Nadezhda Nadezhdina

Soviet ballet dancer and ballet master
The basics

Quick Facts

IntroSoviet ballet dancer and ballet master
PlacesRussia
wasDancer Ballet dancer Ballet master Choreographer
Work fieldDancing
Gender
Female
Birth21 May 1908, Vilnius, Lithuania
Death11 October 1979Moscow, Russia (aged 71 years)
Star signGemini
Family
Mother:Aleksandra Brushteĭn
Spouse:Vladimir Lebedev (painter)
Awards
Stalin Prize 
Order of Lenin 
Hero of Socialist Labour 
People's Artist of the USSR 
People's Artist of the RSFSR 
The details

Biography

Nadezhda Sergeevna Nadezhdina (Russian: Надежда Надеждина) (1904/8-1979) was a Russian choreographer, ballerina, and former director of the Russian female dance troupe Beroyzka ("little birch") from its inception in 1948 until her death. She is the daughter of prominent writer Aleksandra Iakovlevna. She is known for the way she taught her dancers to move across a stage without seeming to move their feet. Beneath long, nearly floor-length gowns, her dancers learned to walk on the very tips of their toes, resulting in the impression that they are floating or gliding across the stage. Winner of the Stalin Prize of the third degree in 1950 and the Frederic Joliot-Curie Prize in 1959.

She based her dances on regional folk forms but had music specially composed for her troupe. She added men to her choreography in 1961.

The first performers of the dance "Beroyzka" were young collective farmers of the Kalinin (now Tver) region, participating in the festival of rural folk talent in 1948. The performances involved twenty girls in long sundresses, stately and with a beautiful bearing, walking silently around the stage in a patterned dance, holding young birch branches in their hands.

The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 13 May 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.