Vera Volkova


Vera Volkova was a Russian ballet dancer and expatriate dance teacher.
Born near Tomsk, she trained at Petrograd's Akim Volynsky's School of Russian Ballet with Maria Romanova. She also studied with the renowned Russian ballet mistress Agrippina Vaganova, and is credited with popularising the Vaganova method in the West. She danced professionally with various ensembles such as the GATOB and the Flying Russian Ballet before defecting in 1929. She defected in Shanghai as she was hopeful she could join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. When she heard of his death, she decided to stay in China where she danced with George Goncharov, and later opened a ballet school in Hong Kong.
In 1936 she and her husband, the architect Hugh Finch Williams, moved to London where she opened another ballet school. In 1943, she gave up dancing and opened a studio in Knightsbridge, and then in West Street in the West End. She spent a number of years teaching at the Sadler's Wells Ballet and Sadler's Wells Ballet School, training some of the leading ex English dancers of the 20th century. She also taught at the Ballet School of the La Scala Theatre in Milan. She became a permanent teacher at the Royal Danish Ballet school in the 1950s, again training some of the school's greatest dancers.

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