On her biggest night ever, before the most expensive audience in all Manhattan, she slipped—and very nearly fell on her face. Hardly anybody minded. For by that time, Natalia Makarova had demonstrated that she has that heart-stopping quality of a great dancer. As the doomed girl in Giselle, she had just executed a series of dazzling turns and was subsiding into a curtsy—the simplest of maneuvers. It was like a man who had scaled Mount Everest slipping in his shower.
For the rest of the evening Makarova was immaculate. In the role of the peasant girl, she seemed properly shy, touching and fragile. In duets with her faithless lover (Ivan Nagy), she matched each line of leg and arm to perfection. Transformed, in the second act, into a gossamer-clad Wili, she showed little tenderness, but conveyed a remote melancholy. Always, when she broke into dance, there was that sudden transformation of earth-bound mortal into incredible creature of some other air.
Even more remarkable was that Natalia Makarova was dancing Giselle with an American company at all. Only four months ago she was a leading ballerina in Leningrad's famed Kirov Ballet, delighting audiences during the company's guest appearance in London. Then, suddenly, she became the most spectacular cultural defector since Nureyev 91 years ago. In seniority, anyway, she outranked him—making top money as an established star, with an apartment of her own and a servant. But unlike Nureyev, she had chosen to come to the U.S. and join an American company precisely to do the adventurous ballets on which the U.S. prides itself and Russian officialdom discourages.
To meet this artistic challenge, and indeed, to get here at all, Makarova has already demonstrated a disposition to risk everything that caused one American dancer to refer to her, partly in awe, partly in envy, as "a little Russian juggernaut."
Early Drive. Explaining herself in a long discourse to London's Sunday Telegraph, shortly after her defection, she made clear that there was nothing seriously political about her decision—she had just felt frustrated as an artist, and though she does not say so exactly, she felt early on that she would and could make a name for herself.
Starting out in Leningrad, Makarova rushed through nine years of ballet training in six years. She rose quickly to top roles—and almost as quickly began to chafe under the hierarchical Kirov system, which she found herself challenging. She describes how she once completely upset a performance of La Bayadere, and made the audience laugh by doing "exactly the opposite to what everyone else was doing." Nevertheless, in 1961, at the age of 20, she made her debut in London as Giselle to general acclaim. She resented that these foreign accolades were never reported by the Russian press.