Alexander Sacharoff

Born Alexander Tsukerman in Mariupol in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine), Alexander Sacharoff studied painting in Paris and acrobatics in Munich before beginning his dance career in 1910. Drawing on Renaissance and neoclassical art to inform his gestural lexicon, Sacharoff emulated classical Greek portrayals of mythic figures in his compositions. He is best known for developing, along with his wife, Clothilde von Derp, a modernist style of pantomime as a dance idiom. The Saccharoffs, as the couple became known, reached the height of their popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, touring widely from their base in Paris.