Happy birthday (100 years), Mrs. Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya as Odile in the ballet Swan Lake , Boris Shaikin National Opera and Ballet Theatre

An absolute figure of the Bolshoi and a legend of 20th-century dance, Maya Plisetskaya remains the embodiment of grace forged in adversity. Torn from her parents during the Stalinist purges, she became a rebellious star and then prima ballerina assoluta , enduring regimes, prohibitions, and humiliations without ever giving up dancing. She would have turned 100 on November 20, 2025.

DANCE MEMOIRS Must we live with blinders on, allowing ourselves to be confined to one particular school of thought or another? My "family" was (and still is, to some extent) that of so-called "contemporary" dance. I can still picture the slightly mocking condescension of certain members of this "family" when I confessed, as if it were a shameful secret, my passion for Japanese Butoh, and even more so for flamenco: I wasn't "excommunicated" for it, it was merely considered a rather curious whim. How could one love both Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Kazuo Ohno, Trisha Brown and Israel Galvan? "Choose your side, comrade!" The problem is, precisely, that I don't have a side. In any case, I don't cling to positions, even if, like everyone else, I do have positions. Or, if I have a side, let's say it's the side of idiocy. On the subject of idiocy, one of my mentors, Julio Cortázar, wasn't very clear. He wrote: "Dictatorships foment oppression, servility, and cruelty; but the most abominable thing is that they foment idiocy." But he also insisted that a child's drawing on a wall "not be scorned in the name of Giotto's frescoes. Idiocy must be a kind of constant presence and renewal."

It was in the name of this very idiocy that, in my early years in Paris, having begun to write about contemporary dance, I would occasionally visit Gilberte Cournand and her impeccably styled chignon at her "Librairie la Danse" bookstore on rue de Beaune in the 7th arrondissement. She would speak to me with particular fervor about Serge Lifar; to me, it was all a bit of gibberish, but I was curious. One day, she opened a book of photographs, published in some exotic country (the United States of America, I believe), stopped in front of a black and white photograph, and began to improvise a veritable love poem.

In the photo, that was Maya Plisetskaya (in Swan Lake , if I remember correctly). I never saw Maya Plisetskaya dance live. Fool that I am, I missed the performance at the Espace Cardin in Paris in February 2006 for her 80th birthday. Fortunately, photos and films remain, including the one below ( The Dying Swan , 1905, choreography by Michel Fokine, danced by Maya Plisetskaya in 1975).

Born on November 20, 1925, in Moscow, into a family of the Jewish intelligentsia, the " Diva of Dance" grew up in Barentsburg, Spitsbergen (the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, in the Barents Sea, north of Norway and east of Greenland), where her father, Mikhail Plisetsky, worked as an engineer in the mines of a Russian concession. In 1937, he was imprisoned, accused of being an "enemy of the people," during Stalin's Great Purges, and executed the following year. Her mother, born Rachel Messerer, of Lithuanian origin and also Jewish, a silent film actress, was imprisoned on the grounds that she was the wife of an "enemy of the people." She was deported to Kazakhstan to a Gulag labor camp from 1938 to 1941. Maya Plisetskaya, orphaned at the age of 13, was placed in the care of her maternal aunt, the ballerina Sulamith Messerer, after the latter fought to prevent her niece from being placed in an orphanage…

In 1934, young Maya was admitted to the Bolshoi Theatre's ballet school. In 1936, at the age of ten, she made her first appearance on the Bolshoi stage in The Sleeping Beauty. She would later write in her memoirs: "Art saved me. I focused on dance and wanted my parents to be proud of me." Becoming prima ballerina assoluta of the Bolshoi in 1962 at the age of 37, Maya Plisetskaya subsequently championed, against all odds, certain modern choreographers, whose new ballets she herself danced. It was thanks to her that Russia was able to discover the art of Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart, who called her "the last living legend of dance."

Displayed as a "medal" of the Stalinist regime, she was nevertheless forbidden from leaving the Soviet Union until 1959, by "exception" from Nikita Khrushchev. One day, she danced before Stalin. "I was terrified. I was paralyzed with stage fright, and the floor was a veritable ice rink. I constantly scanned the audience, searching for who was responsible for my family's misfortune," she wrote in her memoirs ( I, Maya Plisetskaya , Gallimard, 1995). Labeled a "rebel," she nevertheless managed to stand up to the numerous affronts (KGB surveillance, vetoes on her artistic projects, intrusions into her private life, monitoring of her relationships abroad, multiple humiliations, etc.) from the ruling political class of the time:

“I was born in Moscow. In Stalin’s kingdom. Then I lived under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov,”

Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin... And no matter what I do, I will never be reborn a second time.

Let's live our lives... And I have lived mine. I don't forget those who have been good to me.

Nor those who died, crushed by the absurd. I lived for dance.

I never knew how to do anything else. Thanks to nature, I persevered.

I didn't let myself be broken, I didn't give up.

In 1990, at the age of 65, she resigned from the Bolshoi. Five years later, Maurice Béjart created the ballet Ave Maia for her, which she danced for her 70th birthday. In Madrid, she took over the direction of the national ballet and acquired Spanish citizenship. On May 2, 2015, in Munich, while her 90th birthday celebrations were already underway at the Bolshoi, a myocardial infarction ended her life. She will therefore not be there to celebrate her 100th birthday on November 20, 2025.

What do we remember about her? The unparalleled fluidity with which she combined the rigor of classical dance. A breath of movement. The expression "port de bras," familiar in classical dance, "framed" by several standard positions, doesn't really apply to Maya Plisetskaya. Her arms didn't hold "positions," they traveled through the air.

Jean-Marc Adolphe

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