Leonid Yakobson: the greatest ballet genius you’ve never heard of

On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in ‘Cheek to Cheek’ can outcharm it. A dandy in top hat and a captivatingly pretty girl in bonnet and white frills do ecstatic jumps and twirls in each other’s arms to the seething Rosenkavalier waltz. That it’s Soviet is almost unbelievable — still more so that it dates from the still Stalinist 1954. But this is a gem by Leonid Yakobson, a choreographer who was one of the USSR’s most arresting modern voices, yet of whom you will find rare mention in the West or Soviet ballet histories.

His challenging originality was championed by the independent-minded megastars of Soviet ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova, Maya Plisetskaya and Rudolf Nureyev (who adopted Yakobson’s use of female feet for his own singular foot technique). In Janice Ross’s eyecatching phrase, he ‘carried modern ballet to safety’ in the USSR, despite being penalised as a Jew and a modernist.