Valentina Ganibalova is a stolen ballet star

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The ballet traditions of St. Petersburg are already three centuries old, and the city has something to be proud of in this regard. Especially the names of the dancers and prima ballerinas of the Kirov Theatre. In the second half of the twentieth century, one of the brightest stars in it was the ballerina Valentina Ganibalova. She danced almost all the main parts of the theatrical repertoire. In March 2018, Valentina Mikhailovna turned seventy years old. How did her career in ballet develop and what is she doing now?

Childhood and youth

Valentinina Ganibalova was born on 1948-07-03 in Tashkent, where her mother, a native of the village of Tovarkovo near Moscow, was evacuated during the war. As a child, Valya loved to dance, and her mother took her to the Uzbek Choreographic School.

In April 1966, when the girl was in her senior year, a devastating earthquake happened in Tashkent. Then people from all over the Soviet Union came to restore the city, and the local opera and ballet theater was offered to go on tour to Leningrad. The graduate class of the choreographic school was also attracted to the trip. So Valentina Ganibalova first appeared in the city on the Neva.

Studying at the Vaganovsk school

In Leningrad, the talent of a young dancer did not go unnoticed - the Soviet ballerina Natalya Dudinskaya drew attention to the girl. She invited Valentina to the improvement class she taught at the Vaganovsk school.

The training lasted a year, and Ganibalova remembers this time as the most hungry and cold in her life. The mother, who remained in Uzbekistan, could not financially help her daughter, and the nineteen-year-old ballerina did not even have anything to buy winter clothes. In the boarding school, she was given a coat with batting, and the teacher Natalia Dudinskaya presented her winter boots.

Nevertheless, in 1967, Valentina Ganibalova successfully passed the improvement class and was accepted into the Kirov (now the Mariinsky) Theater.

Takeoff

After enrolling in the troupe, the ballerina was immediately given several main roles in classical ballets. Gogi Aleksidze, a famous Georgian choreographer, introduced her to the play "Scythian Suite". Then there was the leading role in Oleg Vinogradov's ballet Goryanka. Valentina Ganibalova was originally supposed to dance in the corps de ballet, but due to the illness of the main artists, she was made a soloist. The ballerina coped with the task phenomenally.

Over the years of work at the Kirov Theater, Valentina Mikhailovna danced almost all the "classics": she was given the main roles in Don Quixote, The Legend of Love, La Bayadère, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Corsair, Stone Flower”, “Spartacus” and, of course, “Giselle”.

Success Abroad

In 1972the troupe went on tour to Spain, and Ganibalova was entrusted with opening the performance with the part of Odette-Odile from Swan Lake. I must say that the directors took a certain risk, instructing the young artist to go on stage first. However, the ballerina danced triumphantly and the local audience really liked it. After the speech, Spanish newspapers called her "star of the night".

Black Mark

The success of Valentina Ganibalova was not welcomed by everyone. The authorities and the theater administration considered that the ballerina behaved too freely abroad. In those years, such famous ballet dancers as Natalya Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev emigrated from Russia, and, fearing that Ganibalova might do the same, she was made restricted to travel abroad.

Until perestroika, Valentina Mikhailovna was not allowed to go abroad. For this reason, the theater stopped giving her leading roles, because then the foreign press would have wondered why the main soloist does not go on tour. So the career of a virtuoso ballerina was stolen, and the world really could not recognize the Russian stage star.

Blue Bird

An outlet for Valentina Ganibalova in this difficult time was participation in the Soviet-American film. In 1976, director D. Cukor began filming the musical fairy tale "The Blue Bird" based on the play by M. Maeterlinck, and the ballerina was offered the role of Water in it. Initially, Maya Plisetskaya was supposed to embody this image, but for some reason she refused.

Many American stars took part in the film, includingincluding Elizabeth Taylor. The Queen of Hollywood, despite the language barrier, became friends with Valentina Mikhailovna. They had dinner together more than once, and at the end of filming, the actress even gave the ballerina a necklace.

Own ballet theater

Valentina Ganibalova left the Kirov stage in 1989, because over the past ten years she was practically not given roles in performances. The ballerina could not imagine her existence without creative activity, so she founded her own theater, in which she became both an artistic director and an artist.

Valentina Mikhailovna staged more than ten original performances, including Pyshka, Coppelia, White Nights, Carnival. She toured abroad with the theater troupe: in the Scandinavian countries, Portugal, Spain, Panama, Croatia.

Currently

2018-07-03 Valentina Ganibalova celebrated her 70th birthday. According to the ballerina, she does not regret that her career in the theater ended so early. Valentina Mikhailovna made up for her creative dissatisfaction with solo concerts and tours, as well as work with talented choreographers.

For the anniversary, the artist was offered to make an exhibition of photographs in the gallery of K. Bulla on Nevsky Prospekt. On March 16, it was open to all comers. The visitors who came looked with interest at the photos of the ballerina Valentina Ganibalova, taken over all the years of her stage career.

In the summer of 2018, the children's creative competition "The Joy of Discovery" was held in Pushkinskiye Gory, which Valentinaorganized in memory of her wife Savely Yamshchikov. Thus, the creative life of the artist continues.