State Kremlin Ballet opens the 23rd season with the festival of its best performances, the main parties in which will be performed by the world ballet stars. Before September 26, on the stage of the Kremlin Palace you will see premier ballet dancers of the Royal Ballet "Covent Garden", the English National Ballet, the Berlin-shtats Ballet and the Mariinsky Theatre.
"For us it is a friendly performance of our colleagues, famous dancers", - Andrey Petrov, artistic director of the Kremlin Ballet, says. - "We will have 12 performances in September, and 6 of them will involve these ballet stars - 4 couples, plus two other artists will dance with our artists. We will open our season with "Swan lake" with Daria Klimentova and Vadim Muntagirov from the English National Ballet. We are now rehearsing "Romeo and Juliet". Federico Bonelli had to study the role of Romeo, so he came here and is now actively rehearsing. He will dance "Romeo and Juliet" together with Natasha Balakhnicheva. On Septemer 1 and 2 we have "Ruslan and Lyudmila" and "Snowgirl" with our artists.
On September 4 "Figaro", on September 6 "Don Quixot" with Jana Salenko from the Berlin Theatre. I think that she is better known in St. Petersburg than in Moscow. She won the Grand-Prix of the Dance Open last year, she is a wonderful ballerina, we danced "Swan lake" in Greece and we had great impressions of each other. She will dance "Don Quixote" with Makhail Martynyuk.
Then we have "The Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty" with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg. Alina was supposed to come to us in Greece and dance "Swan Lake" but unfortunately she had some injury and could not come. Bu Johna Kobborg was there, and we really liked how this wonderful dancer performed the Siegfried role in "Swan Lake". He did not simply perform, he reinterpreted it. He was a real prince concerned with the violation of his own promise. It is a complicated and interesting role, and we were impressed. Now they are performing "Sleeping Beauty" on September 12.
On September 14 and 19 we have our performances - "Esmeralda" and "1001 nights". Ekaterina Asmolkina and Evgeny Ivanchenko from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky theatre will dance "Gizelle" on September 21. You know these names very well. The festival will be finished with "Le Corsair", where our principal dancer will dance with Dmitry Gruzdev from the English National Ballet, also a very famous dancer. Unfortunately, we will not start the season with Boris Eichmann, a wonderful choreographer, whom we invited to direct this performance, and needed to postpone it for later. Currently we are discussing with some western choreographers the possibility of directing some performance in the
remaining time. I cannot say anything for sure, but I can say that there will be Charles Jude, the famous French dancer, who also is a representative of the Nureyev Foundation, and we wanted to make a Nureyev performance on our stage in connection with his anniversary next year. The negotiations will be conducted later, therefore I cannot say anything precise, but it will be very interesting for our theatre to have something fromNureyev's performances.
We will have a lot of tours this year. Last year we had a difficult season, because for about half a year we could not perform on our stage - it was used by Cirque du Soleil. Therefore we had very few performances on our own stage, only 21 in the first half year, and then 59 abroad. This season will be better, because we already have 22 performance in the first half year and then many in the second, but there still will be many tours. We continue our cooperation with Russian seasons and Andris Liepa. We have 11 joint performances that are shown in our theatre or abroad. I think that one of them will be shown here in November when celebrating the anniversary in Andris Liepa and something else in December in a gala-concert for Ilse Liepa in Moscow.
