The Grigorovich Ballet Company was
founded in the summer of 1990 by Yuri Grigorovich, the legendary artistic
director and chief choreographer of the Bolshoi Ballet from 1964 to 1994.
Rehearsals started in August and on November 2nd, 1990 a first performance
of ěThe Nutcracker" was presented on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.
The design of the production was created by the eminent theatre designer
Simon Virsaladze, to whose memory the performance was dedicated.
During it's first two seasons, the
Grigorovich Ballet Company gave 35 performances at the Bolshoi Theatre.
The soloists and teachers of the Bolshoi Ballet worked closely with the
new company. Ludmila Semenyaka, Nadezhda Pavlova, Anatoly Musarov, Andrei
Nikonov all participated in the performances together with their new colleagues,
and Marina Kindratieva, Rimma Karelskaya, Nikolai Simachev, Mikhail Lavrovsky
rehearsed with the young artists.
The Grigorovich Ballet Company now
counts more than 90 dancers. They are graduates of Leningrad, Kiev, Perm,
and Novosibirsk ballet schools, as well as the Moscow Choreography School.
Under the direction of Maestro Grigorovich,
the Grigorovich Ballet Company has become the leading showcase institution
for the great choreographer's masterworks, including "The Nutcracker,"
"Giselle", "Swan Lake", "The Golden Age", "Spartacus" and "Raymonda", as
well as "Tchaikovsky Evening", an evening of dance suites from all three
of the composer's ballets, "The Nutcracker", "Swan Lake" and "The Sleeping
Beauty". The company's repertoire also includes "Divertissement", a gala
evening of fragments from the classical repertoire - including Bournonville
- and contemporary pieces.
Commissioned by the Athens Concert
Hall, the first work created for the Grigorovich Ballet Company, "Electra",
was staged by Yuri Grigorovich together with his pupils Sergei Bobrov and
Andrei Melanin. The Grigorovich Ballet Company was invited to appear at
the Athens Festival in the summer of 1992, where the company performed
the new work with great success. After Athens, the Grigorovich Ballet Company
went on to tour other cities in Greece with a varied repertoire. The Grigorovich
Ballet Company has also participated at the Spoletto Festival in Italy,
at the invitation of Jean Carlo Menotti. The company has toured extensively
throughout Europe, the Far East and North America.
Yuri Grigorovich
artistic director of the Grigorovich
Ballet Company
Yuri Grigorovich is considered to
be the greatest living choreographer in the world of ballet today. His
ballets dominate the repertory of contemporary works,
and his stagings of the classic ballets reflect his personal taste arid
his often-stated conviction that drama must always infuse and be expressed
through dancing.
He breaks with tradition, yet he
himself is rooted in the traditions of classic ballet, by birth and upbringing.
He has acute awareness of his inheritance, and of the vital contribution
that is made to the performances of today by the guidance of great artists
of an earlier generation. On all the Bolshoi's many tours, they are accompanied
by such guardians of the classic school as the ballerinas Marina Semyonova
(born 1908), Galina Ulanova (born 1910) and Raissa Struchkova (born 1925).
To them is entrusted the coaching of young ballerinas, and even established
dancers return for help and advice.
Yuri Nikolaievich Grigorovich was
born in what was then Leningrad on January 2nd, 1927. His uncle George
Rozai, was a character dancer who appeared with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe
and his mother, Klaudia Rozai, trained at the ballet school with Semvonova.
Many of his family were circus artists and young Yuri was fascinated by
the world of the circus, but soon lost his heart to the dance. He describes
it as "a love affair that has lasted all my life."
He trained at the Leningrad Choreographic
School and along with the other pupils was evacuated to Perm during World
War II. He tried to run away (by canoe!) to get to the front but was brought
back and eventually graduated in 1946. He joined the Kirov Ballet where
he excelled in character roles. His favorite was that of the virtuoso warrior
leader Nurali, who can be so sensational in the last act of The Fountain
of Bakhchisarai. But he was already, in his formative years, keen to try
his hand at choreography and in 1956 was allowed to arrange a ballet to
Glinka's Valse-Fantasie for a graduation performance at the Kirov School.
His first major work, undertaken
despite the fact that another version already existed in Moscow, was The
Stone Flower, to the Prokofiev score which was first performed at the Kirov
on April 27, 1957. It marked the first collaboration between Grigorovich
and the artist Simon Virsaladze, a man of great culture from Tbilisi, who
was to design all his subsequent ballets. In addition to their working
partnership they also were the greatest of friends, a relationship that
was only broken by Virsaladze's death in 1989, at the age of eighty.
Grigorovich was named ballet master
at the Kirov in 1962 but subsequently transferred to Moscow and to the
Bolshoi in 1964. Grigorovich was Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Ballet
for the following 30 years, a tenure in ballet rivaled only by the founding
director of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine. During Grigorovich's
term at the Bolshoi, he staged Spartacus by Khachaturian (1968), Ivan the
Terrible by Prokofiev (Moscow, 1975; Paris, 1977), Angara by Eshpai (1876),
Romeo and Juliet bv Prokofiev (Paris, 1978; Moscow, 1979), The Golden
Age by Shostakovich (1982). Yuri Grigorovich revised classical masterpieces
for the Bolshoi Ballet: The Sleeping Beauty (1963), The Nutcracker (1966),
Swan Lake (1969) by Tchaikovsky; Raymonda by Glazunov (1984), La Bayadere
(1991), La Fille Mal Gardee (1993) by Hertel, Don Quixote (1995) by Minkus.
