Monthly Archive: June 2024

Prix Benois de la Danse
Bolshoi Theatre (Historic Stage)
Moscow, Russia
June 25, 2024

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2024 by Ilona Landgraf

On Tuesday evening, this year’s Prix Benois laureates were announced on the Historic Stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.
The Mariinsky Ballet’s Olesya Novikova won the prize for best female dancer for her performance as Aspiccia in La Fille du Pharaon (Marius Petipa’s version as reconstructed by Toni Candeloro). Gergő Ármin Balázsi (Hungarian National Ballet) and Artemy Belyakov (Bolshoi Ballet) shared the prize for best male dancer. Balázsi was nominated for his performance as Leon in Boris Eifman’s The Pygmalion Effect and Belyakov for his performance as Ivan IV in Yuri Grigorovich’s Ivan the Terrible. Marco Goecke was awarded the prize for best choreography in absentia for In the Dutch Mountains, a creation for the Nederlands Dans Theater.
The jury consisted of Svetlana Zakharova (artistic director of the Benois de la Danse Programme and chairwoman of the jury and prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre, Russia), Yukari Saito (artistic director of The Tokyo Ballet, Japan), Qu Zijiao (artistic director and president of the Liaoning Ballet and head of the Liaoning Ballet Affiliated Ballet Dance School, China), Patrick de Bana (dancer and choreographer), Nacho Duato (choreographer and artistic director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet, St. Petersburg, Russia), Tamás Solymosi (choreographer and artistic director of the Hungarian National Ballet, Budapest), and Andrei Uvarov (former principal dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet and deputy artistic director of the Sevastopol Opera and Ballet Theater, Crimea, Russia).

During the second half of the ceremony, the audience had the opportunity to watch excerpts of three of the nominated choreographies as well as performances by some of the nominated dancers and laureates. The Stanislavsky Ballet presented a portion of Maxim Sevagin’s Class-Concert. Akira Akiyama and Dan Tsukamoto (both from The Tokyo Ballet) introduced Jo Kanamori’s KAGUYAHIME to the Moscow audience, and Anastasia Stashkevich and Vladislav Lantratov (both from the Bolshoi Ballet) danced a duet from Yuri Possokhov’s The Queen of Spades.
Prix Benois nominee, Prisca Zeisel (Mikhailovsky Ballet), danced a pas de deux from Giselle alongside her company colleague Viktor Lebedev, while the Mikhailovsky Ballet’s second nominee, Nikita Tchetverikov, presented an excerpt from his creation, Saint Petersburg – Amsterdam. The nominees from the Liaoning Ballet—Sun Huixin and Zhang Haidong—performed a duet from Patrick de Bana’s Notre Dame de Paris, the piece that won them their nomination. Ksenia Ryzhkova from the Stanislavsky Ballet also appeared in the role for which she was nominated. She danced a pas de deux of Gerda from Maxim Sevagin’s The Snow Queen alongside her company colleague Denis Dmitriev.
The Hungarian nominee and laureate, Tatyjana Melnyik and Gergő Ármin Balázsi, respectively, gave Wayne Eagling’s Duett its Moscow premiere, and the two laureates, Olesya Novikova and Artemy Belyakov, combined Mariinsky and Bolshoi forces in a pas de deux from Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.

The Prix Benois program concluded with a gala concert on Wednesday.