Word: balletic
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Enter Ratmansky. Born in St. Petersburg, trained at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography and boasting professional experience with Ukraine's Kiev Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg and seven years with the Royal Copenhagen Ballet, he had already staged his productions at the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg, as well as a new production of Anna Karenina in Copenhagen. His knowledge of Western dance and his strength as a choreographer were, according to Bolshoi Theater director general Anatoly Iksanov, just what the company needed to reclaim its standing in the newly modernized world of ballet. With impressive choreography credentials...
...President Putin, frustrated with ever-increasing delays in the Old Theater reconstruction project, ordered the Bolshoi to report directly to the Ministry of Culture, which would keep a tight rein on its finances. By the following year, the Bolshoi's estimated annual budget was substantially lower than other top ballet companies. But now, with more dancers, more productions, lavish tours and the very expensive Old Theater renovation, there's clearly millions more being thrown at the Bolshoi than before Ratmansky's arrival...
...trend has led to a dearth of big-star roles. "People aren't choreographing for stars anymore - they're not doing Swan Lake," says Lynn Garafola, a dance historian and author of Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Increasingly, it's choreographers like Ratmansky who are taking their place as ballet's headliners. In one of Ratmansky's most celebrated moves, for example, in 2003 he restaged Bright Stream, the full-length ballet by radical Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which Stalin banned shortly after it premiered in Moscow in 1936. Ratmansky looks forward, too: his own creation, Go for Broke, features...
...Bolshoi also has a new venue. A smaller mint green theater called the New Stage completes the trifecta of Bolshoi buildings on Teatralnaya Square. Eerily similar in appearance to the Old Mariinsky Theater building in St. Petersburg, home to the Bolshoi's longtime rival the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) Ballet, it has, since 2005, become the company's interim Moscow home. Ratmansky says the Old Theater, whose renovation is costing hundreds of millions of dollars, will reopen in fall 2008. In the meantime, he says, "we do tour quite a bit," including a recent trip through Siberia involving nearly...
With the Bolshoi now firmly recommitted to invention, Ratmansky was able to lure two of the biggest names in Western ballet - the American director and choreographer Twyla Tharp, and the energetic young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to each produce a one-act ballet at the Bolshoi this season. (Wheeldon's, a brand-new work called Misericors, debuted on Feb. 13.) "I don't want the Bolshoi to be the work of just one choreographer," Ratmansky says. Unlike years past, when a dancer's name - like Baryshnikov or Maximova - would be a key advertising point, at the new Bolshoi...