Captives of Terpsichore (Perm Ballet Documentary, 1994)

The film focuses on one of the greatest ballet teachers of the 20th century, Ludmila Pavlovna Sakharova. Sakharova is the current artistic director of the Perm Ballet school. The Perm school is one of the top 3 ballet schools in Russia, with the others being the Vaganova Academy and Bolshoi school. Sakharova was the teacher that trained her most famous student and probably the most remarkable teenage student ever, Nadezhda Pavlova. At the same time that she was teaching Pavlova, her other student, Olga Chenchikova, was winning the silver medal against older professional dancers in the 1973 Moscow Ballet Competition when 16 year old Pavlova became the only ballerina to win the Grand Prize at a major competition of that level.

The film starts with one of their foreign students, a girl from Ireland talking. The student that is the main focus of this documentary is Natasha Balakhnicheva . Her fellow classmates shown are the girl from Ireland, two Japanese students and three Russians. American reviews of this film were very critical of Sakharova's marine sergeant domination. She was considered like an evil witch and the filmproducer was criticized for showing too much of the girls' faces while being yelled at. Sakharova might have traits of a dictator, but when you see how much energy that she puts into teaching and how she acts at the end, you see that she loves ballet and loves her students, but sometimes has difficulty showing her love to her students. Anyone who could help produce a Nadezhda Pavlova is a very special teacher. Part of the film focuses on the 3rd International Arabesque competition held in Perm. Among the important ballet personalities involved in this competition and shown in the film are Maya Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova. During the competition in 1994, the Kirov Mariinsky star, Lariissa Lezhnina is shown outside the back stage door, but only for a few seconds. Natasha Balakhnicheva is shown in the competition dancing the pas de deux from Giselle, Carmen and a new ballet.