Leon Woizikovsky (1897-1975). Polish dancer and ballet master

Leon Woizikovsky was born in Warsaw in 1897 and studied at the Warsaw Ballet School. He joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1915, where he remained until Diaghilev’s death in 1929. His famous roles included Petrushka and the Faun in L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, both originally performed by Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1919 he danced with Lydia Sokolova in the tarantella from Léonide Massine’s La Boutique fantasque and in Le Tricorne. Already close, they later married. Sokolova said of Woizikovsky that he ‘was never an actor, his talent was for genuine dancing’. As such he worked under both Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine.

The 1930s saw Woizikovsky working for many companies, first with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where he stayed until 1934. From 1935 to 1937 he ran his own Les Ballets de Leon Woizikovsky, and travelled to Australia in 1936 for a very successful tour with Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russe. He returned to Poland in 1937, becoming director of the Ballets Polonais in 1938. From 1939 to 1945 Woizikovsky worked with the Ballet Russe, first in Paris and then mostly in the Americas. In 1945, he returned to Warsaw, where he taught. Later, in 1958 and 1960, he staged Petrushka and Schéhérazade for London Festival Ballet, where he was also ballet master for a time. In 1959 he became ballet master for Massine’s Ballet Europeo, thereafter working in Antwerp, Cologne and, in 1974, in Bonn. He returned to Warsaw shortly before his death in 1975.