Khyva St. Albans

Khyva St. Albans, born Eleanore Saenger in New York City in 1896, was an American actress, dancer, and choreographer who also performed under the names Zara Alexeyewa and Ayenara Alexeyeva. She died in 1989 in Ajijic, Mexico, at the age of 92. Her parents were both professional musicians: her mother, Charlotte Welles Saenger, was an organist, and her father, Oscar Saenger, was a baritone singer and voice coach. Both parents supported and financed her pursuit of a theatrical career until Oscar Saenger's death in 1929.

St. Albans made two Broadway appearances between 1915 and 1918. In 1915 she took on the role of Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet, performing opposite George Relph as Romeo. Critic Heywood Broun, writing in the New York Tribune, observed that her performance lacked passion. Three years later she appeared as a dancer in The Awakening, a 1918 production written by Ruth Sawyer in which Theodore Kosloff also starred. That production drew sharply negative notices, with the New York Times describing it as "a weird and very artificial play" that was "almost unbelievably crude and old-fashioned," while a writer for Life suggested the show exemplified precisely the kind of theatrical misstep that ought to have been prevented.

Beyond Broadway, St. Albans translated a work by Leonid Andreyev under the title The Painted Laugh, which she both produced and starred in on the London stage in 1921, with Basil Rathbone in the male lead. The production became notorious when St. Albans and her mother disappeared following poor reviews for the first matinee, leaving the cast and financial backers unpaid. She was subsequently located at a hotel in Paris. From 1926 to 1927, St. Albans served as co-director of ballet at the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company alongside her partner, dancer Holger Alexeyev-Mehner.

In the 1940s, after a series of extended visits, St. Albans settled permanently in Mexico with Alexeyev-Mehner, who died in 1944. She made her home in Ajijic on the shore of Lake Chapala, where she became a recognizable local figure known as "La Rusa." An American visitor described her appearance as that of "a ghostly figure in flowing silks and gossamer," wearing a wide-brimmed hat, holding herself with a straight back, and wearing a long, thick braid of hair that reached her waist. In her later years she drew attention to the environmental problem of pollution in Lake Chapala. Although she had claimed various birthplaces during her lifetime, including France, she had been born in New York City and died in Ajijic in 1989.