Tereza Durova

From Circopedia

1 Animal Trainer
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Animal Trainer

By Dominique Jando

A talented animal trainer and a member of one of Russia's oldest and most celebrated circus dynasty, Tereza Durova (1926-2012) was born Tereza Vasilievna Milva on September 5, 1926, in Voronezh, in the southwestern part of Russia. Her mother was Maria Anatolievna Durova (1891-?), the daughter of the legendary clown and animal trainer Anatoly Durov (1864-1916), and her father was Vasily Vasilievich Milva (1884-1962—or Milwa, its German spelling), an acrobat.

Maria and Tereza Milva: Family Roots

Vasily Milva & Maria Durova (1917)

The lineage of the various members of the Durov dynasty is generally complicated, due to an uncanny number of illegitimate unions and adopted names in both branches of the family (whether Vladimir's or Anatoly's), to which one may add the fact that this lineage was continued in large part by women. Tereza Durova's lineage is indeed no exception.

Vasily Milva's birth name was Hundadze; he was of Georgian origins, but he had been abandoned by his parents when he was a baby: They left him in a cat's basket in front of a balagan(Russian) A fairground booth or theater. (Russian fairgrounds booth). The owners of the balagan(Russian) A fairground booth or theater. adopted the child, and gave him the name of Vasily, which was the name of the basket's true owner, their cat! Vasily’s new family, who were traveling entertainers, trained him as an acrobat. As such, he later went to work in Denmark, where he eventually took the Danish nationality, with the chosen name of Milva. Vasiliy would discover his true identity much later in life.

Vasily had a hand-to-handAn acrobatic act in which one or more acrobats do hand-balancing in the hands of an under-stander. balancing act with a partner named Nader. He met Maria Durova at Circus Ciniselli in St. Petersburg (Russia's oldest circus building, which is still extent) where they were working in the same program just before the Bolshevik Revolution—she as an assistant to her brother, Anatoly Anatolievich Durov, he as a hand-to-handAn acrobatic act in which one or more acrobats do hand-balancing in the hands of an under-stander. balancer with his partner. There, they fell in love, and they eventually got married. In 1926, Maria gave birth to a daughter in Voronezh, Anatoly Durov's family seat, whom she called Tereza in homage to her own mother, Tereza Stadtler (who never legally married Anatoly Durov).

Tereza's father may have been a hand balancer, but he had married into the Durov family, a dynasty of animal trainers: Thus, he and Maria soon created their own animal act, and Vasily became an animal trainer—although this was not really new to him: He and his partner had previously used small monkeys in their acrobatic act. In time, they taught Tereza how to work with all sorts of animals—a diversity that was a trademark of all the Durovs. When she was sixteen, in 1942, Tereza adopted the Durovs' patronymic and, as Tereza Durova, she debuted in the ring in her parents' animal act. Five years later, she took over the act.

Enter Tereza Durova

Tereza Durova at the Sate Circus of Minsk (c.1985)

Small in stature (she was 1,50 meters tall—just shy of 5 feet), Tereza Durova had a joyous nature that belied a great strength of character. She eventually trained all sorts of animals; camels, ponies, zebras, kangaroos, monkeys, pelicans and other birds, and even a porcupine participated in the mixed animal act that made her famous, but her favorites were the biggest of them all: elephants, which truly established her reputation. In 1980, she was made People's Artist of the Russian Federal Socialist Republic. Her most acclaimed presentation was an act aptly titled "Acrobats and Elephants," created in 1986, and in which acrobats worked on the backs of her two elephants—something unseen then in the USSR, and which will remained a rarity thereafter.

Tereza Durova became a featured attraction(Russian) A circus act that can occupy up to the entire second half of a circus performance. of the GosTsirk programs, at home and on a few foreign tours of the so-called Moscow Circus. In 1952, she had married a circus musician, Gannibal (Hannibal) Vladimirovich Nadzharov, with whom she had a daughter, Tereza Gannibalovna (b. 1953), who would also take the name of Durova and join her mother's act—before pursuing a brilliant career in Moscow as a circus, and then theatre, director. Tereza Vasilievna's second husband, whom she married in 1976, was an acrobat who later participated in Tereza's "elephants and acrobats act," Viktor Ivanovich Kocherzhlanko, who was fifteen years her junior and may have inspired the creation of that act.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, the situation became increasingly difficult for animal trainers who had an important collection of animals. Many had to part with their charges and leave them in the care of what was left of SoyuzGosTsirk, whose financial situation was spiraling down—as was the case for many old Soviet state agencies, especially in the performing arts. Other reached out to the many State Circuses that had managed to get some financial independence, in hope to find one that would be able to take them and their animals in their performing companies.

Tereza found a home at the State Circus of Penza, at the confluence of the Penza and Sura rivers, southeast of Moscow. Yet, she and the circus still needed money to properly maintain her menagerie, and at that time, the only way was to look at the West&mdashin Europe or the United States. If anything, Tereza was resourceful and not one to stay idle waiting for things to happen, and she quickly secured an engagement with the French Cirque Amar for its 1993 season. This was her first independent contract!

Epilogue

Contrary to the West's general misperception, the following "Yeltsin years" proved to be a nightmare for Russia—but Russians have long learned how to survive in all circumstances and, in that free-for-all period that was mostly controlled by the Russian mafia and oligarchs-in-the-making (not to mention their foreign investor friends), they managed to do so and find their footing as well as they could. Then, in 1999, a new regime and a reconstruction era began under a new president, Vladimir Putin—to the relief of the Russian people, it must be said.

Tereza Durova, as many of her compatriots, weathered the storm, and eventually retired from performing in 2004, after the death of her last elephant, Monri, during an engagement in Lipetsk, an industrial city southeast of Moscow in the Don basin. She was seventy-nine! Tereza then donated all her animals to the State Circus of Penza, which now bears her name. She passed away at age eighty-six on July 29, 2012, in Moscow, her hometown and family seat, where she had retired.