Russia and the USSR

Russian ballet has its roots in a school founded by the Empress Anna Ivanovna in 1738 for the teaching of ballet to selected servants' children. Under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Landé, this produced a small company which during the subsequent decade performed in entertainments staged in the royal palaces of both St Petersburg and Moscow. After Landé's death ballet productions were staged by the impresario Giovanni Locatelli in an old opera house in St Petersburg, and under continuing royal patronage the art form flourished. Many guest ballet masters were invited to the city to stage their ballets, such as Hilverding and Angiolini, and though most principal dancers were foreign a new generation of Russian talent was also emerging. The young ballerina Nastasia Parfentyevna Birilova (1778-1804) was outstanding and in 1794 the first Russian ballet master Ivan Valberkh was appointed to direct the St Petersburg School and oversee the company which now performed at the city's Bolshoi Theatre. Outside St Petersburg developments were more limited. In Moscow a dance school was attached to the city's orphanage in 1773 under the direction of the Italian ballet master Filippo Beccari and in 1776 a company of 24 dancers began giving stage performances in the Znamensky Theatre. Elsewhere, many landowners funded their own troupes of serf dancers, performing folk and ballet.

Russia finally became a major centre of ballet when Didelot came to work in St Petersburg (1801-11 and 1816-34). During his reign he dramatically raised the standards of both the Imperial Company and its school as well as bringing important new works into the repertory. He was succeeded by Alexis Blache from France and Antoine Titus from Berlin and it was under Titus that M. Taglioni was invited to give her debut performance in St Petersburg, dancing La Sylphide on 6 Sept. 1837. She caused a sensation, and her continuing guest appearances over the next five years served to rekindle public enthusiasm. She also inspired a new generation of Russian dancers such as Andreyanova, although many foreigners continued to guest in the city, e.g. Grahn in 1843 and Elssler in 1848. Between 1851 and 1859 Perrot worked in St Petersburg, staging many of his ballets there and was succeeded by Saint-Léon (1859-69) who created his popular hit The Humpbacked Horse in 1864 and promoted the career of the Russian ballerina Marfa Muraieva. It was under Petipa, however, that Russian ballet entered its golden age, developing its own distinctive style (a fusion of French elegance, Italian virtuosity, and Russian flamboyance) and its own major repertory. He had arrived in 1847 as a dancer (his father, Jean Petipa, was a teacher at the Imperial School) and after his appointment as ballet master began to create a body of about 50 ballets for the St Petersburg and Moscow companies, including Don Quixote (1869), La Bayadère (1877), Sleeping Beauty (1890), Swan Lake (1895, with Ivanov), and Raymonda (1898). The great Tchaikovsky ballets were commissioned by Vsevolozhsky who was director of the Imperial Theatres from 1881 to 1899. Dancing many of the leading roles were celebrated Russian dancers such as Kshessinska and Preobrajenska who now rivalled popular guest virtuosos like Legnani and Cecchetti. At the beginning of Petipa's reign performances were given at the Bolshoi Theatre, later they alternated between there and the Maryinsky Theatre (built 1860) which from 1889 became the sole venue for grand ballet.

The successes of the St Petersburg Ballet overshadowed developments in Moscow where the Imperial company moved from the Petrovsky Theatre (under the management of Englishman Michael Maddox) to the rebuilt Bolshoi Petrovsky Theatre and thence to the replacement Bolshoi (built 1856). Its less elevated standards were typified by the failure of its own premiere of Swan Lake (chor. Reisinger, 1877) compared to the success of the Petipa-Ivanov version at St Petersburg. Yet it developed its own distinctive style, more theatrically colourful than the classical St Petersburg ballet, and evident in, for example, Petipa's staging of Don Quixote for the company in 1869. During the early 20th century Gorsky intensified the dramatic realism of Moscow's productions, both in his revisions of Petipa's ballets and in his own works, which particularly showcased the exceptional expressive talents of Geltser.

During this dramatic invigoration of the Moscow company the St Petersburg Ballet lost much of its own creative momentum. Petipa had been forced to retire in 1903 and though young choreographers—notably Fokine— were eager to present their own new ballets, the conservatism of both directorate and public stifled new creativity. The extraordinary generation of dance talent that came out of the school in the first decade of the century—Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky. etc.—found little to excite them in the repertoire, and not surprisingly many seized the radical opportunities offered them by Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes.

Until 1917 Russian ballet was under the Tsar's patronage but after the Revolution it was taken over by the State. Initially a new generation of choreographers, such as Lopukhov and Goleizovsky, pursued avant-garde principles in their vision of a new Soviet ballet but by 1932 Socialist Realism had become established as the official style demanding realistic stagings and politically correct themes. Ballet education was centralized (and given State encouragement) under the supervision of Vaganova whose methods became official teaching practice throughout the USSR. It was also official policy to establish an opera house— with its own ballet and opera companies—in major towns and cities throughout the Republics, such as Novosibirsk. Some were more successful than others, but none rivalled the major companies in Moscow (renamed the Bolshoi) and Leningrad (renamed GATOB, then the Kirov). During the 1930s the latter was pre-eminent, premiering Vainonen's Flames of Paris (1932), Zakharov's Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934), and Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet (1940), but the Bolshoi's premiere of Zakharov's Cinderella (1945) marked a shift over to Moscow and the leading Soviet ballerina Ulanova was transferred from the Kirov to the Bolshoi. However, when both companies started to tour abroad after the late 1950s Western audiences were astonished by the strength and expressiveness of their dancers, and Soviet ballet as a whole started to enjoy immense international prestige.

On these tours, however, Soviet dancers saw how varied ballet and modern dance had become in the West. Some were so frustrated at their company's artistic isolation, and lack of creative freedom that they chose to leave the USSR. Nureyev was the first famous dancer to defect, and was followed by Makarova and Baryshnikov. The West benefited greatly from the arrival of these dancers, not only their inspirational example as performers but also the traditions they brought with them. All three staged Petipa ballets which were previously little known in the West. After these defections Russian companies became much more cautious about touring, although when Grigorovich was appointed artistic director of the Bolshoi in 1964 the company enjoyed an injection of artistic vigour. He created a repertoire of colourful epic ballets, including Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible, which were danced by a succession of great male stars like Vasiliev, Liepa, and Mukhamedov. By the late 1980s, however, Grigorovich had ceased producing new work and the repertory had became moribund. Mukhamedov's public departure to London was one among many blows to its prestige. Under the direction of Vinogradov the Kirov attempted to introduce new works into its repertoire, such as those of Béjart and Balanchine, but its reputation continued to rest largely on its performance of the classics and the reputation of a new generation of dancers including Asylmuratova who still seemed to embody the purity of the Kirov traditions.

During the 1980s and 1990s increasing numbers of Western companies visited Russia, including many modern dance groups such as Trisha Brown and the Rambert Dance Company, but a native Russian modern dance culture has been slow to get established. Kinetic Theatre, founded by Sasha Pepelyaev in 1994, was one of the first dance groups to try to break the monopoly of the classical tradition, along with Provincial Dances, founded by Tatyana Baganova. Other new companies include Saira Blanche, directed by Oleg Soulimenko, the Chelyabinsk Theatre of Modern Dance, the Dance Theatre Elta (from Elets), and the Nota Bene company from Moscow. Several of these were featured during the First European Festival of Contemporary Dance, held in Moscow in 1999. Some of the smaller ballet companies have attempted to develop contemporary repertories, including Maly Ballet under choreographer Nikolai Boyarchikov, the Stanislavsky Ballet, Eifman's Leningrad Theatre of Contemporary Ballet, the recently formed Russian Ballet of the 21st Century, the Graphical Ballet, the Evgeny Panfilov Ballet (Perm), and St Petersburg's All-Men Ballet under Valery Mikhailovsky (a Russian version of Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo). Like the larger companies, their artistic aspirations have been affected by Russia's sweeping economic and political reforms. Under the new democracy, state funding for the arts has dramatically declined. Many companies both large and small now have to tour for much of the year to finance themselves and this makes it harder for them to develop new repertoires and artistic policies. The situation was exacerbated in the mid-1990s by the loss of powerful directors, Grigorovich leaving the Bolshoi in 1995 and Vinogradov the Kirov in 1997, though both have since been replaced by major figures (Vladmir Vasiliev at the Bolshoi, with Alexei Fadeyechev as ballet director and V. Gergiev at the Kirov with Vaziev as ballet director). Russian ballet is still regarded as the keeper of 19th-century traditions and is revered as such by the West, but its future at the end of the 20th century was still very uncertain.