A living transmission

Her grandfather, Zare Muradyan, a graduate of the Moscow ballet school and a dancer at the Bolshoi Theatre, left Moscow for Armenia and then gave many years to the Spendiarian Theatre in Yerevan. It is to that arrival that the family and the Armenian ballet world trace the establishment of classical ballet in the country. Her grandmother, Maria Grigorievna Sliztchenko, from St Petersburg, entered the city's ballet school, the former Imperial school, in 1924, and was both a ballerina and a teacher, carrying that classical tradition. Together, trained in the great schools of the Soviet era, they established an artistic and pedagogical foundation that continued through the next generations.

The pedagogical line reaches back to Ekaterina Heidenreich, who taught Maria Grigorievna Sliztchenko and in 1944 founded the Perm ballet school. Decades later, Victoria trained at that same school with Lidia Grigorievna Ulanova, whose own pedagogical lineage is also connected to Heidenreich.

Victoria's mother, Zhanna Muradyan, and her father were both dancers at the Spendiarian Theatre. A graduate of the Yerevan State Choreographic School and a student of Dina Nikolaevna Gatsina, Zhanna Muradyan also trained with the legendary Natalia Dudinskaya during Dudinskaya's visits to Yerevan, a direct link to the great classical tradition of St Petersburg. Having become a soloist of the Yerevan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Spendiarian Theatre, she later taught for many years at the Kharkiv Ballet School, in Ukraine, where the family had settled after leaving Armenia, then spent six years as Senior Ballet Teacher at the Tokyo Ballet. She was also Victoria's first teacher: Victoria was her pupil in those Kharkiv years. Victoria's father worked in Yerevan with the pedagogue Maxim Martirosyan, before further developing his training in Moscow, in the line of Petr Antonovich Pestov.

Zhanna Muradyan's students dance as principals and soloists in leading international companies in Europe, Asia and North America. Today she is Senior Ballet Teacher at Ananyan Ballet Monaco, teaching alongside Victoria, with the same children.

The Ananyan family's artistic lineage extends across generations and far beyond ballet. It includes dancers, writers and literary figures, visual artists and opera singers: a family in which the performing, literary and visual arts have long existed side by side.

The tradition continued across the family: Victoria's brother, Edgar Ananyan, trained at the Yerevan Choreographic School, was a principal dancer at the Kharkiv Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre and also worked as a choreographer and stage creator, notably alongside Teodor Popescu and Svetlana Kolyvanova. Other dancers marked the family too, including on her mother's side: dance ran across several generations, in an environment in which the arts were lived rather than treated as an extracurricular activity.