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Nikita Dolgushin: An 80th Anniversary Exhibition

26.10.2018

Nikita Dolgushin: An 80th Anniversary Exhibition

To celebrate 80 years since the birth of Nikita Dolgushin, an exhibition has been unveiled in the Fireplace Room on the dress circle level featuring photographs from Dolgushin’s personal archive, together with posters from productions he choreographed at the Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre, his costumes from the ballet Spartacus, and insignia.

8 November 2018 would have marked dancer and ballet master Nikita Dolgushin’s 80th birthday. Much of his creative life was led in connection with the Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre (now the Mikhailovsky). His memory lives on today, not only between these four walls, but also on the stage: dancers appearing in Giselle follow his vision of the ballet and his sophisticated taste.

Nikita Dolgushin was born in Leningrad in 1938, and graduated from the Leningrad Choreographic Institute in 1959. He can be seen in his graduation photograph in the centre of the top row, with Lyudmila Kovalyova on his right and Natalya Makarova on his left. By all accounts, even then great things were expected of these young artists — expectations which were amply met in their graduation performance, when Dolgushin and Makarova together performed the pas de deux from the second act of Giselle. As historian of ballet Vera Kraskovskaya recalls, „The audience were preparing for the appearance of the Duke, whose grief over the death of his beloved was to be conveyed by a student who had been described by the répétiteur as ‘relatively quick on the uptake’. Nothing of the immature student was to be found in this dancer, however, either in his appearance or in his style. He made the audience relish motion itself, his plasticity of phrase combining movements into a harmonious whole.“

Dolgushin was accepted into the ballet troupe of the Kirov Theatre, and Yury Grigorovich, the theatre’s young ballet master in chief, not only entrusted the recent graduate with several of Leonid Yakobson’s Choreographic Miniatures, but also with a principal role in Giselle. With Grigorovich’s replacement Konstantin Sergeev, however, relations were more difficult. Dolgushin was „banished“ to the corps de ballet, where he was eventually given a small number of leading roles, but was largely appointed to character parts, which he found intolerable.

No longer able to remain in the troupe, in 1961 Dolgushin left for Novosibirsk, which at the time was considered a centre of innovation in ballet. The dancer’s Siberian repertoire turned out to be extremely rich and varied: Belsky’s Leningrad Symphony, Le Corsaire and Raymonda directed by Pyotr Gusev, The Legend of Love by Yuri Grigorovich, Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet by Oleg Vinogradov, and three versions of Swan Lake. In 1964 he was a prizewinner at the Varna International Ballet Competition, appearing with Ekaterina Maksimova, and in the same year received the title of Honoured Artist of the RSFSR. It was at this point that Dolgushin tried his hand as a choreographer, producing fragments of a ballet, The Ice Maiden, to music by Grieg.

But no sooner had Grigorovich and Vinogradov left Novosibirsk than the artist’s restless soul demanded change. In 1966, Dolgushin was won over by an offer from Igor Moiseev to join the recently formed Moscow Classical Ballet ensemble. This initially seemed promising, but Dolgushin found working in the thrown-together troupe unfulfilling. After two years of creative solitude, in 1969 he arrived at the Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre, where he danced until 1983.

The characters brought to life by Dolgushin on this stage were vivid, memorable, and complex: he was a brilliant virtuoso of the grand pas in Paquita, an ardent Colas in La fille mal gardée, a courageous prince in The Nutcracker, a lovestruck James, an inspired Igor in Yaroslavna, and a powerful yet brooding Godunov in Tsar Boris.

The talented dancer was to rise to even greater heights, however. In the Maly Opera, Dolgushin devoted himself to finding his own choreographical language: it was here that he created his ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky, Concerto in White, Meditations, Romeo and Juliet, and Mozartiana. Working on these productions, he planned everything down to the smallest detail, covering piles of paper with scribbled notes on roles and often even sketching costumes.

Meditations, Dolgushin’s treatment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, became the quintessential Dolgushin ballet. „The piece is Hamlet’s interior monologue, where real time perhaps shrinks into a single moment, or perhaps stretches into eternity. It is not a stream of thought, but rather a flow of consciousness: deep in thought, he intensely, painfully, personally assesses events that have already come to pass and are still to come,“ wrote Vera Krasovskaya. In a sense, this ballet and this role were Dolgushin’s confession — as a doer, a dreamer, and a poet.

In 1983 Dolgushin became Head of the Faculty of Dance and ballet master in chief of the Opera Studio of the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1988 he was awarded the title of People’s Artist of the USSR.

2007 saw him return to the Mikhailovsky Theatre as a ballet master and répétiteur. An artist and aesthete, old-fashioned and courteous, with a voracious appetite for anything new, and always one to do things his own way, he never ceased to surprise. He created a refined version of Giselle, recognized by critics as exemplary, in which he selected for himself the role of the Duke, the father of Bathilde. It was with no less pleasure that he appeared in the role of Pompeius in Spartacus, choreographed by Georgy Kovtun, a ballet so very different from his own.
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