A Life Well Danced: Maria Zybina¿s Russian Heritage Her Legacy of Classical Ballet and Character Dan

Relatively little has been written about how ballet teachers become teachers themselves and how each generation passes on its experience to the next. The teacher-dancer relationship within the context of the Russian classical tradition is a theme of -A Life Well Danced-. It is presented through the lens of a young girl who lived through emigration and displacement at the time of the Russian Revolution, who experienced this again as an adult after the Second World War and who went on to establish a successful career as a teacher, examiner and choreographer. The book also touches on the teaching and performing of European character dance which is also an under-appreciated field.

-A Life Well Danced- was inspired by the author-s direct connection through Zybina and her teachers, Nicolai Legat in London, Evgenia Eduardova in Berlin and Elena Poliakova in Belgrade, to the flowering of Russian classical ballet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Marius Petipa