Margarita Koroleva

Aerialist

By Dominique Jando

Margarita Koroleva was born in Moscow in February 1989 to a circus family. Her mother, Lyudmila Koroleva, is a graduate of Moscow’s State College of Circus and Variety Arts, and her father, Sergey Korolev, was trained at National Studio of Circus and Variety Arts of Tashkent, the capital of the Republic of Uzbekistan, where he graduated in 1981.

Margarita began to train in sports gymnastics at the age of six at the well-known Locomotive Sports Society of Rostov-on-Don in Russia, and she trained in circus arts at the Rostov Youth Circus Arts Center. There, in 1997, under the guidance of Vladilen Ivanovich Levshin, she created with two partners an aerial trapeze and cradlePiece of apparatus (generally aerial) composed of two horizontal parallel bars in which a catcher locks his legs to be in position of catching a flyer. (Variant: Korean Cradle.) act called Kaleidoscope. Thus Margarita began her career as an aerialistAny acrobat working above the ring on an aerial equipment such as trapeze, Roman Rings, Spanish web, etc.. Kaleidoscope was featured at Circus Nikulin in Moscow, and toured Europe, visiting Norway, Italy, Finland, France, Switzerland, Poland and The Netherlands.

Margarita and Kaleidoscope won awards in a number of circus festivals; in 1997, they received a Silver Medal at the 2nd Festival of Circus Arts in Yaroslavl (Russia), and later that year, a Bronze Medal at the Circus Festival of Viareggio in Italy. The following year (1998), they participated in the International Circus Festival of Budapest (Hungary), and the International Circus Festival of Warsaw (Poland), in both of which they were awarded Gold. They also took part in the Russian Culture Festival held in New York in 1998.

In 2002, Margarita went on to create a very original solo tissu(French) A double piece of hanging fabric, generally made of silk, used for an aerial act. (See also: Fabric, Silks) act of her own, which combined aerial rope technique with the possibilities offered by a tissu(French) A double piece of hanging fabric, generally made of silk, used for an aerial act. (See also: Fabric, Silks), and had an extremely creative opening presentation, in which her tissu(French) A double piece of hanging fabric, generally made of silk, used for an aerial act. (See also: Fabric, Silks) was used as a piece of costuming. She was featured with her act at the 5th Moscow Youth Circus Festival held at Circus Nikulin in 2006, and participated in the SOLyCIRCO festival on the island of Sylt, in northern Germany, in 2007. She toured with this act in Poland, Indonesia, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.

In 2006, she was offered to perform for the Canadian Cirque du Soleil an aerial strapsPair of fabric or leather straps used as an apparatus for an aerial strap act. duet. After two years of preparation in Montreal, the show for which she was casted, Zed, opened in October 2008 in Tokyo, Japan, where it ran successfully until its closure in December 2011, following the devastating earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. Margarita married another aerialistAny acrobat working above the ring on an aerial equipment such as trapeze, Roman Rings, Spanish web, etc., Iurie Hlionov, in 2009. They were casted together in the Cirque du Soleil's production of Viva Elvis, in Las Vegas, in which they appeared from January to September 2012, when the show closed down. Cirque du Soleil then cast their act in its production of Zarkana, at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, where they still perform to this day (as of 2013).

See Also

• Video: Margarita Koroleva, tissu act, at Circus Nikulin in Moscow (2006)

Image Gallery

• 

  Margarita Koroleva (2006)

• 

  Margarita Koroleva (2006)