Olga Smirnova, principal soloist of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, arrived in Amsterdam on Monday, where she will immediately join the Dutch National Ballet. For Smirnova (30) it had become impossible to continue working in Russia after she spoke out last week on the Telegram message service against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “With all my soul I am against the war in Ukraine,” wrote the ballerina, who has a Ukrainian grandfather. However, the latter is not the reason for her protest. “It seems as if we are living in the twentieth century instead of the twenty-first. In our modern and enlightened world, I would expect advanced societies to solve their political problems through peaceful negotiations. I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia.”
It is no coincidence that Smirnova has moved to the Netherlands. She had been eyeing the Amsterdam ballet company for some time, as an admirer of Hans van Manen, ballet master Larissa Lezhnina and the repertoire of Dutch National Ballet: classical and contemporary. The war in Ukraine has accelerated her move to Amsterdam.
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supernova
With Smirnova, nicknamed Supernova, the Dutch National Ballet is bringing in one of the most beautiful dancers of her generation. In 2013, for example, she won the Benois de la danse (‘Oscar of dance’) for best female dancer. Her pure, typically Russian classical technique, with smooth back, clean lines and beautifully flowing ports de bras, is the result of training at the famous Vaganova Academy in her native city of Saint Petersburg. With the Bolsjoi Ballet, but also with the Mariinsky Ballet and American Ballet Theater among others, she often demonstrated these in the classical repertoire. In Moscow, the expressive Smirnova also regularly appeared in contemporary work by Paul Lightfoot and Wayne MacGregor, among others. Smirnova will perform for the first time at Dutch National Ballet in April in a new adaptation of the nineteenth-century classic Raymonda†
Incidentally, the Bolshoi ballerina is not the only dancer who has put a line under her career in Russia for the time being. The Russian-Ukrainian Alexei Ratmansky, once director of the Bolshoi Ballet and now resident choreographer of American Ballet Theater in New York and one of the most in-demand choreographers of the moment, has abruptly stopped rehearsals for a new ballet at the Bolshoi Ballet. In the New York Times he says he doubts he will ever return to Moscow as long as Putin is president.
Foreign dance artists are also leaving Russia in protest, including the Italian Jacopo Tissi (soloist Bolshoi Ballet) and the Briton Xander Parish (first soloist Mariinsky Ballet). For example, the 22-year-old Brazilian Victor Caixeta, who comes from the Mariinsky Ballet, also joined the Dutch National Ballet. Laurent Hilaire, former danseur étoile of the Ballet of the Opera de Paris, today director of the Stanislavsky Ballet in Moscow, resigns from his position “because the circumstances mean that I can no longer work with a clear conscience.”