Leonid Yakobson

Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson (1904–1975) was a choreographer who looked for a new language of movement for every subject he took on. He made full-length ballets for the Kirov and the Bolshoi, turned the choreographic miniature into an art form of its own, and spent the last six years of his life running his own company. [2][3][13]

He was born in St Petersburg. In the summer of 1918 he was one of hundreds of children sent from hungry Petrograd to a children’s colony in the Urals. The Civil War cut off the way back, and it was the American Red Cross that brought them home: in July 1920 the Japanese ship Yomei Maru sailed from Vladivostok and carried them by way of Japan, San Francisco, the Panama Canal, New York and France to Finland, and from there they returned to Petrograd. Half a century later, in 1973, Burle Bramhall, one of the Americans who had looked after the children on that voyage, came to Leningrad, and Yakobson greeted him from the stage. [2][6]

In 1926 Yakobson graduated from the Leningrad choreographic school, where he studied with Vladimir Ponomaryov, and joined the ballet company of the Leningrad opera and ballet theatre, later the Kirov. He danced character and grotesque roles, among them Puss in Boots in The Sleeping Beauty and the Acrobat in The Red Poppy. His first major work as a choreographer was the second act of Shostakovich’s The Golden Age in 1930. From 1933 he worked at the Bolshoi. In the autumn of 1940 he went to Kazan to stage Shurale, but the war interrupted the work, and he spent the evacuation years in Molotov, now Perm. [1][2][5][7]

His Leningrad Shurale opened at the Kirov in 1950 and won him the Stalin Prize. Soon afterwards, during the antisemitic campaign of those years, he was dismissed from the theatre and could not return to work until 1955. In 1956 the Kirov premiered his Spartacus, for which he set aside pointe work and built the dance from the poses of ancient sculpture. The Bedbug, after Mayakovsky, followed in 1962, and The Twelve, after Blok’s poem, in 1964. The Twelve was performed only three times. [3][5][8][9][10][11][12]

The miniature remained his own form. In 1958 he presented an evening called Choreographic Miniatures at the Kirov, and the same year brought his Rodin triptych to music by Debussy, which later grew into a whole cycle. In 1969 he took charge of a young company founded three years earlier and gave it the name of that evening. The company’s first programme opened in 1971, but Wedding Cortege, to music by Shostakovich, was banned shortly before the premiere. Hiroshima, inspired by Iri and Toshi Maruki’s Hiroshima Panels, was banned too, as a pacifist work. [3][4][13][14][15][16]

Yakobson died in Moscow on 17 October 1975 and is buried in Leningrad. For many years his ballets were kept alive by Irina Yakobson, his wife from 1953 and a ballet mistress in his company, who passed them on to new dancers. After she moved to the United States she staged his choreography abroad, including Rodin in Amsterdam. In 2004 the company was given his name. The Mariinsky has revived Shurale and Spartacus, and in June 2026 it gave its first performance of his Brilliant Divertissement. [2][5][8][9][14][17][18]