Oleg Briansky, who distinguished himself first as an international ballet star and then as an influential ballet teacher, died on July 7 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his wife and only immediate survivor, the French ballerina Mireille Briane, through Yelena Demikovsky, a family friend and the director of a documentary about Mr. Briansky and Ms. Briane. She said that Mr. Briansky, who lived in Manhattan, was visiting Florida with his wife and had been hospitalized because he was not feeling well. He had been in poor health for about a year.
As a dancer, Mr. Briansky was tall, dark and handsome, full of verve and energy — and versatile.
He was as willing to caper around a stage portraying a jester as he was to bring down the house through blazing virtuosity in the “Don Quixote” pas de deux with the tempestuous ballerina Tamara Toumanova.
Mr. Briansky excelled as a partner to numerous world-class ballerinas in addition to Ms. Toumanova, once an early protégée of George Balanchine. The list of female stars who often invited Mr. Briansky on special tours reads like a Who’s Who of Great Ballerinas, all different. They ranged from Alicia Markova and Margot Fonteyn to Violette Verdy, and also included Maria Tallchief, Melissa Hayden, Nathalie Krassovska, Mary Ellen Moylan, Patricia Wilde and Beryl Grey, the British ballerina Mr. Briansky partnered on a five-month tour of South Africa.
To many others in the dance world, Mr. Briansky and his wife, Ms. Briane, were known as the directors of the Briansky Saratoga Ballet Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which they founded in 1965 and where they taught for 42 years. A summer school, it became one of the most prestigious ballet academies in America.
Born on Nov. 29, 1929, in Brussels as Oleg Borisovich Kayoukoff, Mr. Briansky was the son of Boris and Nina Kayoukoff, Russian émigrés who met in Brussels shortly after the Russian Revolution.
His father had been a businessman in Petrograd and had fought in the anti-Bolshevik White Army. His mother came from a provincial town near Kursk and helped her husband when he opened a Russian restaurant in Brussels.
She also took Oleg as a child in 1941 to a Russian émigré teacher, Leonide Katchourovsky, ballet master at the Brussels Opera House. The young dancer made his professional debut with a concert in 1945 and then left at 16 to study in Paris with other Russian teachers, including Rousanne Sarkissian (known as Madame Rousanne), then the main teacher for the teenage Violette Verdy, a future star at New York City Ballet and other troupes.
Changing his stage name to Briansky, he joined Roland Petit’s Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1946. There he met Mireille Lefebvre, a Paris-born graduate of the Paris Opera Ballet school who had already been a principal dancer in the Bordeaux Ballet. She was still known as Lefebvre when she and Mr. Briansky performed in New York in 1951 with Petit’s new troupe, Les Ballets de Paris. She became known as Mireille Briane after they joined Festival Ballet in London, where they married in 1953.
“Happy to Be So,” a 2008 documentary by the Russian-born American filmmaker Yelena Demikovsky that was a hit at Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival, explores why the Brianskys settled in the United States in 1963. “We became teachers,” he says in the documentary, because he had never fully recovered from a knee injury when he was 19: “I danced on a bad knee and it caught up with me. I had to stop dancing.”
Mr. Briansky impressed Princess Grace of Monaco, whom he met as dance adviser to “The Children of Theater Street,” a 1977 documentary about the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, of which she was a narrator. In 1979 she was the guest of honor at a fund-raising benefit for the scholarship fund of the Briansky Center in Saratoga Springs — “because,” she told The New York Times, “Oleg is a friend of mine and I’m a friend of the ballet.”
Although his career change was not planned, Mr. Briansky’s true legacy may well be as a teacher. For many years he and his wife taught at other schools, sometimes as guest teachers outside New York City and abroad. From 1994 to 2006 they were artistic directors of the Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and its school in Bethlehem, Pa. In the Demikovsky film, he is shown reaching out to the children in a class there with gentle humor, asking them to remember which is their right foot and which is their left.
Ellen Weinstein, who is now artistic director of the National Dance Institute, founded by Jacques d’Amboise, recalled in a phone interview that Mr. Briansky was her first ballet teacher, when he taught a weekly class in Binghamton, N.Y.
“Even as child, I knew I was in the company of greatness,” she said. “Oleg taught with joyful rigor.”
She later attended the couple’s summer school in Saratoga Springs. Noting that she now heads a dance program that teaches children, she added: “Oleg and Mireille had a commitment to excellence that was supportive and loving. Oleg had an influence on the course I took.”
Source: Read Full Article
