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An unscheduled premiere of the Bolshoi Theatre will open ballet repertoire of the 245^th season. The Bolshoi has prepared a program of one-act ballets staged by Vyacheslav Samodurov, Anton Pimonov and theatre premiere of Artemy Belyakov for the audience before the start of the pandemic, but did not have a chance to show it.

Works of young overseas choreographers serve as some type of peculiar rhyme for this project – The Ninth Wave by Bryan Arias, Just by Simone Valastro, Fading by Dimo Milev and Silentium by Martin Chaix.

Idea for this project came to Makhar Vaziev, Ballet Director, during quarantine at the end of April 2020. He explained his decision as follows: “It was a very difficult situation; everyone missed their job so much that I have decided to captivate our artists, give them energy, power and hope. I had a great desire to spark people with creativity and a new task”.

After watching a large amount of video recordings and consulting with his colleagues, Mr. Vaziev has chosen four young choreographers from different countries. They were Simone Valastro (Italy), alumni of ballet school academy La Scala; Bryan Arias (Puerto Rico) who received his formal dance training at La Guardia High School for Performing Arts in New York; Dimo Milev (Bulgaria), who studied at the National ballet school of Sofia and Martin Chaix (France) who studied at Paris Opera Ballet.

Leading artists of the troupe will be performing in the upcoming premiere: Svetlana Zakharova, Ekaterina Krysanova, Anna Nikulina, Evgenia Obraztsova, Olga Smirnova, Margarita Shrayner, Artemy Belyakov, Vladislav Lantratov, Semyon Chudin, Jacopo Tissi, Denis Savin, Igor Tsvirko.

Initially, a specific format was planned, compositions with duration of 15 minutes each. Bryan Arias’s The Ninth Wave is an exception which will last for an hour and will include forty performers.

All choreographers were free to choose musical score. Just is to music by David Lang and will be lip-synched, Fading is to music by Enrique Granados accompanied by piano, Silentium is to music by Arvo Pärt, and The Ninth Wave is to music by Mikhail Glinka and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov accompanied by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra conducted by maestro Pavel Klinichev.