Generations of Montreal dancers are celebrating Chiriaeff’s centenary this year because a major part of her mission was education. “She was passionate about not only creating but ensuring a solid future for the art of dance in Québec,” Katia Mead, her youngest daughter, told me in a recent interview. Chiriaeff created the first professional institution in Québec dedicated entirely to the training of dancers, teachers, and choreographers. “She believed dance needed to be accessible to everyone and traveled across the entire province to develop new talent and establish local feeder schools for L’École supérieure. Whenever she discovered gifted students who needed support, she raised funds to provide grants for free classes and housing. She was ‘Madame’ but also a mother figure to all.” Graduates of L’École supérieure have gone on to perform at companies nationally and internationally, including Ballett Zürich and Opéra de Paris.

The renowned Canadian choreographer and longtime director of the Alberta Ballet, Jean Grand-Maître, is one of those graduates. He credits her with his turn toward choreography. “She opened a little door in my mind,” Grand-Maître said at L’École supérieure’s performance in May. “I wasn’t sure what to do in my last year at her school [in the 1980s]—I hadn’t reached the caliber I’d hoped for as a dancer. I was a bit depressed, and Madame sought me out. She said that everything she taught me was not only in my legs but in my head, and she said that with that, I could move mountains.” Chiriaeff commissioned his first piece. “She had a knack for spotting vocations, for whether a dancer should become a doctor or an actress or even a choreographer.” Grand-Maître went on to a prolific career and only recently retired, after twenty years at the Alberta Ballet. He has now created a piece for school and company, which will premiere in October, based on Chiriaeff’s life as a refugee. “Madame taught not only dance,” Grand-Maître said, “but the history of dance. She showed you what a huge responsibility it was to be an artist: to inspire truth and beauty, to provoke and challenge, and to connect communities through an encounter with aesthetics.”

Throughout her life, Chiriaeff regularly credited the influence that the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine had on her. Fokine, who is best known for his work for the Ballet Russes, spent time in Berlin at the Chiriaeffs’ home. One day, the young Ludmilla and he had a remarkable exchange. Questions swirled, like, “How do we sense movement without music, just a score?” Fokine made a creative roadmap for her. He sketched a dancer at the bottom of a page and drew four characters above her. He said, Chiriaeff recalled, “To be a dancer and creator, you must be as musical as a composer, as sensitive as a poet, as strong and supple as an athlete, as self-critical and severe to yourself as a very severe critic would be, but also open to the many many possibilities of mixing colors like on the painter’s palette. And then, maybe, you will serve the dance.”

Perhaps it was this conversation, in which service to dance was the highest goal, that led Chiriaeff to make bold statements like, “Ballet is the most spiritual of all the arts.” For Chiriaeff, ballet was a vehicle by which she could serve the people who had welcomed her and her family from a time of war and hardship.