Cleopatra Lorintiu « Gabriel Popescu »

Remember the gold year of the ballet

   I meet the ballet dancer Gabriel Popescu thanks to Margaret Zirra, a former ballerina of Theater Ion Dacian Operetta Bucharest.
   So many memories bind us together. I wrote pages about her life and that of her husband, writer and director of radio, professor Guy Pariseau. I was at their home  in Alberta, near Edmonton, in Canada during  December  2000.

    On the occasion of her return to Bucharest, Margareta Zirra insisted Gabriel Popescu introduce myself .He was by chance, in Bucharest, He came from Italy where , even his age, signed choreography as ballet master for the Company "Marinel Stefanescu and Liliana Cosi".


    Gabriel Popescu name represented for the generation of our parents as well as for the history of the European contemporary ballet, so much!

    On the other hand, it was a little bit difficult to explain to the current young people why the classic ballet was so loved in this time and how Gabriel Popescu was a size.

    He agreed easily to answer my questions.
    Regrettably, I had not obtained the right to make a professional shooting for the public channel TV where I worked.

   As usual, the decision-makers of moment, didn’t know about his activity and the ballet seemed no way a priority for them.

. Although the president of the country, in the time, Mr. Ion Iliescu had organized a festive evening has the Opera to honor  the artists of the Opera and the ballet and give them the golden medal of big knight.
Among them, Gabriel Popescu.

   Then I took my VHS camera , an antiquity and I went to Ileana Iliescu to film him.
I could not disappoint him;
as I had no operator , I fixed it to the foot and I began .

    I must ' admit that he was enchanted, he answered fast the questions, him, the professor of ballet of famous Carla Fracci and Marcia Haydee.*

( *Marcia Haydee was born in Brazil in 1939. She studied in Rio the Janeiro and then went to Sadler's Wells School. Later she studied with Egorova and Preobrajenska. Joined Grand Ballet of  Marquis de Cuevas in 1957 and then moved to Stuttgart Ballet in 1961, where she was promoted prima ballerina in 1962.She was one of the great dance actresses of her generation,)

We must remember that he was  the principal dancer of the Opera of Zurich, big medal-holder of Moscow, the star on the stage of the Kirov Theater, friend  of big Parisian dressmakers and the friend of Rudolf Noureev .)

   At first, he attacked a big chocolate-brown cake with Margareta, indeed on, both, septuagenarians who made of the regime all the life, and who could now feast with a good at will dessert.

    We spoke about hours about the ballet, the friends and the enemies, the opera, the fashion and Bucharest. After this first meeting, I had the impression that we knew for years along.

   It was not true, years when he shone on the stage of the Opera and here received the biggest international prize, me, I had not been born yet!
   Look a little extract of the interview made in the spring of 2002.

M.Gabriel Popescu, you are a reference for those who like the ballet in Rumania. You marked by your artistic activity a moment glittering for years 50-60. It is also necessary to recognize that the new generations do not know about this period.
You returned to Bucharest after so many last years abroad, in France and in Italy. Could we look back a little on the atmosphere of the sixties?
When you began to dance on the stage of the Opera of Bucharest?
 

 In 1948, in the show of the «Red Poppy ", made by a boss dancer use trickery.
We lived a time of confusions) .
I danced practically in all the opera shows of time, during 19 years of ballet, until 1965.
And how was the Opera has the time?

It was a madness! I danced with Irinel Liciu, I remember myself our big success.
The theatres were full?

Full? That's an understatement … When we danced, sometimes; we did not hear any more the music because of the applauses.
It was really the golden time of the opera, when Nicolae Herlea, Loghin, Zenaida Pally and so many other magnificent singers occurred on stage.

And who were the ballet masters who signed the choreography?

The truth is that they signed the choreography, but the steps, it is us whom we had created. The choreographs, they had their importance, in a certain sense cannot deny for example the talent of Oleg Danovschi or Romanovschi.
But the intimacy of dance, it belonged to us to make it.
I say it to you with sincerity; I was all my life very sincere, I often lost because of this quality. But nobody was able to deprive me my talent or my artistic capacity.
And even if I was sometimes hated, has cause of my gossip, we had no courage to say it to me opposite. Oleg Danovschi had the genius of a choreographer but he had no capacity to create steps. They were thousands of steps there, and I, I always gave the solution. I always knew what choose as our couple of ballet.

What made you so famous in that time?

We two, Irinel  Liciu  (  in the photography) and me, we succeeded has to make a couple as a violin and the arc. I was as a glove for the dance of Irinel Liciu! We got in a magnificent way and we made a success of an absolute performance; one made five or six consequent shows as Scheherazade, The Lake of swans, Le Tricorne …Everybody came to the Opera, even the heads of state, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, Tito..

In what opportunity you stayed abroad ? By knowing that it isn’t road there of return? We spoke about realities during the communism and the soviet influences in Romania, some years after Stalin's death.

It was the Festival of Champs Élysée,  in Paris.
May be you must tell us more about yours successes. You know that in the period the information did not circulate any more and the name of the artists who left the communist country was erased.
Maybe I should write a book , here in Bucharest. Meeting all the friends and colleagues who are alive, here, at Luli (Ileana Iliescu n. n., Romanian ballet dancer ) normally one should speak whole days between us all, and that could make us live again this time to make a book together.

That I left Romania , and I joint Paris, everybody helped me: Margot Fonteyn (1919 - 1991, principal dancer of origin British.), Rudolf Noureev, Christian Dior, David Wibson from Covent Garden, big personalities of the artistic world world .
 I danced, I was successful, after that I danced in Zurich a lot or I was a ballet master. In Zurich I invited moreover Rumanian singers by using my influence with the artistic managements: as Zenaida Palli, Nicolae Herlea, David Ohanesian, Octav Enigarescu, Ion Buzea, I do not remember to myself at the moment all the names...

 NB: We did not write this book. We did not meet any more. I left Bucharest for Paris , the autumn of the same year,2002.
He stayed in Romania, and four years later, he left us.
For ever, this time .

 *Gabriel Popescu began the study of dance with the maestro Floria Capsali.
He started dance on the stage of Bucharest Opera in 1948 when he was 16 years.
In 1949 he was taking advanced courses in Balchoi Theater in Moscow. early he became a State Prize Laureate and he received the Gold Medal at the International Ballet Contests in Berlin and Warsaw. He received the First Prize in Moscow, in 1964 for an exceptional pas-de-deux in Don Quixote Ballet partnered by Larisa Şorban, who was then the principal dancer of the Cluj Opera Ballet. In his early years the danced particularly in the USSR, as the partner of gretest ballerinas like Olga Lepeshinskaya, Ala Ossipenko, Maia Plisetskaya, Natalia Makarova.

At the Bucharest Opera, his repertoire was the classical one, the ballets were inspired by Russian or Romanian folklore,: Călin,Iancu Jianu, as well as The Fountain of Baccisarai, Red Poppy, or masterpieces of Glazunov.

He formed a mythical duo with Irinel Liciu the principal dancer of Romania Opera between 1949-1965.

In 1965 he had difficulties with the communist regime, and he solicited political asylum in Paris.
He danced in  Great Britain (where he was denied residence )and Switzerland. This is the time of his greatest successes.
He was principal dancer, choreographer and ballet maestro at the Zurich Opera, and from 1975 with the Berlin Opera.

His became a beautiful carrier in Italy in 1978, when he became a ballet professor to the school in Reggio Emilia led by Marinel Stefanescu and Liliana Cosi.

Collaboration at The Rome Opera, La Scala in Milan, the Turin Ballet Theater, the Verona Arenas . He was the personal instructor of megastars such as Carla Fracci, Gheorghe Iancu and Marcia Haydee from Stuttgart.

He was a ballet maestro with Roland Petit’s Company in Marseille, assistant to choreographies signed by, Maurice Béjart, Glen Tetley, Uwe Scholz.

He return in Romania after the revolution to meet friends and colleagues from Opera. He became Knight Rank Star of Romania Order, awarded by President Iliescu ( 2002).See Page Balet