THE INTERNET BALLET DATABASE

Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet

The Ballet Company of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre has its origins in the famous meeting held in 1897, when the actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky and the writer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko met at the Slavyansky Bazaar restaurant in Moscow for a lunch that began on June 22 and ended 18 hours later at the Stanislavsky family estate of Lyubimovka near the capital.

Both visionaries shared a desire to create a modern performing arts center merging their active organizations and sixteen months later they inaugurated the Moscow Art Theatre bringing together some of Russia's finest artists.

The new company quickly gained recognition for breaking with classical European theatre tradition and combining Stanislavsky's "method-acting" with Danchenko's muscial expertise. The theatre began staging radical new plays by Anton Chekov and paved the way for a new freedom of expression and emotion to be expressed on the stage.

In 1929, the former Bolshoi ballet star Victorina Krieger formed the Moscow Art Ballet, which in 1939 joined with the Moscow Art Theatre, melding Stanislavsky's system of acting with her ballet productions. By teaching her dancers to expolore the motivation behind their characters she showed them how to bring greater depth and drama to their performances while remaining true to the art of the classical dance. The philosophy of imbuing dance with drama continues to this day and is is upheld by the current artistic director.

Following Stanislavksky's death in 1938 . what is today known as the Music Theatre named after Stansislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko was created in 1941 by merging their two respective theatres and included Krieger's dance troupe.
Danchenko was the company's first musical director and continued until his death in 1943.

Currently. the Stanislavsky Ballet is a company of around 165 people and ranks as Moscow's second ballet company after the Bolshoi.The Artistic Director is Sergei Filin, former principal dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet.

The company is famous for its staging of the Vladimir Bourmeister version of "Swan Lake" which Bourmeister, the company's artistic director from 1943 to 1971, created for the group in 1953. Bourmeister's version went back to Tchaikovsky's original score that accompanied an unsuccessful and soon forgotten 1877 Moscow staging. (The version on which most other productions are based is the total reworking of the ballet by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in 1895 for the St. Petersburg Maryinsky Ballet.)