Ballet stars in a medieval fortress

“The atmosphere here is fantastic! It’s like being in a film!” Mariinsky Theatre soloist Yekaterina Osmolkina said delightedly of the medieval fortress of Olavinlinna in the Finnish town of Savonlinna. It was here, under the unbelievably beautiful vaults of the fortress, that on 11 August there was a gala concert of ballet stars. This is a new project, St Petersburg – Savonlinna Ballet Days, run by the St Petersburg DANCE OPEN festival.

The improvised auditorium seating just over two thousand people is located in the inner courtyard of the fortress and on the evening in question it was packed full of people. And this despite the fact that Savonlinna has just twenty-eight thousand residents and the weather was rather poor; just 13C and the auditorium, of course, has no heating. The curious contrast was immediately noticeable – the audience in coats and jackets with shawls and rugs and, on the other hand, the half-naked ballet dancers who found it hard to warm up. But the team of Mariinsky Theatre dancers (Anastasia Kolegova, Yekaterina Osmolkina, Elena Yevseyeva, Yuri Smekalov, Danila Korsuntsev, Maxim Zyuzin and Filipp Styopin) and Bolshoi Theatre soloists (Mikhail Lobukhin, Anastasia Stashkevich, Anna Tikhomirova, Artyom Ovcharenko and Anastasia Gubanova) as well as Boris Eifman Ballet Theatre soloist Maria Abashova and principal dancers Herman Cornejo (American Ballet Theatre) and Joseph Gatti (Boston Ballet) demonstrated their skills to perfection. The passionate Finnish audience didn’t just clap, they were whistling and stamping their feet too – in Finland this signals tremendous success. Tribute must be paid to  festival’s Director, Yekaterina Galanova, who compiled the programme with great taste, mixing various choreographic styles and eras. The opening was extremely effective, featuring a highlight from the incredibly rarely performed classical ballet The Talisman for which new costumes had been especially sewn and which remained as faithful as possible to Petipa’s original (thanks to the project’s Artistic Director Vasily Medvedev). Later came a fireworks display of scenes from ballets by Vaganova, Gorsky, Vainonen, Zakharov, Grigorovich, Bryantsev, Eifman, Yakobson, Gzovsky and, of course, Petipa, as well as new pieces featuring choreography by Herman Cornejo and Yuri Smekalov who were performing in the concert. In the event, everyone loved the gala.

“I am a great fan of ballet,” stated the mayor of Savonlinna Janne Laine, one of the most enthusiastic members of the audience that night. “I have been to performances at the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theatres. Apropos, I love opera just as much, and our town is most famous for its opera festival, one hundred years old this year. It is attended by some eighty thousand people and we do everything we can to ensure that they all feel welcome here. We have a great many tourists in general – half a million each year, about fifty thousand of them from Russia. Now we hope that the ballet festival, too, will bring more visitors.”

And how! People come to Savonlinna to relax – it is a beautiful location and is known as  “the Venice of Finland,” being located on the shores of an entire sequence of lakes known as the Saimaa Lake System. And all just sixty kilometres from the Russian border! Entire families and whole companies come here from St Petersburg, Moscow and Karelia...

In the coming three years, the Savonlinna Ballet Festival will take place as it did this year, as part of the project St Petersburg – Savonlinna Ballet Days and in partnership with the DANCE OPEN dance festival. As well as the gala concert of world ballet stars – beyond doubt the main draw and the high point of the festival – the programme has an important educational element, with master-classes being given by teachers from the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet for pupils from ballet schools and a concert for the participants (in terms of structure, the Ballet Days in Savonlinna copy St Petersburg’s DANCE OPEN International Festival.
Preparations for the next festival are already under way...

Olga Rusanova