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• Prize-winner at the XI International Ballet Dancers’ and Choreographers’ Competition, “Choreography” category (1st prize, Moscow, 2009).
• Recipient of the Golden Mask, Russia’s most prestigious theatre prize, for “Best Male Role” in the ballet The Seagull (Trigorin) in the 2007–2008 season.
He was born in Nizhny Tagil.
In 1998, he graduated from the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet (class of Konstantin Shatilov).
From 1998-2009, he was a soloist with the Boris Eifman St Petersburg State Academic Ballet Theatre, where he danced the lead roles in ballets including Don Quixote, or Fantasies of a Madman, Tchaikovsky, The Karamazovs, Red Giselle, Russian Hamlet, Don Juan and Molière, WHO is WHO, Anna Karenina, Requiem, My Jerusalem and The Seagull.
As a guest artist, he has appeared at the Mikhailovsky Theatre (as Spartacus in the ballet of the same name), the Warsaw National Opera (as Tchaikovsky in the ballet of the same name) and in the ballets Spartacus (Spartacus) and at the St Petersburg State Leonid Yakobson Academic Ballet Theatre (as Zeus in the ballet Andro-Geny and Spartacus in the Leonid Yakobson's ballet Spartacus).
Yuri Smekalov was invited to join the Mariinsky Theatre in February 2009.
His repertoire at the Mariinsky Theatre includes:
La Sylphide (Gurn);
Giselle (Hans);
Le Corsaire (Birbanto);
The Sleeping Beauty (Princess Aurora’s Suitors);
Raymonda (Abderakhman);
Michel Fokine’s ballets Le Carnaval (Pierrot) and Pétrouchka (The Moor);
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Ghirei);
Romeo and Juliet (Tybalt);
Leonid Yakobson’s ballets Shurale (Evil Spirit) and Spartacus (Spartacus, Harmodius);
Walpurgisnacht – choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky;
In the Night – choreography by Jerome Robbins;
The Nutcracker (Drosselmeyer), production by Mihail Chemiakin and choreography by Kirill Simonov;
The Little Humpbacked Horse (Gentleman of the bedchamber, Horses, Seahorses), Anna Karenina (Vronsky) – choreography by Alexei Ratmansky;
Diana Vishneva: Beauty in Motion (Pierrot Lunaire, Three Point Turn);
Vernal Waters – choreography by Asaf Messerer.
He has toured with the Mariinsky Ballet Company to the Netherlands and Norway.
He has worked as a choreographer since 2008. He has staged the following choreographic miniatures and ballets:
Autumn Gold (Verba volant, scripta manent (“Words fly away, what is written remains”), a project in memory of Georgy Aleksidze,
Parting (first performers: Yevgenia Obraztsova and Vladimir Shklyarov at the gala concert Malakhov and Friends, Berlin, 2008),
Requiem for Narcissus and Story on the Run (2009),
and Presentiment of Spring and Bolero Factory (2010).
As a choreographer, Yuri Smekalov works with the coach Alexei Mishin and he is involved in creating programmes for Russia’s figure skating team. In 2003–2004 he was the choreographer for Yevgeny Plyushchenko’s programmes and, in 2008–2009, he created the programmes Narcissus and The Hermit for figure skater Artur Gachinsky.
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