Ivo Váňa Psota (actual name Ivan Psota, 1908–1952) ranked amongst the most renowned Czech dancers and choreographers. He was the ballet master and ballet art director for the National Theatre in Brno starting in 1928 and taught dance at the Brno conservatories. He worked in the ballet group Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1932–36, the successor to the renowned group Ballets Russes of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev. He also established his own ballet school in Brno presenting the world première of the ballet Romeo and Juliet by Sergej Prokofiev and Slavonic Dances by Antonín Dvořák in 1938. Psota left Brno for the USA in 1941 and became the ballet art director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York where he, amongst other things, presented excellent choreography of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances under the name Slavonica He consequently met with success once again with Original Ballet Russe, primarily in Latin America, in 1941. He rejected an offer to become director of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires as well as the post of ballet director of the National Theatre in Prague and returned to Brno in 1947. The local ballet consequently became the leading professional dance troupe in Czechoslovakia. He suffered, however, various political attacks and intrigues in Brno and died in February 1952 from a brain stroke.
