A debut by Anastasia Kolegova

The ballet Romeo and Juliet to music by Sergei Prokofiev with choreography by Leonid Lavrovsky, first staged at the Kirov Theatre in 1940, remains one of the most vivid dance interpretations of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Vera Krasovskaya, a leading ballet critic and dance historian, wrote that “Lavrovsky has conveyed Shakespeare with such truth of feeling, something rarely met with among drama directors today. The young girl and the youth boldly resist a brutal way of life, standing their ground against its pressures and shaking its foundations at the cost of their lives.”

The standard of the role of Juliet was set by its first performer – Galina Ulanova. In this role, which the ballerina created in this ballet, contemporaries could find no fault: the expressive dance monologues, the “spoken” dialogues” with Romeo, the dramatic scenes and the famous flight scene which Fellini frequently showed to his own casts during filming as the standard of expression in movement.

Mariinsky Theatre soloist Anastasia Kolegova’s repertoire is extremely broad. When she appears as Kitri (Don Quixote) her dance sparkles with temperament and dazzles with her excellent technique and quick tempi. When she adorns Taglioni’s costume in Giselle her movements take on a poetic tenderness and softness. On 3 November Anastasia will be appearing as Juliet for the first time.