Obituary: Yuri Grigorovich, Alla Osipenko

Over the past week, the world lost two Soviet-era ballet legends, Yuri Grigorovich and Alla Osipenko.

Yuri Grigorovich, Russian dancer, choreographer and ballet master, has passed away aged 98, The Bolshoi Theatre announced on 19th May 2025. The Mariinsky Theatre expressed condolences.

Born in January 1927, Grigorovich was widely regarded as one of the most influential ballet figure in the former Soviet Union. He started his career as a dancer at the Kirov Ballet, now the Mariinsky Theatre, where he was a soloist until 1962. His re-choreography and staging of The Stone Flower (1957) and his creation of The Legend of Love (1961) solidified his fame as a choreographer.

In 1964, Grigorovich was invited to become the ballet artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre, where he worked with legendary dancers including Irek Mukhamedov and Maya Plisetskaya. He choreographed the new production of Spartacus with Vladimir Vasiliev for the title role (1968) and created Ivan the Terrible (1975) and reinterpreted famous ballets such as The Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet and so forth.

Grigorovich left the Bolshoi Ballet in 1995 and set up a small ballet company. He returned to Bolshoi as Ballet Master in 2008.

Alla Osipenko, prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet and one of the last pupils of Agrippina Vaganova, has passed away aged 93, The Mikhailovsky Theatre announced in its Telegram on 12th May 2025.

Osipenko was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1932 and trained at Leningrad Choreographic School with Vaganova. The school later became Vaganova Academy. She became prima balletirna in 1954 and casted in Grigorovich's The Stone Flower and The Legend of Love for main roles, among other classical ballet staples.

Osipenko was the prefered partner of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev and Yuri Soloviev. Nureyev defected to the west a day after dancing Swan Lake with her in Paris in 1961. She was blocked from touring internationally since then and apparently put under surveillance by KGB. As she supported Nureyev and refused the invitation from the Communist Party, she had to battle with the Soviet and Kirov establishment in the following decades, according to this article of The Washington Post.

In 1970, Osipenko left Kirov and continued to dance with the companies set up by Leonid Jacobson and Boris Eifman. She moved to the United States in 1995 after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and taught there. From 2008 onwards, she taught at the Mikhailovsky Theatre.

Here is the Kirov Ballet's The Stone Flower on YouTube. I am not sure the year. Let me know if you do.