Yuri Possokhov

• Recipient of the Isadora Duncan Dance Award for the choreography of Magrittomania (2001)

Yuri Possokhov was born in Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk). Graduated from Moscow Choreographic School (class of Pyotr Pestov) in 1982. From 1982 to 1992 he danced with the Bolshoi Theatre of the USSR/Russia Company, performing leading roles in classical heritage ballets and productions by Yuri Grigorovich, Michel Fokine, Roland Petit, George Balanchine.

In 1992–1994 Yuri Possokhov was a premier dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1994–2006 he was a premier dancer with San Francisco Ballet.

Since the late 1990s he has been working as a choreographer. Among his productions are Magrittomania by Yuri Krasavin (2000, San Francisco Ballet), The Damned based on Euripides’ tragedy Medea (2002), Studies in Motion to music by Scriabin (2004, San Francisco Ballet), The Firebird by Stravinsky (2004, Oregon Ballet), Waltz to music by Ravel (2005, Oregon Ballet), Sagalobeli to folk music (2008, Paliashvili Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre), Immersion in Lilac to music by Boris Tchaikovsky (2009, San Francisco Ballet), Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (2010, San Francisco Ballet), The Bells to music by Rachmaninoff (2011, Joffrey Ballet), Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (2013, San Francisco Ballet), Ilya Demutsky’s Optimistic Tragedy (2017, San Francisco Ballet), Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker (2018, Atlanta Ballet), Demutsky’s Anna Karenina (2019, Joffrey Ballet). For the Bolshoi Theatre he staged the ballets Cinderella by Prokofiev (2006), A Hero of Our Time (2015), Nureyev (2017) and The Seagull (2021) by Demutsky.
Information for June 2023