Earlier this year, Alèna Grivnina graduated with honours from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. She is now dancing with the Mariinsky theatre’s Primorsky company in Vladivostok. In June, Alèna, along with other Bolshoi Ballet Academy students, was interviewed by a major online publication for an issue covering the brightest stars of the Academy’s graduating class. The […]
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La Personne’s newest columnist, Vaganova Ballet Academy graduate and Mariinsky dancer, Svetlana Savelieva, writes about her life in quarantine. Translation by melmoth | Original Article (Russian) | Follow Svetlana on instagram What are dancers’ lives like now? The date on which the quarantine was supposed to be lifted has been changed several times already. At first, the company […]
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The Bolshoi’s General Director, Vladimir Urin, spoke with Kommersant about the challenges facing the Bolshoi during COVID-19 pandemic and the plans for the future. Translation by melmoth | Original Article (Russian) What is the General Director of a closed theatre doing now? Still working, in spite of everything, because the Ministry of Culture and the government are […]
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Can attending a ballet performance save a relationship? This is one of the many questions Diana Vishneva answered in her most recent interview with Grazia Russia and, as always, it is my great pleasure to bring you an English translation. Translation by melmoth | Original Article (Russian) | Follow Diana on instagram On the Power of Art One […]
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Last week, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina Evgenia Obraztsova ignored the government’s advice against mass gatherings and attended a church service, assuring her instagram followers that “a church is the safest place” during a pandemic. Since then, Russia has enforced stricter rules to ensure that its citizens take self-isolation more seriously. In a recent livestream on […]
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Russia currently has 1,836 reported cases of COVID-19, with 212 new cases registered in the capital overnight. 8 people have died so far. Until now, the country had seemingly kept the pandemic at bay, though there are speculations that the actual number of cases is much higher than reported. Over the past few days, the […]
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A graduate of Vaganova Ballet Academy, where she had studied under Lyudmila Kovaleva, Anastasia has already danced the part of Maria in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” and Masha in “The Nutcracker”. At the end of her first season, she was supposed to debut as Gamzatti in “La Bayadere”, but an injury prevented her from performing. New debuts await Anastasia in the upcoming season, and we wish her all the energy and inspiration she needs to work towards her ultimate dream – to dance.
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I had an opportunity to see “Swan Lake” at the Bolshoi when I was a child; my school offered students who were interested in seeing the ballet a day trip to Moscow. The outing was entirely voluntary, and the children who did not wish to go would get a day off school instead. Guess which option my stupid nine-year-old self went with.
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Alexandra Khiteeva, the soon-to-be graduate of Vaganova Ballet Academy and former student of Kazan Ballet Academy, came to St Petersburg from her native Kazan four years ago. Last September, she received First Prize at VaganovaPRIX competition, she spent the following winter touring Japan with her fellow students, and will next week take part in the “Russian Ballet” Competition at the Bolshoi, where she will perform variations from “Suite en Blanc” and “Le Réveil de Flore”.
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melmoth.co is an online archive of some of my more substantial articles and reviews. For daily updates, please follow my blog: melmoth.blog I’m happy to share with you my English translation of a short documentary about Vaganova Ballet Academy, featuring past and current Academy students: Maria Koshkareva (class of Lyudmila Komolova), Alexandra Khiteeva (class of Irina Sitnikova) and Ruslan Stenyushkin […]
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