Word: balletic
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...change polarized an already embattled corps of dancers and musicians. Leadership changed hands four times between 1995 and 2004, including a stint by famed former principal dancer Vasiliev, who was unceremoniously dismissed in 2000 by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The short-lived replacements were all part of Russian ballet's insular old guard. "They were doing Sleeping Beauty the way it had always been done," says Andre Lewis, artistic director of Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet, North America's second oldest ballet company. "The Bolshoi was stultified. It needed to change...
...many renovation projects surrounded by barbed wire and covered with a thick layer of dust. But beneath rickety scaffolding, the building's towering columns and gilded fixtures tell a different story. Under renovation since 2005, this is the Bolshoi Theater, home of the fabled 231-year-old Bolshoi Ballet Company. From his cozy office in the Bolshoi's labyrinthine headquarters across the square, artistic director Alexei Ratmansky can see the theater site through a window. "The general atmosphere here is of something building - not falling apart," he says, his voice not much louder than the construction noise outside...
Founded in 1776 on the orders of Catherine the Great, the Bolshoi practically defined the art form of ballet. But it did not achieve its near mythical standing until after the 1917 revolution, Moscow was made capital and the Bolshoi became a primary cultural ambassador of the newly founded Soviet Union - a role it maintained for the next seven decades. Through the years, the Old Theater's stage was home to some of dance's biggest names, including Galina Ulanova, who danced the definitive Romeo and Juliet in the 1950s, and her contemporaries, the couple Ekaterina Maximova and Vladimir Vasiliev...
...1970s, Western dance began to catch up. Rising companies like the American Ballet Theater, the San Francisco Ballet and the Royal Ballet of Winnipeg began producing challenging new works. The Bolshoi, meanwhile, under the longtime leadership of artistic director Yuri Grigorovich and ideologically locked behind the Iron Curtain, simply stopped updating its repertoire. By the time the cold war's walls started to fall...
...grittier, jazzier, more daring Western dance had become the new global standard. Now free to emigrate legally, Russian dancers followed famous cold war defectors, like the Kirov Ballet's Mikhail Baryshnikov, West by the dozens, looking for more complex choreography, brighter fame and bigger paychecks...