A little known awards ceremony, the “Spirit of the Dance” awards, was held at the Stanislavsky Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre in Moscow on 27 April to honour the winners from 2016 in categories ranging from rising stars to talented pedagogues and even informative ballet critics.

The evening, structured in a format that combined award ceremony with gala concert, interspersed the presentation of awards with short numbers acknowledging each winner. Though running nearly 4 hours, specific dancing highlights punctuated the evening that covered a range of styles from folk to classical ballet.

The first artist to make his mark during the evening, Yuri Kudryavtsev, performed the pas de deux from La Sylphide alongside Ekaterina Bulgutova. Both leading soloists form the Kranoyarsk Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Kudryavtsev is a tall young man with clean beats and light ballon with a promising future ahead of him. Bulgutova evoked a mischievous sylphide with clean delivery and proved a lovely onstage match for her partner.

You directed the ballet troupe at Teatro alla Scala for 7 years. How did that differ from running the Mariinsky?

Everything was new for me: a new system, a new culture, new values. Although there are general human values that are shared as well, there were a lot of revelations for me. As interesting as it was for me in Italy, working in the Bolshoi or Mariinsky Theatre you always know that it is a large empire, and there’s some sort of guarantee — that’s the presence of the Vaganova Academy for the Mariinsky and the Moscow Choreographic School for the Bolshoi, and that’s a huge strength. La Scala also has their own school but it’s not what we have here.

After all, our school, our training system is distinguished by the fact that there is practically no place else in the world where students are taught and graduate on the basis of classical dance through means of a complex system of classes: character dance, historical, duet, ballet and others. There are few schools like these two in the world. Another thing is the repertoire these two theatres have.

On Saturday, 18 February, nearly 5000 people filed into the great hall of the Kremlin Theatre in order to attend the gala concert in honor of Andris Liepa’s 55th anniversary. Film clips of Liepa’s early years greeted the audience pre-curtain — the “Ballet Russes” curtain — referring to the Diaghilev works that Liepa has helped restore over the past few decades in various international theatres.

The upper stage of the Bolshoi Theatre: a small auditorium located under the building’s roof, complete with a small orchestra pit and audience seating that mimics the actual stage where performances are held. It is a hallowed yet impressive space, and today it’s empty except for a small team of six people: Alyona Kovalyova, her partner Yakopo Tissi, two coaches, a pianist, the conductor…and me. It is just five days before Kovalyova and Tissi’s debut in Swan Lake. As the dancers rehearse, their coaches, former Bolshoi soloist Alexander Vetrov and former Kirov ballerina Olga Chenchikova, lead the rehearsals to the sounds of a single piano onstage. The conductor for the premiere, Aleksey Bogorad, sits to mark notes about the score and inquires frequently about the tempo while the rehearsal goes on.