by Hannah Chang Foster | Mar 23, 2016 | Company Life
When I first saw this clip of Leonid Lavrovsky’s Walpurgis Night, I didn’t know what the ballet was about, nor did I care. I was completely transfixed by Maya Plisetskaya. From one-legged hops on pointe to a grand saut de chat, she springs off the ground...
by Hannah Chang Foster | Mar 9, 2016 | Company Life
Spring may be 10 days away, but we’re anxious for its arrival—so we’re dedicating this #ThrowbackThursday to the Spring Waters pas de deux. Created by Russian choreographer and former Bolshoi Ballet principal dancer Asaf Messerer, this short concert...
by Hannah Chang Foster | Feb 21, 2016 | Company Life
Whether it’s an oh-so fashionably late arrival to a ball or an endless line of impressively in-sync penchés, ballets know the power of a dramatic entrance. (Appropriate, perhaps, that the word “entrance” has a double meaning, depending on how...
by Laura Cappelle | Jan 28, 2016 | Profiles
This story originally appeared in the February/March 2016 issue of Pointe. Olga Smirnova’s first three seasons at the Bolshoi Ballet were a whirlwind of debuts and creations, but it all came to a halt in 2014, when a foot injury took the Vaganova-trained prodigy...
by Hannah Chang Foster | Jan 6, 2016 | Company Life
Sandstorms, opium, lions, snakes—plot devices in The Pharaoh’s Daughter read like a list of clichés about Ancient Egypt. Though 19th century ballets set in the Far East (ahem, Bayadère) tend to emphasize grandeur over cultural accuracy, the...
by Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone | Dec 19, 2015 | News
This story originally appeared in the December 2015/January 2016 issue of Pointe. From its eerie opening scene to its dramatic closing interview, Bolshoi Babylon—a documentary filmed in the aftermath of the 2013 acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet director Sergei...
by Hannah Chang Foster | Oct 25, 2015 | Company Life
Makhar Vaziev with La Scala Ballet dancer Claudio Coviello on tour in Japan. Photo courtesy of Teatro alla Scala on Twitter From Russia to Italy and home again: Makhar Vaziev, former director (and principal dancer) of the Mariinsky Ballet and current director...
by Amy Brandt | Sep 29, 2015 | Company Life
World Ballet Day LIVE, a glorious, 23-hour livestream that takes us inside five of the world’s leading ballet companies, technically begins October 1. But while our calendars in the Western Hemisphere currently say September 30, in Melbourne,...