| Subject: Eva Evdokimova, Ballerina |
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died April 3
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Date Posted: Monday, April 06, 2009, 08:39:24pm
Eva Evdokimova-Gregori, an internationally known ballerina who stood out for the delicacy and eloquent purity of her dancing and stage presence, died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 60 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of cancer, said her husband, Michael S. Gregori.
Ms. Evdokimova, who was also a gifted ballet teacher, began her performing career in 1966 with the Royal Danish Ballet. But it was at the Berlin Opera Ballet that she became a star, joining the company in 1969 and reigning as prima ballerina there from 1973 to 1985. She was also a guest star with the Kirov Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Paris Opera Ballet and other companies.
One of her most frequent partners was Rudolf Nureyev.
“I think I’ve danced with Rudolf in nearly every city in the world,” she said in a 1984 interview in The New York Times. That year, she performed with the group Nureyev and Friends in the pas de deux from August Bournonville’s “Flower Festival at Genzano”; as Terpsichore, the lead muse, in George Balanchine’s “Apollo”; and as Marie Taglioni in Anton Dolin’s “Pas de Quatre.”
That stylistic range was typical of Ms. Evdokimova’s career-long repertory. She was known for her Giselle, which she studied with Yvette Chauviré, who was considered one of the great Giselles, and for the title role in Bournonville’s “Sylphide.” In both roles, her refinement and musicality, and the understated amplitude of her dancing could be seen at their best.
But in addition to mastering these roles and performing in the classics “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” Ms. Evdokimova also danced in craggily dramatic works by John Cranko and Birgit Cullberg and in Glen Tetley’s sweepingly expansive pure-dance ballets.
Another landmark of her career was winning a gold medal in the Varna International Ballet Competition in Bulgaria in 1970. Earlier that year, in a Moscow competition, she was awarded a diploma rather than a medal, causing an uproar among the fans attending the ceremony. Galina Ulanova, one of the judges, invited her to compete that year at Varna.
Ms. Evdokimova was born in Geneva in 1948 to a Bulgarian father and an American mother, through whom she received her American citizenship. She became the first American to win the gold medal at Varna. In 2005, she received the first Ulanova Prize, for “selfless dedication to the art of dance,” at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
Ms. Evdokimova was tall, with a long body that seemed to fold and gently stretch naturally into the line and poses of the classical ballet canon. But she was also chic, with childlike sweetness shining through.
Those somewhat disparate qualities were evident in Henning Rübsam’s “Litanei und Frühlingsglaube,” a solo set to two Schubert songs, created for Ms. Evdokimova in 2002 and danced by her in New York in one of her last performances. The delicate inflections of her quick shifts between sadness and joy were impressive, enhanced possibly by having studied acting at the HB Studio in New York and by her several acting roles in Off Broadway productions. Together with the strength, quietness and transparency of her dancing, those dramatic nuances helped turn the performance into a celebration of maturity and experience.
Her reflectiveness as an artist helped make Ms. Evdokimova a prized teacher and ballet coach in the United States, Europe and Japan. She herself trained at the Munich Opera Ballet School and the Royal Ballet School and with teachers like Maria Fay, Vera Volkova and Natalia Dudinskaya. Late in her career she was ballet mistress at the Boston Ballet in 2002 and 2003 and a juror in many international ballet competitions.
Mr. Gregori, her husband, is Ms. Evdokimova’s only immediate survivor.
In 1984, Ms. Evdokimova cited Nureyev as a major inspiration early in her career, though she acknowledged the seeming oddity of a male dancer’s influence on a ballerina. Enumerating the attributes that had drawn her to this very different kind of performer, she might almost have been talking of her own gifts: “That presence on stage. The beauty of his technique and quality of his movement. His use of space. Rudolf opened up new vistas for me.”
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