Word: ballets
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Whether Ballerina Ludmila Vlasova of the Bolshoi Ballet really wanted to go home or to defect with her husband, Dancer Alexander Godunov, may never be known in full. When Godunov, one of the most brilliant of Soviet ballet stars, made his rush to freedom, he did not-or could not-take her with him. Upholding U.S. law prohibiting forced repatriation, the State Department insisted on interviewing Vlasova to see if she wanted to join her husband. Belatedly, the State Department moved to keep her in the country by preventing her Aeroflot jetliner from taking off until, in the words...
...placed Diaghilev's achievement in perspective. But if analysis is missing, the man transcends his interpreter. For Diaghilev's life was his work, and that has continued. His followers have founded many of the world's leading dance companies, including London's Royal Ballet and the New York City Ballet. It is a suitable legacy for the impresario who. with one daring jeté after another, brought the East to the West and the West into the 20th century...
When Soviet Ballet Star Alexander Godunov decided to defect to the U.S. last week, he could hardly have foreseen the fallout from his electrifying leap to freedom: a Moscow-bound Soviet jetliner with 112 passengers aboard grounded for more than 24 hours and surrounded by police at New York's Kennedy Airport; top U.S. officials at the U.N. and in Washington getting into the act; the official Soviet news agency, Tass, accusing the U.S. of "political blackmail"; and Godunov's ballerina wife an unwilling hostage in the center of the turmoil...
...drama began early last week when Godunov, 30, bolted from his Manhattan hotel, just as the Soviet Union's premier ballet company, the Bolshoi, was about to complete a hugely successful four-week run. Godunov, the Bolshoi's most charismatic star, coolly walked out of his room as if he were heading for a stroll, evading the KGB officer stationed in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. He rushed to the New York office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, where he requested, and was granted, political asylum...
News of the defection-the first in the Bolshoi's history-sent waves of shock and apprehension through the 125-member Moscow troupe, which included Godunov's wife, Ludmila Vlasova, a soloist with the company. At that point some ballet insiders reported that the couple were estranged and that Vlasova, 37, was unwilling to defect with her husband. Still, angry Soviet officials felt it necessary to hold Vlasova incommunicado at the hotel. Because the Bolshoi has long been groomed to be the showcase of Soviet culture, Godunov's flight was evidently viewed as even more...