by The virtuoso ballet dancer Valery Panov, who died at the age of 87, became a matter of Célèbre in 1972 when he and his second wife applied for the ballerina Galina Ragozina to leave the visa to leave the Soviet Union to Israel. It was lucky that his dancing in the 1960s had attracted the attention of the western ballet novels and critics, especially Clive Barnes, who fought his name for two years. Panov’s followers in the west began an international campaign with a WHO -IS -WHO of the British and American theater, including Laurence Olivier, John Cranko and Hal Prince and the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
They were successful and achieved the publication of the dancers in 1974. When her exit visa were finally agreed and they had to leave within five days, Panov recovered from the administration of poisoned tea on a train while Galina suffered from a miscarriage.
Panov was a talented Demi-character dancer who was more suitable for dramatic roles than the traditional princes of the classic ballet. In fact, he described himself as a “actor in dance”. Always a rebel, which was only considered a “risk” in 1959, he was allowed to tour in the west. In the United States, he danced the Pas de Deux of Le Corsaire and the flames of Paris at the time.
Between 1957 and 1964 Panov danced with the Maly Ballet, the second company in Leningrad, where he benefited from the coaching of Semyon Kaplan. The title role was important for Panov in a new version of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka by Konstantin Boyarsky. Panov was not the oppressed doll created by the original choreographer Michel Fokine, but one who heroically protested his fate. The seal of approval for his performance came when Stravinsky saw it for 50 years on his first return to his home and admired his emotional effect.
Questions about Panov’s interpretation came up again when he played this role in 1975 in Fokine’s original staging with the London Festival Ballet, whose audience was familiar with the more traditional version, but the critic John Percival found that Panov’s changes were not brought to fokines production. [the original Petrushka] Nijinsky must have found it. “
After Rudolf Nureyev’s waste in 1961, Panov was invited to dance Basil in Don Quijote in Kirov in 1963 and replaced it in many roles. Panov remained at The Kirov, where he received the Lenin Prize in 1969 and created the title role in Sergeyevs Hamlet, the title of a honored artist of the Russian Federation, in 1970. His last creation in Kirov in 1971 was the devil in the creation of the world, in which he danced alongside Yuri Soloviev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
In 1967 Barnes Panov saw Leningrad. He impressed him “as one of the most remarkable male dancers of our time … his dance technique is fantastic, but it is his feeling of dramatic conviction that is really impressed.”
He was born in Vitebsk and was the son of Matvey Shulman, a manager of the state production of leather goods who was a passionate communist who always wore the party line, and Elizaveta Charitonova, who encouraged his wish to dance. (Valery took the name Panov when he married the Maly dancer Liya Panova in 1958 after he had been encouraged to hide his Jewish last name.)
He grew up in Vilnius, where he trained with a favorite student of the renowned ballet teacher Agrippina Vaganova. This led her to be interested in him when he spoke for her Vaganova School in Leningrad, and he was accepted. There was Nureyev his contemporary and a similar “rebel”.
After Panov left the Soviet Union, he continued to dance. Many early appearances were in large arenas, but Beryl Gray grabbed him and Galina as guests for the season of their company in 1975 in the London Coliseum in Great Britain. His repertoire and his appearances of Petrushka, an extract from Boyarsky The Lady and the Hooligan, his own adaptation of Harlekinade, and his Albrecht, presents as a peening CAD, which was directed with Mary Skack’s production of Giselle, disappointed spectators.
Panov had started choreographing in Vilnius, and it quickly became his focus in the west. During his time, he had written Barnes about his wish to choreography great works in Russian literature. After choreographing the heart of the mountain for the San Francisco Ballet (1976), in which he also danced, he became a guest choreographer and main dancer at the Berlin Opera Ballet (1977–83). There he choreographed Cinderei, with himself as Prince (1977), War and Peace (1980) and Ricardo W (1983). His most important creation for Berlin’s ballet, also in New York, was the idiot (1979), in which Panov danced as Rogozhin after Nureyev’s Prince Myshkin and who received a 40-minute curtain call.
Other important choreography were Le Sacre du Printemps for Vienna, the three sisters for the Royal Swedish Ballet and Romeo and Julia for the Royal Ballet of Flanders, whose artistic director was 1984-86 he was.
In 1991 he became Bonn Ballet’s ballet director and brought the company to Moscow the following year. From 1993 he concentrated on the Ashdod Performing Arts Center in Israel, where he founded the Panov Ballet Theater in 1998. In Great Britain there was relatively little to be seen, although Brandon Lawrence was recognized by Birmingham Royal Ballet in Panov’s Solo, LiebesteD in 2020.
His marriage to Liya was divorced as well as his and Galina in 1993. In 1998 he married Ilana Yellin, an Israeli dancer. She died in 2009 by suicide.
His son died with Liya in 1998. He is survived by two sons – one from his second marriage and one of his third – and a daughter from a different relationship.
• Valery Panov (Valery Matyevich Shulman), born on March 12, 1938; died on June 3, 2025
