Uploaded February 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
This clip shows two Bolshoi dancers from the first in the first half of the C20 in a pas de deux and a ballerina solo from 'Don Quixote'.
They are the brother and sister Sulamith and Asaf Messerer, the first Soviet dancers to tour Western Europe.
Asaf trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School under Mikhail Mordkin. And Sulamith trained under Vasily Tikhomirov and Elisabeth Gerdt.
After Sulamith's sister Rachel Messerer-Plisetskaya was arrested in the Great Purge, Sulamith legally adopted Rachel's daughter Maya Plisetskaya, and coached her into the prominence she achieved.
I've reposted this footage because I now have a clearer version and with a piano accompaniment - obviously added later to the original silent film.
This clip shows two Bolshoi dancers from the first in the first half of the C20 in a pas de deux and a ballerina solo from 'Don Quixote'.
They are the brother and sister Sulamith and Asaf Messerer, the first Soviet dancers to tour Western Europe.
Asaf trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School under Mikhail Mordkin. And Sulamith trained under Vasily Tikhomirov and Elisabeth Gerdt.
After Sulamith's sister Rachel Messerer-Plisetskaya was arrested in the Great Purge, Sulamith legally adopted Rachel's daughter Maya Plisetskaya, and coached her into the prominence she achieved.
I've reposted this footage because I now have a clearer version and with a piano accompaniment - obviously added later to the original silent film.
![Lydia Ivanova - Balanchine’s Muse [Fragments of Film Footage from ‘Dvorets i krepost’ (1923)]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tOL75ljF0hg/mqdefault.jpg "Lydia Ivanova - Balanchine’s Muse [Fragments of Film Footage from ‘Dvorets i krepost’ (1923)]
I often wonder what kind of career and what influences Lydia Ivanova would have had on ballet outside Russia, had she not died so prematurely.
Ivanova was a friend of George Balanchine at the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg, and performed with the choreographer in some of his early works.
She was due to leave on a 1924 tour of Germany with the Soviet State Dancers - which included Balanchine, his wife Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova and Nicholas Efimov - when she died in a boating accident. The boat in which she was a passenger was struck by another boat. The four other passengers in the boat survived - Ivanova’s body was never recovered. The ballerina was dating a communist officer at the time and there is some doubt about whether her death was accidental or something else.
It has been suggested that the memory of Ivanova was an inspiration for some of Balanchines later work, including the classic ‘Serenade’.
As far as I am aware, these are the only fragments of footage of the ballerina that exist. They are from the 1923 movie ‘Dvorets i krepost’ (‘Palace and Fortress’). At one point in the film, Tsar Alexander III attends a ballet performance at the Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace in which Lydia Ivanova appears with a corps de ballet in a ‘Chopiniana’ styled ballet.
A rehearsal photograph of the ballet in the spring of 1923 shows Moscow ballerina Ksenia Makletsova and Ivanova at the end of a line of dancers, standing next to Alexandra Danilova. This perhaps suggests Makletsova and Danilova might appear unidentified in the film fragments.
So I suspect great potential not realized, particularly, as Balanchine’s muse, ballets created for and so revealing her particular gifts.
See: Elizabeth Kendall ‘Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer’ (2013)
So I suspect great potential not realised, particularly, as Balanchine’s muse, ballets created for and so revealing her particular gifts.
See: Elizabeth Kendall ‘Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer’ (2013)
Enjoy!")
