She was within the final graduating class of Agrippina Vaganova — Vaganova, who codified the Russian coaching technique and gave her title to St. Petersburg’s well-known ballet academy. Earlier than that, Vaganova was a ballerina working underneath Marius Petipa himself, the generator of ballet’s treasured classics like “La Bayadère,” “The Sleeping Magnificence” and “Swan Lake.”
That makes Kolpakova, in ballet succession phrases, a direct descendant of Petipa.
EACH GENERATION, AND EACH COMPANY, wants to seek out its personal approach to dance Petipa. It was Mikhail Baryshnikov, himself a product of the Kirov, who invited Kolpakova to New York, in 1989. He was then Ballet Theater’s creative director, making an attempt to nurture a era of younger American dancers to switch the worldwide stars the corporate had relied on to spice up ticket gross sales. A type of younger dancers was Jaffe, to whom he confirmed a tape of Kolpakova within the Petipa ballet “Raymonda.”
Jaffe remembered Baryshnikov asking: “Do you want her? Do you need to work along with her? She was my mentor.”
Kolpakova accepted Baryshnikov’s invitation. “I’d at all times appreciated America,” she mentioned. She had been with the Kirov, in 1961, once they toured “for 3 months — on the prepare! — New York to L.A., stopping in all of the totally different cities. We tried to see the Balanchine firm, the Joffrey. …” She’d had life in Russia, she mentioned, however was “ to see how one other ballet firm lives.”
For years now she has labored and lived principally in New York along with her husband, Vladilen Semenov, her former accomplice on the Kirov.
I FIRST MET KOLPAKOVA in 1990 in St. Petersburg, Russia, when The New Yorker despatched me to jot down about how the dissolution of the Soviet Union was enjoying out in its most refined ballet firm, the Kirov. She was already splitting her time between New York and Russia, and was on one among her periodic journeys again. From my first day within the theater, I felt the reverence surrounding Irina Alexandrovna, as she was known as. (Russians use the primary title and patronymic to sign respect.)
