Yuri Nickolaevich Grigorovich, the great choreographer of XX century, was born on January 2, 1939, in Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg). He is seventy-eight this year. He can be proud of this date. The choreographer’s energy is not ever lost; he takes part in the life of ballet empires as before.

«Choreography is something like foam on speaker’s lips». This was written by famous American ballet critic Clive Barns in an April number of the «Dance Magazine» for 2004. Barns expressed his anxiety on the occasion of choreographers’ productions: they could easily be forever lost if not being performed. The choreography becomes forgotten; performances vanish like foam. Clive named Grigorovich among XX century world ballet geniuses whose heritage he was worried about. Having left the Bolshoi Theater where almost all his ballets fell out of the repertoire there and then after his leaving, Grigorovich came to a wise decision of saving his work. He supported to open a new theater in Krasnodar where revived his ballets or made new versions of some of them. Lately Krasnodar Theater goes on tour over the world. The company even performed with success at Mariinsky stage before snobby and captious audience of Saint-Petersburg last summer. The world festival takes place there in Krasnodar. In short, the town becomes one of the world ballet centers. Now Grigorovich is offered to revive his ballets not only at the Bolshoi or the Kremlin ballet company (there are some offers from the Mariinsky as well). He revived his «Ivan the Terrible» in Paris last year. The premiere was a great success with not less snobby Paris audience. Grigorovich is a president of the Russian Ballet Fund and an organizer of the World Ballet Contest «Benois de la Dance». I say nothing about what influence his work had on the development of Russian choreography – this is a separate subject to speak about.

More than one book should be written to tell about master’s creative life. In this article I permit myself to repeat some facts well-known to the Russian ballet audience. I think it can’t be passed over in the jubilee article. I add some episodes and details connecting with the beginning of his work at the Kirov Theater, so long as I was an eye-witness of it. I am glad to think that Grigorovich and I came to the theater nearly at the same time although at the different sides of stage. Exactly in the season of 1946-47 I became a regular spectator of the Kirov Theater ballet performances. After finishing Leningrad Ballet School in 1946 Grigorovich was admitted to the company of the theater as a corps de ballet dancer – it was the custom at that time. The season of 1946-47 was his first one at the theater. The first modern ballet I saw in 1947 and remembered for all my life was «The Spring Tale» choreographed by Ph. V. Lopukhov, Grigorovich’s mentor and friend to be. Could it come into my mind that in the final figure dance on music of a romance by Tchaikovsky «Whether reigns a day or silence of the night » I saw among the other corps de ballet dancers a great choreographer to be.

I got acquainted with Grigorovich by our family’s friend, historian of ballet, critic and script writer Yu.I.Slonimsky. It was exactly Slonimsky who gave advice to a starting choreographer and believed in this gifted person. After the first night of ballet «The Stone Flower» where Danila the master (Alexander Gribov) started to hummer inside the box of malachite designed by Suliko Virsaladze; where an enigmatic woman-lizard slid down the rock and twined herself round Danila; where Severian (Anatoly Gridin) firstly threw himself into a dance and then started to sink tragically into the ground punished by the Mistress of the Cooper Mountain, I was so much shaken by what I had seen that I inspired with love and veneration for the choreographer for all my life. When Grigorovich moved to Moscow, I went to see his premieres. Later when I lived in America, Grigorovich started to take the Bolshoi Theater on tour, and we talked with him about the events of the past. In my article I used something from our talks about the beginning of his choreographic work.

Thus, Grigorovich started his art career as a dancer. He finished Leningrad Ballet School in class by B.V.Shavrov and A.A.Pisarev in 1947. He danced in «The Nutcracker» when he was a student of school and remembered with pleasure how they liked to perform this ballet on New Year’s Eve. By tradition in the first act of the ballet a table set with true sandwiches and bottles of lemonade was put in the interior of the stage for children who participated in the performance.

Accepted to the Kirov Ballet company Grigorovich from his first season in the theater began to dance not only in the corps de ballet but as a solo performer of the character and grotesque parts. I remember Grigorovich as a dancer very well. Besides having a high jump shooting up into the air (inherited from the Rozays, his ancestors) he danced with exaltation and had expressive plastic movements. Leonid Yakobson who understood peculiarities of the actors well staged specially for Grigorovich. So Grigorovich’s performing the part of Retiary in «Spartacus» put him in a row of the other unforgettable dancers. Good was he as Shurale in the ballet of the same name: an enigmatic devil of the wood, with plastic and changeable movements, like outline of the trees in the gloomy bewitched forest…

But his artistic work was only a prelude for the display of his true mission.

It is known that by the early 1950s the Soviet ballet started to fall into decay. A period of so-called «dramaballet» went to the end. It is considered that a new era in the ballet began with «The Stone Flower» produced by Grigorovich. But the young dancer started to produce dance numbers for operas at the Kirov before the production of the ballet by S.Prokophiev (generally speaking, Grigorovich began to produce dances at school, then he choreographed two ballets for a children group at the amateur children theater, but I talk about Yury Nickolaevich’s work on Kirov stage). Dancer Anatoly Gridin recalls that dances for opera «Sadko» produced by Grigorovich were not any kind of variety entertainment but two true dance suites connected with the plot in meaning. «These suites were something like fore-runners to the fair scene in «The Stone Flower»!» – Gridin recalls. This way Grigorovich started to give a dance as a main means of expression back to stage. When in the early 1950s Lopukhov was temporarily in power at the Kirov Theater, its ballet life started to come to life. Exactly Lopukhov gave an open road to talented choreographers and encouraged them in their search of new ways. When Grigorovich knew that Prokophiev’s «The Stone Flower» piano score had been sent to the theater, he made a request of producing the ballet to the theater management. He was not ever confused by the facts that in Moscow the production by venerable choreographer Lavrovsky had just turned out a complete fiasco and that music was considered not to be suitable for ballet. Grigorovich with Lopukhov’s support choreographed a performance as an extraordinary work i.e. in spare time free from rehearsals. Lopukhov advised Grigorovich: «Work with the young people, they will be like pliable clay in your hands!». And Grigorovich began to produce his ballet with the young dancers who had already shown their worth on stage: Alla Osipenko, Irina Kolpakova, Ella Minchionok, Anatoly Gridin, Alexander Gribov, Anatoly Sapogov, Irina Gensler. Tatiana Vecheslova, ex-prima-ballerina of the theater, took an active part in the work as a ballet coach. This was the time about what all the participants of the performance remember up to now. When the orchestra rehearsals began the dancers came to the hall in the morning and sat there listening to the music. Nobody did so before. Theater designer Suliko Virsaladze, one of the followers of the Silver Age Art, worked at the performance from the beginning. High-cultured man and talented artist, he remained Grigorovich’s true friend and held the same views by the end of life. Osipenko remembers Virsaladze moving ornaments on her costume from one place and gluing somewhere else with his own hand when came to the rehearsals. Grigorovich started to produce some scenes not even in the rehearsal rooms of the theater yet but at his own. One day he demonstrated Lopukhov a duet of Katerina and Danila executed by Irina Kolpakova and Vladlen Semionov. Lopukhov said: «In case you intend to produce this way any longer I approve it». Grigorovich told me later that that had been the greatest praise for him. At a moment of work when some more scenes with Gridin as Severian and Osipenko as the Mistress of the Cooper Mountain were produced it was settled to demonstrate a produced part of the ballet to the company in the rehearsal room of the School. When the demonstration finished total silence fell in the auditorium. As Grigorovich remembers they didn’t know if it was a success or a flop. Suddenly a storm of applause burst out. The actors jumped up the chairs, the mirror nearly crushed down the wall. This way the recognition of the choreographer began. The morning after the premiere of «The Stone Flower» the choreographer himself both with the all participants of the performance woke up famous. But the success of «The Stone Flower» and the next ballet «The Legend of Love» on music by A.Melikov didn’t improve Grigorovich’s position in the theater. «The Legend of Love» was created as a planned work but as Gridin remembers the work was going on under trying conditions because «Yura started to be driven out of the theater». By this time Lopukhov had been already retired on a pension. K.M.Sergeev, a new company leader being a confirmed conservative didn’t intend any choreographer-innovator to be admitted to the theater. New theater director P.I.Rachinsky backed up Sergeev totally. He proposed Grigorovich only to reproduce dances for operas next season. At that time Grigorovich accepted an offer from the Bolshoi Theater to produce a new version of «The Sleeping Beauty» by Petipa, after that he headed the Bolshoi Theater according to the decision of Furtseva, the Minister for Culture, and had been directing it for over thirty years (1964-1995). At the early 1960s in spite of presence of the numeral ballet stars in the company the Bolshoi Theater ballet was in stagnation. New productions one by one were not a success, the repertoire grew scarce. This way Grigorovich’s emigration of some kind began, because the Moscow ballet had its own performing features and traditions differed from ones of the Saint-Petersburg ballet. The choreographer worked at all the ballets together with Virsaladze as before. Lopukhov had been going to Moscow to see the premieres until his health allowed him to do it.

The beginning of Grigorovich’s work in Moscow was triumphal. Like that at the Mariinsky, in Moscow Grigorovich was supported by the young people. Young dancers can perform any technical difficulty, they feel modern dance technique keenly and are ready to any experiment. What dancers grew up in his ballets: Vladimir Vassiliev, Natalia Bessmertnova, Ekaterina Maximova, Mikhail Lavrovsky and others. At that time nobody thought that a choreographer’s lifetime on stage was much longer than a dancer’s one. Replacing of generations is a badly problem for any ballet theater. A lifetime of a ballet actor is short, a dancer lost his professional qualification at the age of forty or forty-five, when he is still young and full of creative energy. But the leading dancers of the Bolshoi didn’t want to submit the necessity of leaving stage. An opposition to Grigorovich from the actors of the older generation formed in the theater. The young dancers came out against the opposition. But Grigorovich decided to leave the theater considering his subsequent work under such conditions impossible. Struggle for power was still going on for some time after his leaving. Now we know to what result it led. A sequence of new chief ballet masters began. After all Grigorovich was offered to return formerly produced ballets to the theater. The press which persecuted Grigorovich wickedly and unfairly became silent. And one of the critics even flew to Paris to see his premiere of «Ivan the Terrible».

As I already wrote, after leaving the Bolshoi Grogorovich didn’t stop his creative work.

Such is a story of a man and his fortune in short. And now when passions came down we can take a detached view at such a phenomenon as Grigorovich’s theater.

«That is the nature of art to express the common by the concrete». (Albert Camu).

I say again: as far as my article is a jubilee one I permit myself to repeat in short generally known facts on his biography and appraisal of his creative work.

Grigorovich succeeded in taking the soviet ballet out of crisis. Grigorovich’s ballets were created in indissoluble unity of music, choreography and stage design. He revived neoclassicism – classical dance, complicated and modernized, enriched with elements of other plastic systems, assumed as a basis of all Grigorovich’s ballets. «Neoclassicist» George Balanchine worked in a genre of the plotless ballet. Grigorovich using the complex forms of classical dance created a work with a plot by Russian ballet tradition. Following Petipa he became a true master of producing ensembles and corps de ballet scenes. He became a master of creating stage dramatic composition as well. Dynamic interchanging of figure scenes and monologues of the personages is one of the powerful means of emotional influence on the audience of his performances.

For thirty years period of staying a leader of the Bolshoi ballet Grigorovich developed and complicated greatly the male dance technique. He attached much importance to a role of a male dancer in the ballet. After acclimatization in Moscow he began to lean on Moscow traditions. For example, when creating images, he leant on executing tendency of Moscow ballet to display feelings frankly. May be therefore his ballets carried from Leningrad to Moscow lost their mysterious atmosphere to some degree. Frank demonstration of temperament didn’t correspond to strict, reserved executing manner of Petersburg, in channel of which the first ballet images were created.

But the main phenomenon of the theater by Grigorovich is contained in the other thing. In the most semi-official theater of the country he created astonishing performances contrary by their essence to the demands of the Soviet leaders both in the plan of choreography and ideology.

First of all in the Soviet Union the society was opposed to the personality. A person was depreciated and declared only as a screw of this society.

There is a hero in the spotlight of performances by Grigorovich – sometimes a creative personality, sometimes just a strong one. The characters are so much extended that they are nearly reduced to symbols. More often the hero of Grigorovich’s ballets came up to the finished world in which he couldn’t change anything. The hero worked on moral problems under such conditions. It is not a society that is opposed to the hero but cosmos. I think Grigorovich is the first who developed the theme of a man and cosmos in the Soviet ballet. A man applies to cosmos with moral problems, and cosmos answers the man with gloom and death. In the matter of fact this is a transformation of the late romanticism ideas. Swan wings, red Comsomol bandages, the Tsar clothes, the armour of knights – all of these are only the marks of time at which the action takes place. The historical plot only serves as a background for a moral fight of a hero with himself. What is the sense of a central monologue executing by Spartacus with a red toga symbolizing the power? Spartacus must choose between the power over people in the fight for freedom (by Grigorovich, always at the price of loosing love and friends) and life with his friends and his loved woman but in the slavery. Spartacus questions cosmos – this is the sense of the monologue – but not having the answer he makes his choice and dies. So far as life in the slavery for the hero is the same as the death, he chooses only a more deserving way to death. In the final scene of the ballet in the darkness of the deserted stage some survived personages lift up on a buckler a body of the killed hero and a woman sobbing on him. The cosmos absorbs this «pieta».

A collision with cosmos in which archangels fly up with the soul of perished Anastasia finally incites Ivan the Terrible to the world of madness. Having lost a balance in the emotional fight between good and evil the horrible hero begins to correspond completely to the horrible society. In the final scene of the ballet Ivan has been either hanged or crucified on the ropes fasten to the bell tongue.

And also Prince in «The Swan Lake» is faced with the choice between a happy ordinary life in the castle and a strange anxious world of the swan lake with its moral traps. And even in the ballets with the «happy end» («The Golden Age», «Angara», the version of «Raymonda») an image of the «villain» bears a dual character as before and anybody among the heroes all the same died.

In the ballets of Leningrad period and early Moscow period («The Nutcracker»), i.e. in the famous 1960s, the short period of the liberal views being in the Soviet society, the aesthetic proportions between the light and the gloom were still kept. The impossibility of the human happiness still bore rather a nuance of grief than tragedy. The anguish and the horror are the main emotional pivot of the last Grigorovich’s ballet «Romeo and Juliet» on music by S.S.Prokofiev, a ballet of the depressive and stagnant times under Brezhnev. The concentration of tragedy is led there to its maximum. In the gloom of cosmos both innocent souls and triumphing evil perish with the same inevitability. These are modern mystery-plays by Grigorovich. May be Grigorovich himself didn’t think of his works from this point of view, but the time «writes» by the geniuses’ hand and an artist himself isn’t given to foresee how his work will echo in the spectators’ hearts.

How could this occurrence be passed by the censors? I think through their ignorance. The event of the slave revolt by itself covered the essence of the performance in their mind.

Having seen Ivan the terrible on stage they believed they saw a ballet on the historical theme and disputed for long if the choreographer justified Ivan the Terrible or not. Although in the ballet there isn’t any hint of excuse or blame. There is a shuddered soul of an artist who expressed degradation of a man having transgressed moral ideas.

But for all that there are three permanent symbols of hope in the kingdom of the oncoming Apocalypse created by Grigorovich. This is a hero who is capable for a free choice, a villain who is able to experience human feelings and sometimes torments of moral, a female friend of the hero – an ideal woman as an eternal symbol of beauty and moral (among the other dancers who performed in Grigorovich’s ballets at different times I’d like to mark out Natalia Bessmertnova who perfectly embodied an ideal image of a romantic heroine in his ballets – it would be hard to find her match).
Works of an artist are not only «the voice of time». The personality of the creator is reflected in his

performances. The tragedy of Grigorovich’s ballets is an echo of either the difficulties of his own fortune or the contradictions of his individuality.

As a result goes a creation of the Russian romantic theater on a ballet stage, a powerful appearance of the spirit life and choreographic ideas, which doesn’t lose its meaning in our transient time, a phenomenon of the Russian culture named «Yuri Grigorovich’s ballet theater».

Happy New Year and Happy Birthday to you, Master!