Marcia Haydée

Marcia Haydée Salaverry Pereira da Silva was born on 18 April 1937 in Niterói, Brazil. A ballet dancer, choreographer, and company director, she built one of the most distinguished careers in twentieth-century classical dance and appeared on Broadway in 1975 with Ballet Theatre.

Haydée's formal training took her from Brazil to London, where she studied at the Royal Ballet School, and then to Monaco, where she joined the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in 1957. She entered the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961 and was appointed prima ballerina the following year, beginning a long and defining association with the company under artistic director John Cranko.

Working closely with Cranko, Haydée originated several leading roles in his full-length ballets, among them Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in 1962, Tatiana in Onegin, and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. Her portrayal of Kate drew notice from The Times, which observed that she matched her partner in speed and brilliance and that the duet in which the characters admit their love contained difficult Bolshoi-style lifts, throws, and catches executed with apparent ease. Richard Cragun was her frequent dance partner in Stuttgart for thirty years, a collaboration that began with Romeo and Juliet.

Kenneth MacMillan also created roles for Haydée in Stuttgart, including parts in Las Hermanas, based on Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, in 1963; The Song of the Earth, set to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, in 1965; and Requiem, after Fauré's Requiem, in 1976. John Neumeier created for her the title role in Lady of the Camellias, with music by Frédéric Chopin, which premiered in 1978, as well as the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Maurice Béjart created roles for Haydée in several productions, including Wien, Wien, nur du allein, Divine, a ballet centered on Greta Garbo, Isadora in 1976, and Gaiete Parisienne, performed both in Stuttgart and with Béjart's company in Brussels.

Following Cranko's death, Haydée served as director of the Stuttgart Ballet from 1976 to 1995. She also directed the Santiago Ballet, the ballet company of the Municipal Theatre of Santiago in Chile, from 1992 to 1996 and again from 2003.

Haydée appeared in a number of films, including the dance film Die Kameliendame, directed by John Neumeier and produced by NDR in 1986–87; Golgotha, filmed in Germany and Bulgaria between 1992 and 1994 and directed by Mikhail Pandoursky; and the German literary film Poem – Ich setzte den Fuß in die Luft und sie trug, directed by Ralf Schmerberg and produced between 2000 and 2002. Her longtime ballet partner Jean Christophe Blavier produced two documentary works about her: the DVD M. for Marcia in 2006 and the documentary Marcia Haydée – Das Schönste kommt noch!, first broadcast by 3sat on 15 December 2007. She also authored two books: John Cranko, with an introduction by Walter Erich Schäfer, published in 1973, and Mein Leben für den Tanz in 1996.

Among the honors Haydée received were the Deutscher Tanzpreis in 1989, the Nijinsky Award in 2003, the Order of Cultural Merit of Brazil in 2004, the Staufer Medal from the State of Baden-Württemberg in 2007, Germany's Order of Merit in March 2009, and the Life Time Achievement Award from the Prix de Lausanne in 2019. Stuttgart granted her honorary citizenship, and she holds honorary professorships at both the University of Stuttgart and the University of Mannheim.