After performing all over the world, this 99-year-old still teaches ballet
- Last updated: August 17, 2026 | 09:46
In 1953, French journalist J.C. Vérots reviewed the Marquis de Cuevas ballet company’s performance of “Les Sylphides.” The show starred some of the most iconic post-war ballet dancers — Serge Golovine, Rosella Hightower, Jacqueline Moreau — but Vérots didn’t focus on them. He was enthralled by Helga Monson de Kansky. “We were surprised to find ourselves preferring Helga Monson. Remember her name. It will soon be a famous one,”
Vérots wrote in French. Vérots was wrong. Monson de Kansky never became a world-famous ballerina. Just a few years later, she started a family and had to balance her responsibilities as a performer and ballet instructor with those of motherhood, ultimately returning to the U.S. But more than 70 years later, Monson de Kansky hasn’t lost her love of dance.
The 99-year-old Sierra Madre resident still teaches ballet at Pasadena Dance Theatre. She’s more frail than she once was, and recently battled a bout of pneumonia that hospitalised her. But the moment she’s asked about ballet, a smile spreads across her face, and she lights up talking about her journey.
Monson de Kansky began dancing as a child in Independence, Kansky. During the Great Depression, her family moved from city to city, and in each new place, her parents found her a dance school. Dance always spoke to her, and she explained that the “highlight” of her “young years” was when her father drove them to Topeka to watch a German modern dance company perform “The Green Table.”
“That was the first professional performance I ever saw of ballet or anything,” Monson de Kansky said during a recent interview at her home, where she has lived for 60 years. “And I was just mesmerised. Between the music, the lighting and the dancing, jumping up and down from the table, it was a wonderful performance.”
Monson de Kansky’s midcentury modern house is filled with decades of love. Classical music CDs and cassette tapes that Monson de Kansky records for ballet class clutter her shelves. The walls are lined with paintings done by her husband, Igor — a painter and sculptor whom The Times profiled in 1991. He also built the wooden kitchen cabinets. The house is tucked down a long, gravel driveway, surrounded by nature, which Monson de Kansky says is the most important thing she’s learned to appreciate.
“I have a little broader vision of the world. I’m more attuned to — especially since they’re tearing it up — to our surroundings, to the birds,” Monson de Kansky said, while those same birds chirped in the background. “I didn’t even think about a little bird before.” That’s likely because she was far too busy.
The day after graduating from high school, Monson de Kansky left on a train from Atlanta to study ballet under Elizabeth Anderson-Ivantzova in New York City. Monson de Kansky trained with the former Bolshoi Ballet prima ballerina for three years, until her father inquired about her future. “My dad wrote and said, ‘Is it about time you got a job?’ Because we were poor, and he was supporting this, bless his heart.”
Monson de Kansky auditioned for Colonel Wassily de Basil’s Ballet Russe while they were touring in America. She was accepted and had only seven days to obtain a passport before she took a boat across the ocean to England to begin performing at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. Thrown into the thick of a ballet season, the dancer explained that there wasn’t time to be lonely. “There was no time,” she said. “It was constant come, go, rehearsals.”
After the Ballet Russe disbanded, Monson de Kansky toured with the Marquis de Cuevas ballet company for nine years. This gave her the opportunity to perform throughout Europe, South America, North Africa and even during inauguration events for Prince Rainier III of Monaco. In Europe, she studied with ballet legends including Olga Preobrajenska, Bronislava Nijinska and Vera Volkova.
She danced in countless roles, her favorites being the prelude to “Les Sylphides,” one of four principals in “Pas de Quatre” and queen Myrtha in “Giselle,” although Monson de Kansky found that role to be “just hell. It was so hard.”
During those whirlwind years, she also met Igor. Monson de Kansky was performing in the role of a street dancer in the ballet “Petrouchka,” and Igor played the organ grinder. Smitten by Monson de Kansky’s performance, he presented the dancer with a watercolor painting of their characters in the ballet.
The pair married three years later in 1954 and had their first child, Svetlana. After taking a short break to care for her daughter, Monson de Kansky went back to work. (“People jump in and take your roles,” she said of the Marquis de Cuevas.) She returned to the company for eight months before traveling north to perform as a principal ballerina for Het Netherlands Ballet (now known as the Dutch National Ballet).
The Netherlands was “heaven.” She loved eating herring and working with the “wonderful” Sonia Gaskell, but it wasn’t worth being separated from Svetlana.
“Svetlana bounced back and forth from my mother-in-law and from my cousin,” Monson de Kansky said. “I had to leave about 10 months later. I left to go back to Paris because I just couldn’t be away from my family.”
Back in Paris, Monson de Kansky gave birth to a second daughter and focused on teaching. Her students were primarily Parisian royalty (Igor’s half-sister, French actor Odile Versois, married Count François Reynier Ambroise Henri Pozzo di Borgo), with their lessons inside the duchess’ palace.
After more than a decade abroad, it was time for the ballerina to return to America. The de Kansky family settled in California, first in Los Angeles, then in Newport Beach, followed by three years in Altadena before buying a home in Sierra Madre.
It was a major change in pace from her 20s, which were almost entirely focused on ballet. When we talked about dancing in post-war Europe, Monson de Kansky simply shrugged. She was there to dance, and while she was training, she didn’t have time to see the cities where she performed. For Monson de Kansky, the dance studio is her second home. It’s all she grew up knowing, and these days, it’s where some of her deepest friendships and greatest joys are. And even at 99, she has no plans to retire, at least, she says, “Not as long as I can walk.”
Tribune News Service