She danced Giselle over a thousand times. Never the same twice. Galina Ulanova moved like grief had physical weight. Critics said watching her was like seeing someone's soul leave their body in real time. She didn't perform emotion; she inhabited it, and audiences found it almost unbearable. Born in St. Petersburg on January 8, 1910, into a family of Mariinsky Theatre dancers, Ulanova trained under Agrippina Vaganova, whose teaching method became the standard for Soviet ballet. She joined the Kirov Ballet at eighteen and danced the leading roles in Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, and Giselle with an intensity that made them seem like new works. Stalin admired her. She became the Bolshoi's prima ballerina when the company brought her to Moscow in 1944, and for the next sixteen years she was the face of Soviet culture abroad. She stayed silent through the purges, kept her head down, kept dancing. She won four Stalin Prizes. She was the most decorated artist in the Soviet Union. When she finally performed at Covent Garden in London in 1956, at forty-six, she was dancing Romeo and Juliet. Hardened British critics, many of whom had expected propaganda dressed in tutus, wept in their seats. The reviews the next morning were ecstatic. One critic wrote that she made every ballerina he'd ever seen look like she was pretending. She turned every role into something almost painful to watch, not because the technique was imperfect but because the emotional honesty was so total that it stripped away the usual protective distance between performer and audience. There was nothing ornamental about her dancing. She retired from performing at fifty in 1960 and spent the next thirty-eight years teaching at the Bolshoi, shaping generations of dancers. She was famously demanding and economical with praise. She died on March 21, 1998, at 88. The Bolshoi Theatre dimmed its lights.