Ballet Evening

On 5 March 2010 it will be one hundred years since the birth of Konstantin Mikhailovich Sergeyev. He was a legendary, symbolic figure of the Leningrad ballet, a symbol of an entire era.

Sergeyev’s entire career was linked with the Leningrad-St Petersburg ballet: for over thirty years, from 1930 to 1961, he danced at the Kirov Theatre, and from 1951 to 1954 and from 1960 to 1970 he was the theatre’s Principal Ballet Master; he taught and was the Artistic Director of the Leningrad School of Choreography, and after this became the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet in 1991 he became its first President.

Konstantin Sergeyev was an outstanding dancer. An unsurpassed Romeo coupled with the great Ulanova and the best prince of Soviet ballet partnered with the dazzling Natalia Dudinskaya, he had his own inimitable artistic means of expression, his own particular theme. This theme was refined lyricism contrasting with the expressive heroics of male dance, dominant in Soviet ballet of the time. His heroes were poetic and filled with nobility, the dance virtuoso and inspired, the roles psychologically convincing and the images deeply emotional.

In the 1940s, Konstantin Mikhailovich Sergeyev began to choreograph for the first time. One of his greatest works was Sergei Prokofiev’s Cinderella. At the turn of the 1940s-50s he consequently revived ballets from the classical legacy including Raymonda (1948), Swan Lake (1950) and The Sleeping Beauty (1952). Retaining the composition and choreographic essence of the original versions, Sergeyev at the same time proffered his own versions, answering the call and tastes of the mid 20^th century, cutting the pantomime scenes, intensifying the dance with the very latest technical elements and subjecting the plot to psychological and narrative logic in the modern meaning of the word. These versions remain in the repertoire to this day, and we know Petipa’s ballets through them. It was Konstantin Mikhailovich Sergeyev’s personality and art that defined the passions and outlooks for at least two generations of dancers and audiences.