Russia looked grim, but Vaganova "fought tooth and nail" (as she put it) for the survival of the art form she so loved and the preservation of the legacy of Marius Petipa. In 1934 she was appointed director of the khortekhnikum, the school which now bears her name - The Vaganova Ballet Academy.

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Among Vaganova's pupils were the distinguished Soviet ballerinas Natalia Dudinskaya, Marina Semenova, Galina Ulanova, Olga Lepeshinskaya, and Maya Plisetskaya. Her teaching sought to combine the elegant, refined style of the Imperial Ballet which Vaganova had been taught by the likes of Enrico Cecchetti with more vigorous dancing developed in the Soviet Union. In 1933, she staged and choreographed the celebrated version of Swan Lake with Ulanova as Odette-Odile.

Famous graduates of the Vaganova Ballet Academy reads like a "who's who" of ballet: Rudolf Nureyev, Irina Kolpakova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Yuri Soloviev, Altynai Asylmuratova, Diana Vishneva, and Svetlana Zakharova, among many others.