On 19 April the ballet Spartacus with choreography by Leonid Yakobson will be dedicated to the memory of the famed ballerina Inna Zubkovskaya.
There were legends about Inna Borisovna Zubvovskaya’s beauty. Nature was generous with her gifts – a beautiful face with huge and expressive eyes, beautiful and feminine lines of the body, dutiful “ballet” legs and enviable dance skills. Zubkovskaya did not rely on her beauty on the stage, instead working on her roles so that her own physical harmony formed part of the beauty of the dance. And when at the very outset of her artistic career the management of the theatre, placing great hopes on the young dancer’s stunning looks, suggested she immediately begin to rehearse the role of Zarema in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai she turned it down, uncertain of her acting skills. Inna Zubkovskaya came to this role later when her skill allowed her to appear alongside other brilliantly-talented Kirov Theatre performers.
Zubkovskaya joined the Leningrad company in 1941 after graduating from the Moscow School of Dance – evacuated together with the Kirov Theatre to Perm, she came to class to keep in professional shape and remained with the Leningrad company for many years to come. At the Kirov Theatre she danced numerous roles – the lyrical Odette and the magnetically alluring Odile, the temperamental Kitri, the tragic Nikia and one of the comical Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. Her talent was most fully revealed in roles where the character was created by purely dance means, where the dramatic tension was not focussed in just the pantomimic scenes but was danced and conveyed through the expressiveness of her lines, movements and poses. That was why Zubkovskaya became the darling of audiences at ballets by Leonid Yakobson and Yuri Grigorovich. Torn apart by gloomy thoughts as the loving and suffering Mekhmeneh Bahnu in Grigorovich’s The Legend of Love, the poetic bird-maiden Syuimbike who danced with a sense of flight in Yakobson’s Shurale and Phrygia in his Spartacus, with her emotionally sculptural poses relating the tragedy of love... As Phrygia Inna Zubkovskaya was a symbol of this acclaimed production.
Always famed for the beauty of her dance, Inna Borisovna Zubvovskaya taught at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. She inspired her students’ love of dance and trained them to perfection. The names of Zubkovskaya’s students say a great deal – Altynai Asylmuratova, Larisa Lezhnina, Elvira Tarasova, Veronika Part and Yekaterina Osmolkina all graduated from her class. Zubkovskaya passed on her example of impeccable elegance and taste to subsequent dancers, and in these dancers’ and audience’s memories she remains forever the embodiment of a beauty without which the art of ballet is unimaginable.
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