100th Anniversary of Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya (1925 – 2015) was a Bolshoi star as dancer and choreographer. As a dancer, she developed “an individual, iconoclastic style that capitalised on her electrifying stage presence” as ballet historian Tim Scholl put it. “Her very personal style was angular, dramatic, and theatrical … Those who saw Plisetskaya’s first performances in the West still speak of her ability to wrap the theatre in her gaze, to convey powerful emotions in terse gestures”. Another commentator wrote that “she began by creating her own style and ended up creating her own theatre”.

This gala programme, celebrating the centenary of her birth, is danced by soloists from some of Russia’s most prestigious ballet theatres including the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky; the evening will feature pieces from her repertoire that have become part of ballet history, the kind of technically demanding roles in which she excelled – Alberto Alonso’s Carmen Suite, the Dying Swan, Don Quixote; excerpts from Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Stone Flower, Yakobson’s Spartacus, Raymonda, Walpurgis Night, Shurale, Laurencia; and the choreographic miniature Melody from the opera Orpheus and Eurydice.