Teacher
She married Soviet General Aleksei Antonov in 1956. In 1962 her husband died. The nervous shock was so strong that she became temporarily blind. When her vision returned, after a year of treatment, she found herself unneeded by the Bolshoi Theater or the Bolshoi School. Fortunately, she found a place at the Komische Oper Berlin where she worked as a ballet mistress for ten years.
After this she worked as a trainer in many different companies throughout the world. For thirty years she served as the Chairperson of Ballet competitions in Moscow. She was the president of the Russian Choreographic Association (since 1992) and was the Chairperson for the Choreography Entrance Exams at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (for her last fifty years).
She helped painter Ilya Glazunov during his early career (she was reprimanded for organizing his first exhibition), so he declared Lepeshinskaya to be his godmother in the art.
Lepeshinskaya died of a heart attack on December 20, 2008 in Moscow at the age of 92.
Read more about this topic: Olga Lepeshinskaya (dancer)
Famous quotes containing the word teacher:
“To be faced with what so-and-so’s mother lets him do, or what the teacher said in class today or what all the kids are wearing is to be required to reexamine some part of our belief structure. Each time we rethink our values we reaffirm them or begin to change them. Seen in this way, parenthood affords us an exceptional opportunity for growth.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell (20th century)
“Parents do not give up their children to strangers lightly. They wait in uncertain anticipation for an expression of awareness and interest in their children that is as genuine as their own. They are subject to ambivalent feelings of trust and competitiveness toward a teacher their child loves and to feelings of resentment and anger when their child suffers at her hands. They place high hopes in their children and struggle with themselves to cope with their children’s failures.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“A teacher for a day is a father for a lifetime.”
—Chinese proverb.