Elisabeth Anderson-Ivantzova: A Bolshoi Ballerina Abroad

About the Book

Before the rise of the professional ballet company schools, New York City was the center for many private ballet studios founded by Russian émigrés that flourished for several decades between the 1920s and 1960s. Such figures as Elisabeth Anderson-lvantzova, Mikhail Fokine, Mikhail Mordkin, Ludmilla Schollar, who were formerly with the Imperial Theatres of St. Petersburg and Moscow, conducted recognized schools of Russian ballet style and technique. Their classes were filled with many of the principal dancers of resident or touring ballet companies, such as, the Mordkin Ballet Company, Ballet Theatre, Col. de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, or with principal dancers from the Broadway Theatre. One important contributor was Elisabeth Anderson-lvantzova (1890-1973). This study traces her early training at the Bolshoi Theatre School in Moscow, her career in the Bolshoi Company, her departure from Russia after the Revolution, and her subsequent professional career in Paris. Berlin, Lisbon, and New York. Anderson-Ivantzova settled in New York City in 1924, and from 1926 to 1930 she taught body movement to student actors in Richard Boleslavsky’s American Laboratory Theatre School, the first of American acting schools to teach the Stanislavskyan Method. Anderson-lvantzova founded her ballet school in 1938, which was dubbed paradoxically the “Little Bolshoi on 56th Street,” where it flourished till 1973, the year of her death.