The Bolshoi Theater pays tribute to one of Russia’s greatest ballet dancers, Galina Ulanova, on what would have been her 100th birthday Saturday.
Dancers from the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi will perform in a gala ballet for the woman whom composer Sergei Prokofiev called the “genius of Russian ballet.”
Making her debut on stage at the Mariinsky in 1928, Ulanova went on to be the prima ballerina at the Bolshoi for 16 years.
Ulanova was recognized all over the world after tours to Britain and the United States in the 1950s.
“I cannot even begin to talk about Ulanova’s dancing, it is so marvelous. I am left speechless. It is magic,” ballerina Margot Fonteyn once said of Ulanova.
She danced until she turned 50 and then became a teacher at the Bolshoi.
Ulanova died in 1998, and there are monuments to her in her hometown of St. Petersburg and in Stockholm, as well as an apartment museum in the Stalin skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya in Moscow.
“The Mona Lisa of Ballet” gala is on Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. Bolshoi Theater, 1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad. Metro Teatralnaya. 250-7317.
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