3 June 1904
Born in Vilna (now Vilnius) Nadezhda Nadezhdina — Soviet dancer and choreographer. Founder of the legendary ensemble "Beryozka."
To be an artist, three conditions are necessary: to love your homeland, to love art, and to see through the eyes of a poet the life of your people, whose art you present to the public.
Father, Sergey Brushtein, — a physician and the founder of Soviet physiotherapy. Mother, Alexandra Brushtein, — a writer and author of plays for children's and youth theaters. According to one theory, it was her popularity that prompted Nadezhda to adopt her pseudonym; according to another, it was because of her Jewish heritage.
At 20 she graduated from the Vaganova ballet school in Petrograd. She danced on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre and was the youngest in the troupe.
In the early 1930s, she entered the Soviet stage, creating her own routines. During the Great Patriotic War, she choreographed dances for frontline propaganda teams.
After the war, she headed the ballet department of the Mosestrad and, at the same time, the folk choir of the Kalinin (Tver) Philharmonic.
In 1948, at the age of 44, she founded the choreographic ensemble "Beryozka" — the idea was inspired by an old Russian lithograph. Its first dancers were 20 young collective farm women from the Kalinin region. They performed in the same concert program with Leonid Utesov и Klavdia Shulzhenko. Girls in long red and white sarafans seemed to float across the stage in a circle dance to the strains of "In the Field a Birch Tree Stood." It created the illusion that they were standing still while the floor was spinning beneath them.
The "Nadezhda" body position elongates the spine: the girls, Munchausen-style, lift themselves by the hair—and their eyebrows involuntarily rise, their eyes open, their necks stretch. In our ensemble, the young ladies grow 5, sometimes even 10 centimeters! (Nadezhdina's student, future artistic director of the Mira Koltsova ensemble)
Nadezhdina also made history as the founder of a new genre—the dance novella (a synthesis of Russian folk dance and classical music). She staged the famous works "Troika," "Carousel," "Pryalitsa," "Patterns," "Siberian Suite," "Lebedushka," "Northern Ancient Round Dance," "Vorottsa," and "Topotukha."
She created various artistic images of Russian women—those of Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, Shukshin, Chekhov, and Nekrasov. She insisted that each of them had to be experienced from the inside—"danced through." To women who were in good physical condition but couldn't do this, Nadezhdina repeated:
A skinny cow is not yet a gazelle
In 1959, the women's ensemble also added a male dance group, including individual numbers like "Bachelors" and "Ballagurs." Male performers performing roles with overly gloomy expressions were asked:
Why are you dancing with the faces of the regicides?
One of Nadezhdina’s latest productions is the dance triptych “Russian Porcelain” (each of the short stories is dedicated to the events of 1812, 1886 and 1918).
She died in 1979, at 75, in Moscow.
Only if you are a mediocrity, you have no enemies.
Throughout its existence, Beryozka's round dances have performed in 80 countries around the world and have walked at a "floating" pace a distance exceeding the length of the equator.
During the Cold War, the Peace Council awarded the ensemble a gold medal for its contribution to strengthening friendship between nations. Its performances abroad were called a "fiery sensation."
There's no need to read 200 volumes about Russia. Just watch one Beryozka concert, and you'll see what the Russian character, the Russian nature, and the Russian essence are. (from a French newspaper after the ensemble's tour)
