Word: assoluta
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Sweet Charity. Gwen Verdon is the dancer assoluta of the U.S. musical stage. She moves to the impulsive music of instinct as a child laughs and a dolphin leaps. She is Terpsichore's darling and yet fortune's foil. She is a wistful waif out of a Chaplin two-reeler, a Broadway gamin skipping along the harsh pavements of defeat with perky gallantry, one of nature's eternally winning losers. Verdon is verdant, and it is lucky that all is well with her, for all is not so well with her musical...
...Covent Garden, Dame Margot Fonteyn plucked a single long-stemmed red rose from one of her many bouquets and with a deep curtsy presented it to her young partner-ex-Kirov Ballet Danseur Rudolf Nureev. The young Russian lowered his eyes, sank to his knees and kissed the assoluta's hand. The audience exploded in an ovation that lasted through 23 curtain calls...
...start of worldwide revolution. Before it became Bolshevik headquarters, that villa had been occupied by Mathilde Kchessinska, once Czar Nicholas II's great & good friend, certainly one of the best dancers of all time and one of two ever to bear the lofty title of prima ballerina assoluta.* In Berlin last week, another ballerina was given that title by sentimental oldtimers: Galina Ulanova, 44, the darling of the Soviet Ballet...
Gymnastics & Glides. Leading Berlin ballet critics gave TIME this estimate: The corps is equal in precision and grace to any in the West. The male dancers are strong and athletic, but they are rarely graceful and are seldom soloists. Among the ballerinas, Galina Ulanova is not absolutely assoluta. When on pointes, she moves so delicately that she seems to glide, but Ulanova indulges in plenty of cape-swishing and distraught breast-beating. When she sticks to her own soft type of dance movement, she is superb. In classical technique, she is as good as the best U.S. ballerinas...
Alicia Markova is, by practically unanimous consensus, the greatest ballerina . alive. Only the cautious conservatism of ballet's experts keeps her from being hailed unreservedly as a ballerina assoluta, a rank in the choric hierarchy attained in recent generations only by Marie Taglioni and the late great Anna Pavlova. Well above a mime dansante (like Irina Baro-nova), immeasurably superior to a soubrette (Zorina's rating), Alicia Markova has attained to the category danseuse noble, and she may get to be a ballerina assoluta yet. She has a combination of flawless classical technique and an ability to project...