Mistress of the Little Swans
Sofia Golovkina resigned
After 41 years of constant directorship, the rector of the Moscow Academy of Choreography, 85-year-old Sofya Golovkina, resigned. According to ITAR-TASS, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater Ballet, Boris Akimov, has been appointed as the successor, who will combine both positions. This means that after a long break, the Bolshoi Theater has regained its school. Kommersant columnist TATIANA KUZNETSOVA comments.

An ambitious woman with an iron character, enormous energy and high connections, she had the undoubted merits of a manager of a state mission. Sofia Golovkina succeeded in almost everything she took on. The main monument to her work - a magnificent new school building with a luxurious educational theater, twenty rehearsal halls, two dozen music classes and a boarding school for three hundred places - appeared seven years after her appointment. The school's move meant not only a territorial distance from the Bolshoi: it finally consolidated the school's autonomy - economic and artistic.
45-year-old Bolshoi Theater ballerina Sofya Golovkina headed the Moscow Choreographic School immediately after her retirement, replacing the great theater figure Mikhail Gabovich in this post. 1960 can be considered the year of a “big turning point”: from that moment on, the Moscow school began to turn into Golovkina’s school.
The oldest and wisest teachers who knew the honored artist, order bearer, member of the CPSU and Stalin Prize laureate from working together in the theater were the first to understand this. In the year Golovkina arrived, the famous Marina Semenova, the legendary Elizaveta Gerdt, who worked for a quarter of a century and raised Plisetskaya, Struchkova, Maksimova, and the great Nikolai Tarasov and Asaf Messerer, who taught at the school since 1923, simultaneously left the school. Following the celebrities, other Moscow luminaries left the school. This demonstrative outcome went unnoticed.
Having achieved full power, Sofya Golovkina entered into an alliance with the theater, which at that time was also autocratically represented by Yuri Grigorovich. The autocrats respected each other. The school served Grigorovich's repertoire, while deforming school programs. The main victim was the characteristic dance, unnecessary at that time on the Bolshoi Theater stage. But Sofya Golovkina was not entirely satisfied with the laurels of administrator - she also wanted to be known as a great teacher. The current shortage of ballerinas at the Bolshoi is the result of this ambitious desire of Golovkina. For forty years, not a single great ballerina emerged from her class. Natalya Bessmertnova is a student of Maria Kozhukhova and only went to Golovkina for one final year. The stars of the 70-80s are Lyudmila Semenyaka (graduated from the Vaganova School), Nadezhda Pavlova (Perm School), Nina Semizorova (Kyiv). Nadezhda Gracheva studied in Almaty for seven years. Galina Stepanenko graduated from college in such a shape that she was not accepted into any Moscow theater; and only Natalya Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliev, famous educators of undertrained talents, risked taking her into their care. Nina Ananiashvili studied in Tbilisi for five years, and in Moscow she fell into the hands of Natalya Zolotova, a teacher with Leningrad roots - after Ananiashvili’s graduation, Zolotova was forced to leave the school.
But already in the 70s, the school became a showcase of developed socialism - the wives of presidents and prime ministers who visited the USSR on state visits were brought here. On this occasion, a samovar with bundles of bagels was installed in the dining room, black caviar and fruit appeared in the buffet, a red carpet was laid out for the school theater, children of different ages gave a mini-concert, at the end of which the next distinguished guest, together with the headmistress, went up to the stage and were photographed surrounded by children - Sofya Nikolaevna smiled radiantly and affectionately called them Masuriks.
Golovkina’s prosperity was facilitated by the fashion for sending her children to ballet. The chain of “golden” children was opened by the granddaughter of Ekaterina Furtseva. The granddaughters of Andropov, Gorbachev and many other figures of lesser rank did not escape Golovkina’s affectionate hugs. Only Andropova managed to finish her studies - her talents sharply faded with the departure of their grandparents from politics.
Six years ago, when assuming the post of artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater, Vladimir Vasiliev, endowed with the broadest powers, inadvertently declared that reforms must begin with the school and, first of all, it is necessary to change its director. The 80-year-old director managed to give a worthy rebuff: the dangerous topic was no longer touched upon, and the Bolshoi Theater had to employ students from private studios in its performances. But the school began to be called an academy, and Sofya Golovkina began to be called a rector.
This season, the iron lady gave up: in recent months, the school was actually run by her son, who has no ballet education at all. In ballet circles they claim that Mikhail Shvydkoy himself persuaded Golovkin to resign. The appointment of Boris Akimov, who also holds the post of artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater ballet, to this position is the only right move. A brilliant representative of modern pedagogy, who knows the teaching staff market very well (former Bolshoi artists who have become excellent teachers now teach in several private schools in Moscow), it is Akimov who is able to pull the school out of the impasse in which it has been for many years. Another question is whether it will be possible to sit on two chairs - both the theater and the school require constant attention. Particularly astute observers see a catch in this appointment - do they really want to vacate the position of the theater's artistic director? Say, for the same Yuri Grigorovich, who returned to the theater on the waves of his “Swan”?
However, despite the ITAR-TASS report about the new appointment of Boris Akimov, the Bolshoi press service assured that the order of the Ministry of Culture does not yet exist. Perhaps this means that the 85-year-old empress has changed her mind about abdicating the throne.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 66 dated 04/13/2001, p. 14

Authors:

Tatiana Kuznetsova