Word: theaterful
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...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 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...
...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. During the height of the cold war, it remained one of the Soviet Union's most...
...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...
...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 yet no management experience, Ratmansky assumed the helm of an organization that employs more than 200 dancers and coaches and is, this season, staging more than...
...relationship with the Russian government had been on shaky ground. Toward the end of Grigorovich's tenure, as the company was consumed by internal squabbles and its touring productions were poorly received, government funding dried up. By 2000, 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...