Celebrating One Of The Greatest Ballerinas Of All Time

Anna Pavlova will always be known as one of the most famous ballerinas in the history of ballet.

Born in Russia in 1881, Anna’s love of ballet began after her Mother took her to see a production of The Sleeping Beauty and at the age of 10, she was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School. As a young dancer, she was often considered frail and not exactly beautiful.

Her early years of training were difficult; she had severely arched feet, thin ankles and long arms and legs. She was teased by other students, but she continued to train hard and improve her technique. She was very supple, being able to bend and twist easily and gracefully and this impressed her ballet teacher, Marius Petipa.

After graduating at the age of 18, she was chosen to enter the Imperial Russian Ballet and became Prima Ballerina in 1906. She danced for 32 years in many roles, including The Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, but her most famous role was The Dying Swan, which she performed more than 4,000 times during her career.

Anna Pavlova had extremely arched feet, so she had to balance her weight on her big toes. She came up with the idea of strengthening her pointe shoes by adding a piece of hard leather onto the soles and flattening the toe box of the shoes. People considered this as cheating because at that time a ballerina was taught that she, not her shoes, must hold her weight en pointe. However, because of the shape of her feet, this was very difficult for her. Her great solution to change the pointe shoe to suit her feet, was the beginning of the pointe shoe as we know it today, providing more support and stability, becoming less painful and easier for dancers with curved feet.

In 1913, she started her own Dance Company, called the Pavlova Company, and was the first ballerina to tour the world, traveling on long tours to everywhere that travel was possible and introducing ballet to millions of people who had never seen any style of Western dancing before.

A Fun Fact: The pavlova dessert is named after Anna Pavlova. The Australian story goes that the pavlova was invented in a hotel in Perth and named after the ballerina when apparently one person dining there declared it to be “light as Pavlova.” However, the Kiwis believe that a chef of a Wellington hotel created the dessert in her honour, claiming that it was inspired by her tutu.