Her named successor, Uliana Lopatkina is, of course, also a great ballerina.
Nor will it save Altynai Asylmuratova, the lustrous former St Petersburg ballerina who is being removed from her own job as the Vaganova's artistic director.
Britain's foremost ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, went to France in 1948 to perform with Petit's newly founded company Les Ballets de Paris, and they had a brief but romantic affair.
What our feelings are at a given moment, where we should make eye contact…" If Gittens and Singleton's experience has been that British ballet is essentially colour-blind, a senior African-American ballerina claims that the same is not true of the US.
Copeland's dream is Gittens's reality, and perhaps the Birmingham ballerina benefits from a culture in which, as she says, "audiences look at the dance, not the colour of the skin".
A ballerina who lived in a single motel room with her mother and five siblings during her teenage years will become the American Ballet Theatre's first black soloist in 20 years.
Maillot's choreography showcases all the delicate expressiveness of her long arms and cantilevered back, and while it maximises the virtuoso power of her supple legs and feet, it also probes the pressures and conflicts she carries with her as a world-class ballerina.
In her memoirs, C'est Court, la Vie (Life Is Short, 1992), Dubost claimed to have attended courses given by the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and that, when in her teens, the infamous financier Alexandre Stavisky had fallen in love with her.
Pawlikowski was born in 1957 and lived in Warsaw until he was 14, when his mother, a ballerina, and father, a doctor, sought political asylum in the UK.
Diana Vishneva could not be mistaken for anything but a Russian ballerina, when she walks into the New York hotel where we've arranged to meet.
Another member, an accountant, had a friend who was a ballerina and was looking for a photographer, and the connection was made.
