A Love of Dance that Began in Shanghai – Ballerina Tamara Toumanova

I saw these photos the other day of Danny Kaye dancing with ballerina Tamara Toumanova in 1945 (photos by Peter Stackpole) which reminded me that Tamara’s love of ballet began in Shanghai.

As a child the future ballerina and inspiration to the choreographer George Balanchine (when she was one of the famous “Baby Ballerina’s”), Tamara Toumanova, was a White Russian refugee child who saw her first ballet in Shanghai in the 1920s, though didn’t formerly study ballet until her family had moved on from China to Paris. Toumanova’s family had fled the Bolshevik Revolution to Shanghai, where they stayed for a year before moving to a refugee camp for White Russians in Cairo and then to Paris.