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Home » You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived

You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived

The New Neo Posted on by

In fact, he might just be the greatest male ballet dancer who ever lived. Such comparisons are subjective, after all.

When I was young (probably some time in the 1960s) I saw Vasiliev dance in person, along with many other Russian dance luminaries of the day. He never defected. He was married to another great dancer, Ekaterina Maximova, an Audrey Hepburn-ish type with great charm and lightness.

I can’t seem to discover how tall Vasiliev is (he’s still alive at 83 although Maximova died in 2009), but he seemed a giant on stage. He had a highly unusual quality for a ballet dancer because the initial impression he gave was of tremendous physical power allied with the usual grace that ballet dancers posses, and a very masculine power at that. It’s hard to describe him and, although luckily we have videos, as I’ve said many times videos can’t capture dance except as a pale echo.

But even on videos you can see the tremendous height of Vasiliev’s jumps. In this video the camera angles are sometimes odd, and I have no idea what sort of surface he’s on. It looks as though it could even be concrete, which would be awful. But no matter; Vasiliev soars to a height surprising. Keep in mind that the year was 1969 and ballet technique back then was nothing like as advanced as today. And yet most of today’s dancers can’t hold a candle to him (I’ve cued up a very short excerpt from this pas de deux):

Here you can see his tremendous upper body strength when he does some famous one-armed lifts of his wife. This is from the Soviet ballet “Spartacus,” a work I saw in person and which bored me unutterably. But that certainly wasn’t Vasiliev’s fault; for me, it was the choreography that was such a snooze:

I actually think that one of the best ways to see Vasiliev is in this later video – I believe he’s in his late forties here – that records him teaching a class to four other male dancers. The video shows the tremendous ease and unified harmony of his movements and his emphasis on head and shoulders, otherwise known in ballet as epaulement. It’s absolutely vital to ballet and much-neglected today (be sure to read the captions, which translate what Vasiliev is saying):

I said it’s hard to describe Vasiliev’s special qualities. But I found this 2023 interview with him in which he manages to do it, so I’ll just quote him. Here he is answering the question “For you, what is the most important thing in a performer?” [emphasis mine]:

V. Vasiliev: Everything is important in a performer. I never tire of repeating what my great teachers told me: there is nothing unimportant or secondary in a performing art. Therefore the rarest quality in an artist is a sense of a natural organic source from which everything melds into a single and inseparable harmonic whole which is impossible to separate out into its components or explain, and this all works well for the development of the character. This is what we observe in truly great performers. And this is a great gift, it is unlikely that it can be learned.

I couldn’t agree more.

Comments

You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived — 41 Comments

  4. …the rarest quality in an artist is a sense of a natural organic source from which everything melds into a single and inseparable harmonic whole which is impossible to separate out into its components or explain…

    –Vladimir Vasiliev

    Totally wonderful quote. Describes every artist I’ve been bonkers for.

  5. I remember being around ten years old getting dragged to ballet by my Ma. Hated it. Couldn’t figure out a story, why are they all jumping around like idiots. Dudes look ridiculous.

    About five years later I read that Heisman winner Herschel Walker regularly did ballet for lower leg strength and flexibility. I found a book that outlined what he regularly did. I was a very strong and flexible kid and couldn’t get through the basic introductory moves.

    Ballet is hard.

  6. neo:

    Your ballet selections never disappoint.

    OMG that first clip looked like what I imagined of Nijinsky. Near superhuman. And he looked like David Bowie too.

    Another secret well-kept, at least from me.

  8. Geoffrey Britain:

    Great stuff!

    I feel like society has failed me that I missed a talent like his.

    I’m somewhat serious.

  9. Something I noticed in the last clip, around the 2:20 mark. Vasiliev has told the four students their arms should be like a brush stroke, and he demonstrates it to the left and the right. Then the students try to imitate his moves, but each dancer’s head is rigid, not flowing as he has demonstrated. Voilà, the difference is clear.

  10. So you’ve got it, or you haven’t. Kind of a bummer for those working themselves ragged….

  11. I’ve never seen Spartacus and Phrygia on stage, perhaps it is boring. But the adagio theme is one of my favorites.

  14. I think admitting you admire a male dancer is almost admitting you are gay. I’m not gay. I think I would have found ot taking all those showers on the Navy. I wish I could lift a girl like that

  17. Spartacus is an interesting choice for a soviet piece as it was a failed revolution like the decembrists a century before

  18. I was curious about the death of Maximova, turns out to have been a heart attack. That in turn led to this article on dancers health and training. Did you know ballet dancers suffer the same rate of injuries as football players?

    There are no guarantees. Mary Cleave, whom I knew before she became an astronaut, died last December from a stroke. It was a shock to me, she was always physically active and healthy, much more so than myself, and yet she was brought down by a blood clot. So it goes.

  19. I think the challenge in those circumstances is not to be emotionally involved

  21. I’m sorry to to hear that, chuck. I’m going to say something but I want ttp say up front I’m not looking for pity me . After I got divorced I wanted to die. O got into fights because I wanted to lose. But I didn’t. I guess deep down o want to live.

  24. I didn’t need to go
    My fighter squadrons wouldn’t give me a hop
    Their last excuse was I hadn’t been to. SERE school. So I went. It sucked. And I still hbu ave never flown in F14. Because I wasn’t in a paid flight status. Of they have me a hop they’d have to give a ride. Yo “no lock doc.” The flight surgeon who let an F14 get locked up by an SU+16 Flagon
    A nothing jet which has no business tangling with Tomcat s

  36. I know enough A life. Yes remaining uninvolved is a must have skill. But you have to be emotional sometimes

  37. When my child died I couldn’t cry for him. I wondered what was wrong. I grew very angry at myself

  39. My father told me, decades ago, that a bunch of sportswriters voted Edward Villella the best athlete in the country. He was the leading male dancer in American ballet at the time.
    He had to do incredible things with his body, do them with superhuman grace, do them in coordination with partners and music, six days a week and a double on matinee.

  40. Richard Aubrey:

    Ah Villella! Villella was another great whom I saw perform many times. Very handsome guy, too, and extremely masculine. He had been a boxer when in college.

    My ex-husband looked quite a bit like him. When I was in my 20s I took a class from Villella (who was visiting the city I lived in), and he was just as charismatic (and attractive, I must say) as a teacher.

    He sustained many injuries. He thought it might be because of the years he took off while in college. He often danced with stress fractures.

  41. neo

    I recall training for a ten-mile road race. Got a stress fracture. Could BARELY WALK. Dancing thus….

    Due to various items involving a misspent youth, I was talking to a physical therapist to kill time while something or other was being manipulated. He said their most common complaints come from people who did gymnastics in high school, quit for the most part while trying to come to terms with freshman year, and then tried to start where they’d left off.

    One male dancer I saw interviewed said his safety routine ALWAYS involved an hour’s warm up. Most people would consider that a solid work out.

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