As a young girl, Alekseeva (1890-1964) loved dancing. Seeing her dance, the sculptress Anna Golubkina, her neighbor in the small town of Zaraisk, sent her to Moscow to study with Rabenek. In 1911 Liudmila joined her classes and quickly became one of the company’s prime dancers. Two years later she left the company dissatisfied with both the life on the road and Rabenek’s way of teaching which appeared to her not too serious. Alekseeva realized that, in order to become professional and to compete with ballet, modern dance had to develop its own training, as efficient as the classical bar.

An ambitious dancer, she wanted to combine Anna Pavlova’s virtuosity with the performance of tragic actress. In 1914, Alekseeva opened her own studio. «She was very young, tall, slim, and ironic, with tomboy manners and a deep hypnotic voice. Her dance had nothing of ballet. It was not even dance in the usual sense of the word. Rather, she taught the art of moving graciously. Every exercise was like a short étude of danse plastique»

Her firsts choreographies were solos: the Bacchanalia to music by Saint-Saëns and The Butterfly to Grieg (in continuation of both Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova’s dances). Her choreography including The Dying Birds to Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, for a group of dancers, was preserved by her students.

In 1918 Alekseeva quickly realized that the wind had changed. She registered her studio with the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. For the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, she choreographed a trilogy, Darkness. A Break Through. La Marceillaise, to the music by Schumann, Liszt and her husband, the composer Meerson. Allegedly, the leader of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin attended one of the performances. Like Isadora, Alekseeva’s ambition was bringing dance to ‘the masses’ and transforming every woman’s life with the help of ‘harmonious’, or ‘artistic’ gymnastics. Later she became one of the founders of the female sport with the same name, khudozhestvennaia gimnastika.

quoted from Irina Sirotkina: The Revolutionary Body, or Was There Modern Dance in Russia?