Katie Pianoff

The Royal ballerina, Katie Pianoff began her training at the Australian Academy of Ballet in Sydney at the age of ten. When she was 17 she was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Ballet Upper School in Covent Garden. She moved up to the Graduate School after six months and the Italian born sculptor Enzo Plazzotta asked her to sit for him. Movement and ballet in particular feature frequently in Plazzotta’s work. In this statue, entitled Young Dancer, he portrays Pianoff wearing her ballet tunic with her hair dressed into the requisite bun so that the line of her neck and head are not obscured. She sits on a wicker stool, her left foot on point, her right leg resting on her opposite knee as she ties the ribbon on her ballet shoe. After graduating Pianoff joined the Royal Ballet Company and toured with them, but due to ill health she returned to Australia, where she now teaches ballet at the internationally renowned Tanya Pearson Academy in Sydney.

Enzo Plazzotta worked for many years in London, dying there in 1981. This statue was offered to Westminster City Council by the Plazzotta estate after the sculptor’s death and was unveiled in Covent Garden seven years later. For a full account of the process of the acquisition of the sculpture by Westminster City Council and its reception at the time, see P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 10–11.

Location: Opposite the Royal Opera House, west end of Broad Court, facing onto Bow Street, Covent Garden, London WC2