Traveling in Russia

The ballet capitals of Moscow and Saint Petersburg are thronged with people fighting for tickets for at least one month of the year, be it tickets for the Tchaikovsky interpretations of “The Nutcracker” as choreographed by Lev Ivanov at the Mariinsky erTheatre in Saint Petersburg in 1892, Yuri Grigorovich’s masterful 1966 version of “The Nutcracker” at the Bolshoi erTheatre in Moscow, or the latest ballet interpretation by Yuri Possokhov at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko erTheatre, also in Moscow. What a feverish queue for a festive show of sugar plum fairies and mouse kings! The obsessed come to Moscow from all over the country to get hold of a few “Nutcracker” tickets for the family at the box office, standing in long queues from the early hours of the morning. A struggle for a piece of culture to warm the heart in a time of despair and grief.

Neither Moscow nor Saint Petersburg look like cities at war, even if the West would sometimes have you believe it. There is a cult of consumption here, just like everywhere else.

But here, more than anywhere else, a trip to “The Nutcracker” is considered a class A treat, including selfies in every corner of the magnificent Bolshoi erTheatre.

The purpose of these selfies is to tell the world: We actually managed to get tickets! And indeed, procuring them is sometimes a really dangerous undertaking; there have already been a number of fierce brawls, or riots, in Russia, among those hoping to snag a ticket or two.

These led – at least officially – to the dismissal of long-serving Bolshoi director Vladimir Urin in 2023. Urin had openly voted against the war in Ukraine, as had many of his colleagues, many of them ballet dancers with cult status such as Artem Ovcharenko or Vladimir Shklyarovm, but also stars such as Diana Vishneva, who founded the renowned “Context” ballet festival in Saint Petersburg in 2012.

However, this was the same Vladimir Urin who tried to prevent the premiere of “Nureyev” in 2017, a production choreographed by Yuri Possokhov and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, who would later face criminal charges. The presumed reason: the Ministry of Culture saw contradictions to current laws against “homosexual propaganda”, and an openly homosexual Nureyev and his portrayal as a male nude by photographer Richard Avedon would offend Russian Orthodox feelings.

The case of Serebrennikov, the former director of the Gogol Centre in Moscow, is still very well remembered. He was accused of embezzling ertheater funds for the highly successful Platforma project, aimed at popularizing contemporary art. This was followed by a series of house searches, then promptly by a period of house arrest and finally prison, meaning that “Nureyev” went on stage in a considerably altered form and without him. The reason: the Russian Orthodox Church had taken up arms against the production because it made reference to the homosexuality of star dancer Rudolf Nureyev. On June 22, 2020, Serebrennikov was officially found guilty of embezzling state funds and sentenced to a three-year suspended sentence, although this did not prevent him from staging important opera productions in Zurich, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Munich via video link.

Vladimir Urin’s fate was not affected by Serebrennikov’s Nureyev ballet, which ultimately disappeared from the Bolshoi’s repertoire. It was sealed by his successor: none other than Valery Gergiev, a close confidant of Vladimir Putin. Gergiev is a soldier of the Russian cultural foundation, serving under Putin’s leadership. He previously led the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg for 35 years as a conductor of international renown. A pillar of the Putin regime, he had previously always been most welcome at the opera houses in New York, Bayreuth, and Munich. Today, Gergiev’s orchestra and the Bolshoi perform in China, Kazakhstan, or Uzbekistan, if at all.

Valery Gergiev has not only become the Tsar of the Bolshoi, but also the director of the ballet company. Makhar Vaziev – the same Makhar Vaziev from Saint Petersburg who began his career as a dancer at the Mariinsky erTheatre and who nevertheless made a name for himself internationally as the director of the ballet company there under Valery Gergiev – has been in charge of this company for eight years. He rose to this position because of his courageous new productions and bold reconstructions (“Sleeping Beauty,” “La Bayadère”) and in doing so personally ensured greater international permeability: Georges Balanchine, Jiri Kylián, Hans Van Manen, William Forsythe – Vaziev put the works of such prominent Western choreographers on the Saint Petersburg program, despite the resistance of his then (and also current) boss Valery Gergiev.

At that time, Vaziev left Saint Petersburg and became director of the ballet company at Teatro La Scala in Milan. It was only seven years later, in 2016, that he returned – this time to the Bolshoi erTheatre. Now he once again works for the same boss –Valery Gergiev, the image of an all-conducting autocrat. He tolerates no objections or doubts and stifles any expression of personal will before it can even be articulated. This means a drastic change for the ballet company.

She wistfully remembers the time of Alexei Ratmansky (2004 to 2008), who as choreographer at the Bolshoi made space for democratic principles within the troupe and gave the soloists a say in the creation of a choreography without any ifs or buts. Now the old days seem to be returning in the form of the unconditional submission of the artists to the will of their master.

The Bolshoi is a perfect mirror of the state. The flatter the hierarchies of the ballet troupe, the more liberal the leadership – and vice versa. The Bolshoi can also be thought of as a barracks in which Gergiev commands the Bolshoi company in the manner of a soldier. It would be extremely speculative to expect another creative performance from them. Even minimal creative skills are undesirable. Any hint of ambition is considered dangerous. Choreographer Makhar Vaziev is still quietly carrying the burden of leadership and can do nothing to change the fact that he will go down in the history books as one of the destroyers of the ballet company’s creative potential.

The latest ballet premiere at the Bolshoi is an exact reflection of these new, old conditions. Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” is being performed, albeit to the music of Yuri Krasavin, choreographed by Yuri Posokhov, who previously tried so courageously to bring “Nureyev” to the stage with Kirill Serebrennikov. Krasavin’s musical style could easily be mistaken for Hollywood movie soundtracks. Familiar motifs from Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades” are interpreted in this piece in a very lively, even gruff manner, gently embedded in snippets of other works by the composer, skillfully and artfully arranged, of course, and enriched with vocal interludes performed by a countertenor, which may have a sweet alienating effect. The orchestra is superbly conducted by the experienced but jittery Pavel Klinichev, but the Hollywood conglomerate sounds just as empty as Posokhov’s choreography is painfully banal.

Yuri Posokhov danced at the Bolshoi Ballet at the beginning of his career and later brilliantly staged a number of major shows. Now, however, this is yet another ballet that does away with content to the greatest possible extent. Everything that happens serves solely to fill the stage with moving dancers. And the audience is probably already familiar with the Pushkin story on which Tchaikovsky’s opera is based, just as it is taken for granted that the ballet is very different from the opera version. Now the script and dramaturgy are by Valery Pecheykin – and that is certainly food for thought, because this critical mind was known and respected precisely for his collaboration with the no less critical mind of Kirill Serebrennikov at the Gogol Centre. Now, like a black hole, he reflects the material, which knows neither intelligent references to Pushkin nor to Tchaikovsky.

During the performance, the author senses this cold emptiness wafting down from the stage and catches himself nostalgically remembering the much more famous “Queen of Spades” by French choreographer Roland Petit, which he staged at the Bolshoi erTheatre in 2001 to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, without any intervention in the music. Nikolai Tsiskaridze, the current director of the Saint Petersburg Ballet Academy, and Ilze Liepa shone in the roles of Hermann and the Countess, whom, in a fit of inspiration, they had shaped into two very dark and mysterious, passionate and enchanting stage characters. Today, dancer Igor Tsvirko still moves elegantly and beautifully across the stage as he was taught, but his performance lacks any notion of representation. The interplay between a ball in Versailles and a ball in Saint Petersburg as well as the famous card game in which the playing cards themselves dance treacherously remains as hollow as it is inconsequential in terms of content. The corps de ballet are flawless. They do their job, add no further thought, invest no more in themselves or in an idea. That’s the Bolshoi: a barracks of art.

Let’s leave this great house and visit the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko erTheatre in the same city. Before the war – the one against Ukraine – this ertheater was directed for five years by the French étoile Laurent Hilaire. The Parisian ballet style moved into the capital and enchanted the Russian-influenced dance culture in Moscow. Hilaire’s current successor is Maxim Sevagin, who took up the post at the tender age of 25. Before making this huge leap in his career, he choreographed “Romeo and Juliet” by Prokofiev at the same ertheater together with the popular director Konstantin Bogomolov. The piece was about two hardened lovers from Verona, two ageing veterans of the love affair, incapable of giving this simple-minded plot any meaning other than artistic, bravura footwork. Thanks to Sevagin, audiences attending the show saw a parody of ballet. And then there was a no less depressing “Snow Queen” with excerpts from several symphonies by Tchaikovsky, probably with the intention of completely demoralizing the music of this master of Russian sound art.

Let’s go north to Saint Petersburg, where the Spaniard Nacho Duato tried his luck at the Mikhailovsky erTheatre until 2014. He went to Berlin without success, only to return to his throne at the Saint Petersburg Opera House in 2019, back into the arms of scandal-ridden opera director Vladimir Kechman. Everyone calls Kechman the “Banana King” and he is considered extremely corrupt. His ertheater went bankrupt several times. But he was always the great reformer, renovating the Mikhailovsky erTheatre and inviting progressive directors such as Andriy Zholdak, Dmitry Tcherniakov, Vasily Barkhatov, and Arno Bernard. Kechman makes it particularly clear how much Russia has changed. From one day to the next, the seemingly modernist Kechman became a righteous supporter of conservative ertheater, which pretends to dispense with all interpretation and seems to exist solely to stroke the currently luxuriantly growing bourgeois beard in the stalls.

2023 was the year when Russia’s ertheater directors were ousted and replaced several times – starting with those who had protested against the war, of course. However, no one raised a hand against Kechman, who is considered a man of the people. Under Kechman, it remains unclear how Nacho Duato, an independent, Western artist, can continue to work at the theatertheater at all. Of course, his “reworkings” of Russian classical ballets such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker” did not create a new style or even renew public understanding of such masterpieces. They were simply commissioned works and cannot be compared with his own productions, in which Duato proves himself to be a consistent, organic, subtle, and original choreographer. Out of necessity, such pieces are no longer on the program.

In addition to the Mikhailovsky erTheatre, it is above all the Mariinsky, the first ballet ertheater in Saint Petersburg. This ertheater, too, no longer presents brilliant premieres, but dances the achievements of the past. The repertoire of Makhar Vaziev is still danced there, as are the ballets of the legendary Alexei Ratmansky – the choreographer who openly opposed Putin, protested against the war, and has now found a new home a comfortable distance away at the American Ballet erTheatre in New York. Even though Ratmansky’s work is still being shown in Saint Petersburg, his name is never mentioned on the program. Concealment is customary. The danger of being accused of propaganda by “foreign agents” is too great.

And this is now threatening Alexei Ratmansky, who spent two years reconstructing “The Pharaoh’s Daughter”, the first full-length ballet by Petipa in Russia. At the beginning of the Ukraine war, shortly before completion, Alexei and his wife Tatyana left the country. Since then, the name Toni Candelero, who completed the work in two months on behalf of the Mariinsky and describes himself as the author of the work, has been emblazoned under this work.

But it’s not the case, as you might think from my story, that everyone in the world is now creeping across the stage on Russian territory, hunched over. No,; a number of small, up-and-coming movements are underway, far away from Moscow. These include the work of individuals such as Olga Tsvetkova, who has founded a new dance academy in Saint Petersburg, or the ballets of Vladimir Varnava, who staged “Petrushka” to the music of Igor Stravinsky and the “Yaroslavna Eclipse” at the Mariinsky – full of sarcasm and grotesqueness. That was in 2017. Today, Varnava works mainly in ertheater together with directors such as Maxim Didenko and his musical “Run, Alisa, Run” at the Taganka erTheatre in Moscow, where the sentiment is firmly anti-Putin.

Vladimir Varnava’s last ballet at the Mariinsky erTheatre, “Yaroslavna Eclipse,” deserves special attention. The piece, with music by the avant-garde composer Boris Tishchenko, was first performed in 1974 at Leningrad’s Maly Opera House and was recognized at the time as being magnificent in its political and social message in the context of the ideological norms of the USSR. “Yaroslavna Eclipse” is like a response to Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor.” The choreographer Oleg Vinogradov, the director Yuri Lubimov, and the dancer Nikita Dolgushi contradicted the traditional material and had no sympathy for Prince Igor, who had overestimated his military strength and lost the battle against the Mongols and Tatars. “Yaroslavna Eclipse” openly condemns Igor’s complacency and pride. He started the war, he lost that war, and Igor’s actions brought terrible suffering to his people.

No wonder “Yaroslavna” is popular again. In December 2023, Alexei Miroshnichenko staged it in Perm, Europe’s easternmost city with over a million inhabitants, where Miroshnichenko has directed the ballet company for 14 years (including a three-year hiatus). Artyom Abashev, who has risen to become one of Russia’s leading musicians thanks to the absence of foreign conductors at the Moscow opera houses, was responsible for the musical interpretation. Alexei Miroshnichenko and Artyom Avashev created a ballet in which the protest against the war is perceived as a complex system, made up of images that seem to coincide with the avant-garde aesthetics of Yuri Lubimov and the idea of freedom that was inherent in the Russian avant-gardism of the 1910s and 1920s. For the Russian leader, with his complacency and insolence, there is no other way out than to sprinkle his head with ashes and mourn after the defeat before leaving the destroyed country forever. It is a mischief to draw false comparisons.

The case of Miroshnichenko allows a somewhat closer look at the creative life of ballet, at least in those regions far enough away from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A graduate of the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Saint Petersburg, Alexei Miroshnichenko initially got the Perm troupe off to a flying start and, together with Teodor Currentzis, who was artistic director there for a long time, turned the opera into a Russian trendsetter. Perm has been considered a ertheater city since the Second World War at least. The Vaganova Ballet Academy was evacuated here from Saint Petersburg during the conflict, and ballet in particular has enjoyed a special prominence in Perm since then, as is also reflected in the prestigious “Arabesque” ballet competition, which now bears the name of Ekaterina Maximova.

In Teodor Currentzis’ time, Perm tried to become a modern city, with a modern art museum, festivals and avant-garde signs in the form of simple, striking sculptures that were placed all over the cityscape. Today there hardly anything remains of all this, apart from the Diaghilev Festival, which takes place in early summer and also in a shortened form just before New Year. The city’s cultural significance has faded noticeably.

The performance “Youkali,” directed by Teodor Currentzis as part of the “Diaghilev +” mini-festival, premiered here in December 2023. Songs with texts by Bertolt Brecht and other poets, which were set to music by Kurt Weill in the first four decades of the 20th century, served as the musical material. The composers, Teodor Currentzis himself, Vangelino Currentzis, Andreas Moustoukis, Alexei Retinsky, Alexei Syumak, and FM Einheit created their own versions of these songs in 2023. The arrangements, which include both versions close to the Weill originals and radically new interpretations of the songs, are based on the artistic and creative abilities of the musicAeterna ensemble and often use non-academic instruments – from electronics to theremin, from prepared piano to banjo. The songs also formed the basis for the dance performances with the participation of the dance group of the Saint Petersburg Radio House – musicAeterna Dance. Director Anna Guseva and choreographer Anastasia Peshkova created a production involving a good fifty participants to create a kind of surrealist cabaret. There is no continuous plot, but there is a clear trace of content linking all the numbers, including an open finale. The action takes place in the waiting room of a railway station, where everyone is waiting for the trains to the unreachable, non-existent land of happiness called Youkali. The directors know their way around the landscape of contemporary dance and make use of its languages without grafting their own onto it. One blindly trusts the music, which reformulates the ideas of the crazy cabaret as if by itself and in surprisingly contemporary images: A cannon is filled with yellow flowers, two girls share a persistent, lingering kiss (in defiance of the official ban on any homosexual themes in this country), and at the end all the characters on stage are dressed smartly in the straitjackets of a madhouse.

It was in Perm that Evgeny Panfilov first appeared – a choreographer of “free dance” who created his own language and body images for his troupe that were not borrowed from anyone. Evgeny Panfilov was known for combining the search for profound content with impressive theatrical forms. He loved stage experiments; he created the female “Ballet of the Fat” and a very masculine “Fight Club.” Panfilov died in 2002, not even 50 years old. Since then, the company has sadly continued to present the master’s works or made do with often unfortunate premieres.

In Yekaterinburg, a city on the other side of the Urals that is home to millions, the Provincial Dances dance troupe is still full of energy, led by the country’s most important contemporary choreographer, Tatiana Baganova. In the 1990s, she managed to assert her own style and repeatedly emphasized the “body of today’s dancer” – the body of a generation of dancers who were equipped with different experiences to those of the previous generation. Despite all their energy, the troupe’s greatest successes are over. Their guest performances in Moscow, which are usually glamorous, have recently been disappointing because a new generation is once again covering this country with new experiences. Tatiana Baganova is unable to recreate new, fresh, and contemporary references.

The neoclassical choreographer Vyacheslav Samodurov has made a name for himself in the same city of Ekaterinburg. After pursuing a career as a dancer, he became chief choreographer of the Ural Opera. He invited Russian and foreign choreographers, organized workshops for young ballet masters, and defied the challenges faced by every provincial ballet company. He wanted to move on again and again; Samodurov has long since been staging successful productions at the Bolshoi.

Artistic director Andrey Shishkin has repeatedly prolonged his Ural career, but has been less than protective of the choreographer, because in his ballet “The Humpbacked Stallion” he was forced to replace the tsar called for in the fairytale original – meaning the Russian president, of course – with a far less controversial Kyrgyz Khan. That’s what the city’s higher-ups wanted. Only now, in 2024, has Samodurov managed to leave Yekaterinburg to choreograph the ballet “The Tempest” based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name to music by Krasavin at the Bolshoi in the summer.

Dmitry Gudanov is also struggling with the same provincial pitfalls at the opera house in Astrakhan, the city of black caviar at the mouth of the Volga. Gudanov was one of the leading dancers at the Bolshoi but was dismissed as soon as Makhar Vaziev took up the role of chief choreographer in Moscow. He tried his hand as a choreographer and ended up in Astrakhan with a ballet company that had led a sad existence. With a titanic effort and in just under two seasons, he achieved a significant improvement in the level of dancing and successfully staged several traditional pieces. He was also able to shine as a choreographer: The ballet “Pari” made waves far beyond Astrakhan thanks to the complex relationship between the great Polish composer Frederic Chopin and the writer George Sand. Nevertheless, the demands of the management forced him to be relentlessly pragmatic, to think commercially rather than academically and to please the people. He has just left his job after less than twenty months.

Let us return to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Russian Ballet, named after Agrippina Vaganova and located on the most beautiful street in the northern capital – the poker-straight Rossi Street. This academy, the forge of the Russian ballet cadre, has been run by its rector Nikolai Tsiskaridze for ten years now. He was once a soloist at the Bolshoi erTheatre, an outstanding dancer whose fame resonated worldwide. He has since developed into a true ruler and master in this age-old talent factory. More than 600 students study at his academy at any one time. Hiring a graduate of this school is an honor for any ertheater in the world. Tsiskaridze is not only a teacher, but also a television star, someone who presents programs on one of the almost exclusively state-run channels. It is no secret that Tsiskaridze has long aspired to the position of director of the Bolshoi erTheatre, and has been unsuccessful for just as long. Nevertheless, Tsiskaridze has a good chance. He is a traditionalist and openly criticizes all innovations in dance and culture. He is educated, well-read and conservative enough not only to protect the grandly prestigious rooms of the academy from the grasp of influential businessmen, but also to increase the heritage in the academy’s museum, for example the costume worn by Vaslav Nijinsky in his leading role in “Le spectre de la rose,” which is exhibited in this museum like a mummy in a glass sarcophagus and guarded like a relic.

The Moscow Academy of Choreography, which is fifty years younger than its sister academy in Saint Petersburg, founded under Catherine II, is more modest and its directors are less ambitious in their endeavors to carry their traditional understanding of ballet to the highest levels of cultural practice. Both academies naturally feel that their staff in particular, dancers and choreographers alike, have long since left Russia. Many positions are currently vacant.

In Russia, the prestigious festival and the “Golden Mask” award were recently destroyed. Initiated in 1994 by Vladimir Urin, who had just left the Bolshoi, the “Golden Mask” nominated and honored worthy artists in both classical ballet and contemporary dance thanks to the efficient work of professional experts. Following a change in leadership, the “Golden Mask” is currently being transformed into another “state award.” The jury that selects the award winners is a dull assembly of obedient officials and “creators of art” for whom the fulfilment of the regime’s requirements is paramount.

The future of artists in Russia is therefore uncertain. At present, the degree of self-censorship in the ertheaterss is so high that it is very difficult to grant free ideas and free forms any kind of access. The production of “The Queen of Spades” described at the beginning of this piece, degraded to a kind of dance musical, speaks volumes about a country that demands nothing more from ballet than obedience and entertainment. Both may work for a while – but art is currently out of the question in Russia.