11 replies to this topic

[rg]

scan of photo with unidentified dancers.
i've got feelers out to some colleagues, if any comes up with confident identifications of the dancers performing Odile and Siefried, in what i'm assuming is Messerer's Bolshoi Theater production of 1937, i'll post them here, unless that is someone here posts them first.
f.y.i.

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[cubanmiamiboy]

Blonde Odile or a wig...?

[rg]

i can't say.
i don't think Bolshoi women of this era wore wigs.
but i have no educated guess as to this dancer's identity, yet....
as i recall Sofia Golovkina was blonde and thus would have danced Odile as a blonde.

[rg]

a most reliable source, Moscow-trained, has suggested, humbly as only a guess, that the dancers in the photo above may be Irina Tikhomirova, wife at the time? of Messerer, and Aleksandr Rudenko, who was described in the information sent along to me, as having, according to a prominent Moscow teacher, the "best carbrioles in arabesque" he'd seen in his life.
(Tikhomirova was described in this information as a "blonde beauty.")

[sandik]

Cannot help with the id, but so grateful to see this -- what a beautiful image.

[cubanmiamiboy]

Tikhomirova and Nezhdanov, 1958.

[rg]

thanks for the follow-up photo.
hard to say with Odile's headdress mostly hiding the ballerina's natural hair and given the intervening 16 years if the '42 dancer is the same as that in '58.

[aurora]

rg, on 13 February 2013 - 07:12 AM, said:

thanks for the follow-up photo.
hard to say with Odile's headdress mostly hiding the ballerina's natural hair and given the intervening 16 years if the '42 dancer is the same as that in '58.

I found a photo of her from '50 (supposedly, this is the internet after all) where her hair is clearly dark.

[rg]

thanks.
a photo of Tikhomirova dated '50 in Zarubin's BOLSHOI THEATER shows her a Cinderella with light hair.
i suppose if my correspondent described her as a somewhat well known 'blonde beauty' in her day, she must have had light hair to start with.

[Mashinka]

Both the features and the physique put me in mind of Golovkina,  I'm sure I have a book relating to dancers of that era, I'll dig it out and see if I can find some more clues.

[atm711]

from the book I have been looking at (Soviet Ballet, Iris Morley,1945) from the descriptions it seems to be Golovkina  "small with a demure Victorian face and rounded limbs.......the audience adore to see her perform 32 fouettes on a postage stamp".  The only photo of Tikhomirnova shows her with decidedly dark hair and there is no mention of having danced Swan Lake (as of 1945)

[rg]

continued thanks, all around, for taking time w/ this.
one correspondent suggested that given the evacuations of the company during this wartime, these might be Bolshoi Th. dancers after all.
i am waiting word, especially, from a very scrupulous dance historian in Moscow. if i get anything(s) from that quarter, i'll post the data.