Book Launch (March 2020)

On Monday 09^th March, a new book on twentieth century ballet histories was launched at the iconic eighteenth century theatre, the Manoel Theatre in Valletta. Princess Poutatine and the Art of Ballet in Malta, the first book on ballet histories in Malta, focuses on the tireless efforts of Princess Nathalie Poutiatine (1904-1984) and her significant legacy in dance on the Island of Malta. This new book, published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti in collaboration with Midsea Publishers, brings together the scholarship of Dr Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel, Head of Research at the Faculty of Education (Royal Academy of Dance) in London. The book explores the connections between the philosophies of ballet, in the studio and on the stage, together with the inspiration and aspiration of the iconic Ballets Russes, Anna Pavlova and Lubov Egorova. It chronicles Poutiatine’s significant work between 1930 and 1978, along with the political and cultural histories associated with the colonial, independent-seeking and republican eras of Malta. Opening speeches by Tanya Bayona MQR, Daphne Palmer-Morewood, and commentaries by Professor Henry Frendo and Professor Yosanne Vella from the University of Malta, marked the importance of this key moment in Maltese cultural histories.

On reviewing the book, Professor Emerita Lynn Garafola (Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1998) wrote: “Thanks to Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel’s Princess Poutiatine and the Art of Ballet in Malta, we meet one of the emigration’s lesser-known figures, a woman who transformed the art she could not practice into a quietly heroic calling.” Professor Janice Ross (Like a bomb going off: Leonid Yacobsen, 2015) wrote: “Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel’s major achievement in Princess Nathalie Poutiatine and the art of Ballet in Malta, is her capacity to bring attention to these underpinnings essential to the bursts of individual voice and cultural identity in ballet. She has excavated a lost history and, in the process, has produced a timely reminder of the life of privilege of many who studied ballet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Russia, reminding us how it endured as a part of their identities in exile as well.”