On 12 October the ballet La Bayadère will be performed in honour of Zhanna Ayupova, People’s Artist of Russia.
Zhanna Ayupova holds the title as the most romantic ballerina on the pedestal of Mariinsky Ballet stars at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It seemed that her delicate, light and elegantly attractive dance was unaffected by the vanities of an era of change. Ayupova's heroines almost literally flew out of old engravings, filling the stage with harmony. The weightlessly ethereal and feminine Sylph, the fragile and vulnerable Giselle, the glowingly youthful Aurora and the refined Terpsichore - in her performances Zhanna Ayupova enchanted audiences not with her energetic virtuoso skill, but rather captivated with the inner light of the characters she created. A graduate of the Leningrad School of Dance (class of Ninel Kurgapkina), Ayupova, who joined the Kirov Theatre in 1984, continued to work with her teacher from school and emerged as one of the leaders of her generation to define the "face" of the ballet company in the 1990s. Stylistic precision invariably added to her Vaganova training and the purity of performance of the choreographic text in her dance; her arabesques and leaps never betrayed the plastique cantilena of Romantic ballets with their sport-like height or vivacity. Everything in her dance was measured. And she danced ballets requiring different styles. Ayupova's repertoire included lead roles in all ballets in the classical repertoire; she developed the romantic image of the Sylph under the guidance of Rudolf Nureyev, who chose the dancer as his partner for his final performance in Leningrad; she danced ballets by Fokine, choreo-dramas, productions by Vinogradov, Neumeier and Ratmansky, while she imbued Balanchine's plot-less choreography with an elegant timidity. Now, having concluded her stage career, Zhanna Ayupova is passing on her feeling for dance which made her sparkle on the stage to the next generation of ballet dancers, continuing the traditions of the St Petersburg school of classical dance in her capacity as Artistic Director of the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.
Olga Makarova
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