In honour of People's Artist of the RSFSR Elena Yevteyeva, the performance of Swan Lake on 14 November is being dedicated by the Mariinsky Theatre to Elena Yevteyeva, a teacher and coach of the ballet company who has dedicated more than twenty-five years to the Mariinsky Theatre and is today passing on her experience to the next generation of dancers.
At the Mariinsky Theatre, Elena Yevteyeva is a guardian, first and foremost, of the traditions of lyrical classical dance. It was lyrical roles that were this ballerina's "bread and butter", it was in such roles plastique gift for cantinela in dance was revealed, as was her talent for creating the characters of timid and gentle heroines. Throughout her performing career at the theatre, which lasted over twenty-five years, she never betrayed her role.
A pupil of the Leningrad school, Elena Yevteyeva learned the ABC of her professional skills under Lidia Tyuntina, she graduated from her class at the Vaganova School of Dance in 1966. At the theatre she learned roles in the classical masterpieces from the great dancers of the previous generation – Natalia Dudinskaya and Ninel Kurgapkina. Elena Yevteyeva captivated audiences with her grace, intelligence and inspiration in Giselle, Chopiniana, as Nikia in La Bayadère, Princess Florine in The Sleeping Beauty and the Queen of the Dryads in Don Quixote. The ballerina's dancing inspired critics to produce poetic metaphors and epithets: it was known as "impressionistic", for the airy lightness and "moods of light and shade" it was compared to a water-colour, and they wrote that it "calls forth associations with water flowing gently". Naturally, this quality determined the management of the Kirov Ballet's choice when the young ballerina - who had not yet danced as Odette-Odile at the theatre – was appointed for the lead role in a ballet film of Swan Lake. Yevteyeva's stage career as the Queen of the Swans, which had begun in a film studio, was to prove a lengthy one, but her first attempt at that image, captured on film in 1968, became for many the embodiment of lyrical poetry in movement.
For audiences, the incredibly magnetic impression of the intimacy of Yevteyeva's dance came thanks to the way the ballerina seemed to "fill" the stage. "She doesn't just create beautiful poses – each movement contains some meaning, it conveys a condition, psychical anxiety, they all mean something, they are inspired," they wrote of her work. This justification and meaningfulness of the gestures and pauses in the performer's dance also attracted choreographers, who asked her to appear in their new productions. Elena Yevteyeva was one of the first performers of roles in Leonid Yakobson's ballet Land of Miracles, Konstantin Sergeyev's Hamlet and The Lefthander, she danced as Shyrin in The Legend of Love and as Katerina in The Stone Flower by Yuri Grigorovich, the Girl in Igor Belsky's Leningrad Symphony, and she appeared in choreographic works by Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov, Igor Chernyshov, Dmitry Bryantsev and Boris Eifman. Her career also involved collaborations with foreign choreographers – she truly touched audiences as Esmeralda in Notre Dame de Paris by Roland Petit, the role of the Moor's Wife in The Moor's Pavane by José Limón, she worked with Pierre Lacotte on the pas de deux from Le Papillon and has performed lead roles in August Bournonville's La Sylphide and Napoli, restaged in Leningrad by Danish ballet masters.
On ending her performing career, Elena Yevteyeva dedicated herself to passing on her rich experience to the next generation. At the Vaganova Ballet Academy, graduates from her class include Svetlana Zakharova and Daria Pavlenko, and at the theatre among those who have had the good fortune to be mentored by Elena Yevteyeva in rehearsing roles are Sofia Gumerova, Daria Pavlenko, Anastasia Kolegova and Oxana Skorik.
Olga Makarova
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