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Twenty years ago, in 1993 Sergei Berezhnoi brought his stage career to a close with a final performance in the ballet Romeo and Juliet at the Mariinsky Theatre.
Having embarked on his career amid the galaxy of brilliant stars of the Leningrad school of male dance of the early 1970s (such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yuri Soloviev, Alexander Gribov, Sergei Vikulov, Valery Panov and Oleg Sokolov), Berezhnoi found his niche in the repertoire of the Kirov Theatre. Ballerinas admired his classical princes in Raymonda, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty for his gallantry and outstanding partnering abilities, while audiences were drawn by the masculinity of his characters and the proud manner of his dance, indispensible for aristocratic roles. Many remember his impetuous Eugene in The Bronze Horseman and his romantic Youth in Chopiniana. A performer brilliantly schooled in classical dance, taught by the acclaimed teacher Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, Berezhnoi did not limit himself to the classical repertoire, appearing also in contemporary choreography; he danced Igor Chernyshov’s Roméo et Juliette and created the role of Adam in Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliev’s The Creation of the World. In Roland Petit’s Notre-Dame de Paris he danced the two contrasting roles of Phoebus and Quasimodo. Having appeared in all manner of styles, throughout his twenty-three-year-long career the dancer remained true to the image of the lyrical hero. When his career as a dancer ended Berezhnoi shared his rich experience with young dancers, helping them to attain that elegance and natural assimilation of roles that were inherent in his dance.
In 2006 fate was to give Sergei Berezhnoi the opportunity to return to his home stage as a dancer when he featured in a production of the ballet The Golden Age. His last role was to be that of Karenin in Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet Anna Karenina, where in a non-dance role the performer enacted the powerful emotional and plastique drama, with the depth of his skills depicting the temperament of a dancer who had hidden behind the academic style of classical princes.
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