Word: moscow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hulking construction site on Teatralnaya square in downtown Moscow doesn't look like much. Situated on a dead-end mere blocks from the colorful spires of Red Square and the dazzling neon of Tverskaya shopping district, it's just another of the city's 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...
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...
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...
...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 modern steps and bright yellow unitards, marking quite a departure from the traditional tutus and pink leotards of Cinderellas past. "You can't call any choreography that's done today classical," Ratmansky says. With Stream and Broke...
...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 200 dancers, musicians, singers, technicians and designers...