Anna Istomina

Anna Istomina, born Audree Ruth Thomas on October 9, 1925, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was a ballet dancer and teacher whose career spanned nearly two decades of performance before she turned to full-time instruction. She died on January 10, 2014, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at the age of 88.

Thomas began studying dance at age five at the Merinoff/Del Roy studio in Vancouver. As a teenager she trained under June Roper, a Texas-born teacher who had established herself in Vancouver in the early 1930s and placed multiple students into professional companies over the following decade. In January 1940, Thomas traveled to Seattle to audition for choreographer Léonide Massine and, at fourteen, became the youngest member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, performing under the stage name Anna Istomina. Within months of joining the company she was dancing the Swan Lake pas de trois alongside Rosella Hightower and Roland Guerard, and appeared as Princess Turandot opposite Massine as the Unknown Prince in Vienna 1814. The company toured extensively across North and South America, and Istomina eventually performed most of the roles in its repertoire. In 1944, following a Montreal performance in the title role of The Snow Maiden, she was received by the Governor General of Canada.

After the 1943–44 season Istomina departed the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and her Broadway credits date to this period. Between 1944 and 1945 she appeared on Broadway with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and in 1945 she served as première danseuse in the Broadway production of La Vie Parisienne, listed in verified records as La Parisienne. She subsequently joined Massine's short-lived Ballet Russe Highlights before continuing to work across several other companies over the next fourteen years.

In 1947 and 1948 Istomina danced two seasons as Guest Prima Ballerina at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, performing both the classical repertoire and new productions staged by Margarita Wallmann. After a Buenos Aires performance as Odette in Swan Lake, she was sought out backstage by Argentina's First Lady, Eva Perón. She later toured as First Soloist with Mia Slavenska's Ballet Variante, running the company for a period and performing Slavenska's roles while Slavenska recovered from an injury. In 1950 she appeared at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts as a soloist, performing Petipa's choreography from Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, Massine's Pavane to music by Ravel, and a Swan Lake pas de deux with Leon Danielian. That same year, billed as Audree Thomas, she headlined a production called Carnival at Radio City Music Hall, dancing a pas de deux with George Zoritch, and partnered with Roman Jasinski in a St. Louis Municipal Opera production of Emmerich Kalman's Countess Maritza and with Jasinski and Robert Pagent in Victor Herbert's Mlle. Modiste. In 1952 she danced with Ballet Russe Concerts, a touring offshoot of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. During the mid-1950s she served as Guest Prima Ballerina with the Ballet Nacional de Venezuela and later returned to Venezuela to teach.

In 1948 Thomas married fellow dancer Sergei Ismailoff in Vancouver. Born in Moscow in 1912, Ismailoff had left Europe in the early years of the Second World War and had danced with Thomas in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The couple had two sons. Their younger son, Greg, born in 1956, pursued a ballet career under the name Gregory Ismailov and died of AIDS at age thirty, shortly after joining Maria Tallchief's Chicago City Ballet.

Thomas retired from performing in 1958 and began teaching full time under the name Audree Ismailoff at dance schools in Great Neck and White Plains, New York, that she and her husband had founded. After Sergei's death in 1969 she continued teaching at the Dance Academy of White Plains. She retired from teaching in 1985 and returned to British Columbia, settling in West Vancouver, where she occasionally taught as a guest at local dance schools. In her later years she was diagnosed with lymphoma and moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to live with her older son, Anthony.

Beyond her performing career, Thomas is connected to a geographic landmark on the British Columbia coast. Shortly after she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, her parents, Harry and Marjorie Thomas, established a homestead on Nelson Island, approximately sixty miles north of Vancouver, on the traditional lands of the Sechelt First Nation. Her mother named the property Ballet Bay in her daughter's honor, and the name was later made official. Thomas's ashes were scattered there, and a plaque commemorating her as the Ballerina of Ballet Bay was placed on a rock bluff at the back of the bay.