Alla Sizova has died

We are deeply saddened to relate that Alla Ivanovna Sizova, a brilliant Kirov Theatre ballerina and People’s Artist of the USSR, has died at the age of seventy-five.

Alla Ivanovna Sizova joined the Kirov Ballet in 1958, though she made her debut on the fabled stage somewhat earlier. While still a student at Leningrad’s Vaganova School of Dance she had enchanted audiences with the fantastic flight of her dance when she appeared as the Queen of the Dryads in Don Quixote. Following Sizova’s graduation performance, Leningrad critics – the n spoiled for choice with the performances of an entire galaxy of star dancers – delightedly wrote that “The beauty of lines and precision of the dance forms, the lightness and extent of the leaps resulted in applause rarely heard, even at the Kirov Theatre.” At the the atre, the career of Alla Sizova, beautifully trained by Natalia Kamkova and with her own generous natural talent, took off impetuously. In the space of three seasons she had learned fourteen major roles, and the culmination of her first years was to appear as Aurora in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. The technical perfection of her dance, its refinement and lightness as well as the ballerina’s ability to take joy in every movement, enchanting the audience with her joie de vivre, made Sizova one of the leaders of ballet in the 1960s-1970s. Captivating in its sincerity and intimacy, Alla Sizova’s dance with her airy leaps of rare beauty revealed fresh colours in such familiar roles as Giselle, Cinderella, Juliet, Maria in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Katerina in The Stone Flower, Masha in The Nutcracker, Kitri in Don Quixote. Sizova’s staggering individuality combined with the dancer’s capacity and adaptability in lyrical roles also adorned numerous contemporary productions from those years; Alla Sizova brought the image of Ophelia to life in Konstantin Sergeyev’s Hamlet, she was involved in the creation of Igor Belsky’s Leningrad Symphony, and the search for new expressive means came for the ballerina in ballets by Oleg Vinogradov – as Princess Rose in The Enchanted Prince and as the Fairy of the Rond Mountains in the eponymous ballet. Throughout her performing career and subsequently as a teacher and coach Alla Sizova truly worshipped the classicism of the Leningrad school as the embodiment of musicality, the virtuoso dazzle of the phrasing of movements and the conveyance of plastique nuances. Impressions of her inspired dance which emanated joy, always filled with immediate emotion, to this day remain in the hearts of those who saw her. And in the hearts of her friends and colleagues the re will forever remain the light that Alla Sizova brought the m – in life as well as on the stage.