As in an exchange of those that took place in the middle of the cold war, the Munich Ballet, the company that will inaugurate the Perelada Festival on July 8 and 9 (subscribers have a 10% discount by buying tickets here), this spring has found itself in the position of replacing its director, the Russian Igor Zelensky, with another European.
The former Mariinsky star and Putin protégé – the press speculated about his relationship with one of the president's daughters – left the management of the Bavarian company that he had taken over in 2016 as soon as the war broke out in Ukraine. And since then the troupe German has not heard from him since.
At the same time, the former étoile of the Paris Opera, Laurent Hilaire, who since 2017 had held the position left by Zelensky himself at the head of the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet, left Russia without hesitation, making headlines in international media.
“I left for political reasons. As a citizen, due to the values of democracy and freedom of expression, I was in a position where whatever I did would be political, because everything in culture is also symbolic. And theaters like the Mariinsky, the Bolshoi or Stanislavsky itself belong to the State”, explains Hilaire upon his arrival in Barcelona to present the show.
Highly valued as a ballet director, Hilaire, who in the eighties was boosted by Rudolf Nuréyev, ran free through Europe just two months ago. So the Bavarian company, the Bayerisches Staatballett (which was founded in 1990 as an independent department of the Bayerische Staatsoper), did not hesitate to call him to take Zelensky's place.
At 69 years old and with crystal clear ideas, Hilaire takes on the challenge of exciting a company of between 65 and 70 dancers of twenty nationalities. In Peralada, 60 will land to dance two programs that range from the neoclassical Balanchine to the fashionable choreographer, the Israeli Sharon Eyal. This is her first outing after the pandemic and "the company is very excited," she says.
The agility that the Peralada Festival has shown in filling the gap for the canceled Mariinsky Ballet with the Bavarian proposal is only comparable to that Hilaire himself has had in finding dates, fitting in rehearsals and applying changes to the repertoire, in order to offer a range representative of the excellence of a troupe.
This is a formation that has cultivated works by incunabula such as John Cranko, Mats Ek, Jiri Kylián, John Neumeier or Hans van Manen while introducing choreographers such as Wayne McGregor, David Dowson, the aforementioned Eyal or Liam Scarlett. Of these last three, works will be danced precisely at the Empordà festival.
On the first day, the Roads and Horizons program is made up of Capriccio for piano and orchestra (from George Balanchine's famous Jewels) with music by Stravinsky, followed by With a Chance of Rain, an expansive ballet by Scarlett dealing with the relationship between music and dance through Rachmaninoff's piano preludes and Bedroom Folk, the same piece by Eyal with which he opened the Grec in Barcelona.
The second programme, Vibrant Colors, brings together Dawson's Affairs of the Heart and the much celebrated Pictures at an Exhibition, with which the Ukrainian Alexei Ratmansky draws inspiration from Kandinsky's work on Mussorgsky's music. And it closes again with Capriccio... by Balanchine.
Most European and international choreographers are withdrawing from Russia, Hilaire warns. "Russian companies no longer travel, they are stagnating, and the wealth of choreographers will be depleted. The danger is a regression to a more restricted repertoire focused on Russian works. There will be less diversity. Because the audience and the dancers evolve together, which some learn serves to feed others. And it will take time to reestablish contacts and relationships". "And as it happened before the nineties - she concludes -, what is done in the West will not reach Russia. And it will be necessary to recover all that again".