A decade ago, a new spirit of tolerance of the avant garde blossomed in Russia. But these days, it´s impossible to know where the lines are - as the country´s most celebrated director discovered to his cost. By Joshua YaffaOne Saturday evening in December 2017, as it has regularly for nearly 200 years, the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, draped by its famous scarlet-and-gold curtain, featured the long-anticipated premiere of a new ballet. Tickets had sold out almost instantly. The Bolshoi´s capacious hall, ringed by teetering loggia boxes, was filled with so many members of the ruling elite that the event seemed an updated version of an old Communist party central committee congress.The highly awaited ballet was a staging of the life and work of Rudolf Nureyev, the famed dancer and choreographer whose defection from the Soviet Union in 1961 made international headlines. The director was Kirill Serebrennikov, who, at 48, was Russia´s most celebrated theatrical figure, an artist whose tastes run to the experimental and provocative. The ballet, titled Nureyev, portrays its hero as a genius whose talent, like his idiosyncrasies, made him difficult for the bosses of the time to understand - an inevitable object of suspicion. Continue reading...
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