A clamor in the mountains

This is the story of a journey across a vast country through which I have been travelling for over half a century – from Perm in the east to Yekaterinburg in the Urals and Astrakhan not far from the Caspian Sea in the south. It is the story of a contemporary who has taken the train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg hundreds of times and to whom the landscapes of Russia are as familiar as the soft velvet seats in the theaters whose names the whole world knows: the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg.

It is a story told by a contemporary witness, and not in an attempt to compare today’s Russia with another Russia – the Russia of perestroika or the Soviet Union. The whole world knows that Russia and its ballet are inextricably linked – a ballet that flourished under tsars and tsarinas, and of which nothing comparable can be expected under the current autocracy. At best, one might think that Russia’s own good old ballet tradition is now being honored more intensely than ever, and that it is once again emerging pure and whitewashed by all the influences from New York, Paris, London, and Madrid that have touched it over the decades. But even that would be asking too much of the guardians of the theaters and ballet academies. They are traditionalists, that is true, but are they sufficiently equipped to inspire the new personnel, to instill the motivation to want to create art, the ambition to interpret and continue the great Russian dance heritage in a younger, current generation?

I have therefore traveled once again and have seen with my own eyes that we live in a country that is trying harder than ever to evade external influences – a country that is throwing itself unrestrainedly at the public, at the people, in order to pull the rubles out of their pockets and not to discipline or educate them, as was once the case. But what do they want to offer us today, all the theaters, the companies, the choreographers? Where do they stand intellectually? Questions whose answers culminated for a moment in the supposedly “voluntary” departure of long-time artistic director and host Vladimir Urin from the center of Moscow, the Bolshoi, a man who was replaced in December 2023 by none other than Valery Gergiev. This spectacular change marks the beginning of my journey through a country in an increasingly desperate search for its arts.