Ludmilla Chiriaeff

Who was Ludmilla Chiriaeff?

Ludmilla Chiriaeff, CC GOQ was a Canadian ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and company director.

Born in Riga, Latvia, to a Russian father and a Polish mother, Ludmilla Alexandrovna Otsup was raised and trained in Berlin, where she studied with Alexandra Nikolaeva, a former ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, with Nikolaeva's daughter and son-in-law Xenia and Édouard Borovanky, and with Evgenia Eduardova. Her career was interrupted by the conflict of World War II, during which she was confined to a Nazi labor camp on the unfounded suspicion of being Jewish. She escaped during a bombing raid and, with the assistance of the Red Cross, made her way to Switzerland, where she was able to resume her ballet training and revive her professional career in Lausanne and Geneva. While resident in the Suisse romande, she married Russian artist Alexis Shiriaev, whose surname was spelled Chiriaeff, in the French style.

After immigrating with her family to Canada in 1952, Chiriaeff settled in Montreal, Quebec, opened a ballet school, and soon began to create dances for Société Radio-Canada, the French-language public television service.