Alighting from the Air: Tamara Karsavina, Dancer and Writer

Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978) was known as a renowned ballerina, writer, and intellectual. Drawing from Karsavina's many published and unpublished writings, Alighting from the Air demonstrates how her experiences and training contributed to the development of her aesthetic credo. She became a celebrated principal dancer at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, assumed a leading role in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and was noted for embodying Michel Fokine's choreographic innovations. In 1930, she published her popular memoir, Theatre Street, describing her rise through the ranks of the Imperial Russian ballet and escape with her British husband and son from revolutionary Russia to England. Her substantial record of publication includes articles devoted to aspects of classical ballet technique, and decades of essays, published mostly in Dancing Times. These wide-ranging articles document not only her performance experience with the Ballets Russes and in her own tours but ballet pedagogy and history more generally. Her work also analyzes ballet choreographies and reflects on classical ballets and steps or expressive elements that she feared were lost in contemporary productions. Alighting from the Air weaves together the narrative of Karsavina's life with analyses of her writings to foreground her development as an intellectual and an artist aware of, and sensitive to, the classical and modern arts movements of her time.