There is an authority that only a long life can confer, and Helga Monson de Kansky has it. At 99, she is still on the faculty of Pasadena Dance Theatre, teaching adult ballet with the same exacting care she has brought to the studio for more than six decades in California — as the Los Angeles Times reported this week.
A life built at the barre
Born in the early 1920s, Helga — she goes by her first name with students — received her foundational training in New York under a former Bolshoi prima ballerina, a rigorous classical grounding that opened doors across the Atlantic. According to her studio biography, she was engaged in the late 1940s for seasons at London's Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and in Paris.
Paris, and a company of high society
She went on to join the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, the company founded by the flamboyant impresario George de Cuevas, who claimed a disputed noble title and whose wife was a granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. The troupe was synonymous with Parisian high society in the postwar years — the milieu behind the "Parisian royalty" of the story's billing. She rose to soloist and performed principal roles in classics including Giselle and Les Sylphides, later dancing as a principal with The Netherlands Ballet before turning to teaching.
From Paris to Pasadena
By 1960 she had arrived in California, and she never left. She has taught across the San Gabriel Valley ever since — master classes, college appointments, and her own company — building, piece by piece, a local dance community rooted in the classical values she absorbed from some of the 20th century's great teachers. Her sessions at Pasadena Dance Theatre are described by the studio as a treat for serious adult students; those who train under her are, in effect, receiving a direct inheritance from the Russian-European tradition.
What keeps her going
At an age when most people have long since handed their work to others, Helga de Kansky is still in the room — still correcting an arm line, still counting the music. The discipline she learned as a young dancer did not leave her when she stopped performing; it became the thing she passes on. Her students may not fully grasp what they are standing near: a living thread connecting present-day Pasadena to postwar Paris and to Covent Garden in the 1940s. At 99, she is still teaching. The beat goes on.
