Vladimir Vasiliev - Ballet Dancer
Vladimir Vasiliev - A ballet dancer par excellence!
Vladimir Vasiliev is a premier dancer who has made amazing contributions to the development of classical male dance. He has come to embody the strong new Bolshoi male.
Vladimir Vasiliev one of the great Russian dancers is the only dancer to be given the title “World’s Best Dancer” by the Paris Dance Academy. But these days he is busy earning another title – that of a painter! His attitude towards painting is that of a professional artist – one who paints because he can’t live without it.
But coming back to his skills as a dancer, Vasiliev was born in Moscow in 1940, graduated from the Moscow Ballet School in 1958 and joined the Bolshoi Ballet. He became a premier dancer who made enormous contributions to the development of classical male dance and came to embody the strong new Bolshoi male. Russia’s influential ballet critic Fedor Lopukhov called him “God of the dance … A miracle in art, perfection.”
Numerous roles were created for him, and he performed throughout the world, usually partnering his wife, Bolshoi prima ballerina Ekaterina Maximova. Among the most notable were those created by Yuri Grigorovich, who gave him the principal roles in his original productions of The Stone Flower, Spartacus, The Nutcracker, Ivan The Terrible and Angara. Besides Maximova, Vasiliev’s famous partners included Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya, Alicia Alonso, Carla Fracci, and Rita Poelvoorde.
Yet Vladimir Vasiliev is not as well known in the west as such dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, because he remained in the Soviet Union and did most of his work there rather than defecting.
New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described the excitement of one of Vasiliev’s U.S. performances with the Bolshoi Ballet: “Yekaterina Maksimova and Vladimir Vasiliev burst upon New York City in 1959, the greatest of the passionate young dancers who, with Moscow's more established stars, made the Bolshoi Ballet's American debut a total triumph.”
In March 1995 Vladimir Vasiliev was appointed the General and Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Theatre after Yuri Grigorovich, artistic director of the ballet company since 1963, was dismissed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Vasiliev was himself dismissed as director of the Bolshoi Theater August 28, 2000 in a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vasiliev learned about his dismissal from hearing it on the radio.
Since his exit from the Bolshoi, Vasiliev premiered in the ballet production Lungo Viaggio Nella Notte di Natale to Tchaikovsky’s music in Opera di Roma, and continues to choreograph and stage new ballets.
