Mia Slavenska

Mia Slavenska, born Mia Čorak on 20 February 1916 in Slavonski Brod, Croatia, was a Croatian-American ballerina who became one of the leading figures of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and later brought her work to Broadway through the Slavenska-Franklin Company in 1952. She died on 5 October 2002 in Los Angeles, and her cremated ashes are interred at the Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb.

Slavenska was the daughter of pharmacist Milan Čorak and his wife Gedwiga. When she was one year old, the family relocated to Zagreb, where she began her dance training at the Josephine Weiss school and under Margarita Frohman, a former ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater who had also performed with Diaghilev's Russian Seasons. She made her stage debut in 1924 in Baranović's ballet Licitarsko srce at what is now the Croatian National Theatre, having begun dancing at the age of four. By the age of sixteen or seventeen she had become the prima ballerina of the Zagreb Opera's ballet troupe.

Political circumstances in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then under a royalist Serbian monarchy, resulted in a ban on her performing in Croatia, which led her and her mother to move to Berlin in 1935. It was at this time that she adopted the stage name Mia Slavenska, as Croatian dancers were legally required to perform under the Yugoslav banner. At the 1936 Berlin Dance Olympics, held in conjunction with the Olympic Games, she won the award for choreography and dance. Despite this recognition, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia continued to deny her the right to perform in her Croatian homeland.

She moved to Paris in 1937, where she appeared in two films: Nights of Fire, directed by Marcel L'Herbier, and The Dying Swan, directed by Jean Benoit-Levy and Marie Epstein. She also studied in Paris under Lubov Egorova, Mathilde Kschessinska, and Olga Preobrajenska, and had previously studied in Vienna under Leo Dubois, G. Krauss, and L. von Weiden. She had also studied with Bronislava Nijinska. In 1938, Slavenska joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where she served as a principal dancer alongside Markova, Danilova, and Tumanova. She remained with the company from 1938 to 1952 and again from 1954 to 1955, and traveled with the troupe to the United States at the outset of World War II. She became an American citizen in 1947.

During the war years, in 1944, she established her own company, Ballet Variante, in Hollywood, which operated for a period before closing. In the early 1950s, following the cessation of the Monte Carlo Ballet's operations, she co-founded the Slavenska-Franklin Ballet Company with Frederic Franklin. The company's most significant production was a ballet adaptation of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, choreographed by Valerie Bettis and first performed in 1952 at Her Majesty's Theatre in Montreal, in which Slavenska performed the role of Blanche DuBois. The Slavenska-Franklin Company brought her to Broadway in 1952 before closing after approximately three years due to financial difficulties. Among her notable partners throughout her performing career were Frederic Franklin, Oleg Tupin, and Milorad Mišković. In the second half of the 1950s she danced with the London Festival Ballet alongside Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova.

Slavenska was also a significant teacher across several decades. As early as 1938, while the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was touring California, she opened a ballet studio in Los Angeles where sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief were among her students. From 1960 she maintained a studio in New York, where her students included Lucinda Childs, who described Slavenska as a demanding and serious teacher of the Russian school. She directed the Fort Worth Civic Ballet in Texas for three years. After returning to Los Angeles, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1969 to 1983, and at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1984. Her daughter produced a documentary about her life titled Mia: A Dancer's Journey. Slavenska had been married to Dr. K. Neumann.