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MOSCOW, Nov 19 (AFP) - The celebrated Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, known for her inspirational performances that flouted Soviet convention, returns to the stage at a Moscow gala performance celebrating her 80th birthday this Sunday.
Plisetskaya, who brought performances charged with eroticism and modern choreography to tradition-bound Soviet ballet, will participate in Ave Maya, a performance choreographed by France's Maurice Bejart, in the Kremlin.
"I danced the classics but I dreamt of performing modern ballet, which was unrealistic when I was young," recalled Plisetskaya, who now lives between Germany, Lithuania and Russia.
Born in Moscow on November 20, 1925, Plisetskaya joined the Bolshoi Theatre in 1943, where she danced for 50 years, capturing audiences with the purity of her performances and her dazzling looks.
It was a career that was far from plain sailing.
She first sparked scandal in 1967 after a meeting in Moscow with Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso, who as a citizen of a friendly communist country was allowed to create for her the Carmen Suite.
"Carmen -- where every gesture, every look, every movement had meaning, was different from all other ballets... The Soviet Union was not ready for this sort of choreography," Plisetskaya said.
"It was war, they accused me of betraying classical dance."
Then came more controversies over her performances of dances by Bejart, as well as Roland Petit and the adaptations from Russian literature made by her husband, the composer Rodion Shchedrin.
"No other prima ballerina in the history of dance has succeeded in remaining the centre of attention for 60 years," said Tatyana Kuznetsova, a ballet critic.
Kuznetsova cites as examples the ballerina's performance of Bejart's Bolsero, a hymn to eroticism, at the age of 50, in which she was surrounded by 30 men, and her interpretation of a failed romance in Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog, when she was 60.
"Her dancing always seemed excessive -- heartbreaking passion, provocative manners," and a personality that neither her artistic detractors nor Soviet authorities succeeded in bridling, Kuznetsova said.
Sunday's gala will mix classical dance with flamenco, break-dance and martial arts. Ahead of the performance she has had standing ovations from fans at several Moscow festivals she has presided over.
"Plisetskaya is the only dancer who can ignore the critics" because her performances, unlike those of many other artists, look so good on film, said Yuliya Yakovleva, a reviewer from Moscow's Afisha culture magazine.
"She has a charisma that burns the film."
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