IZO

Anastasia Volochkova in Snickers ad.

Cinema

Nominations for the forthcoming Nikas, the Russian Oscars. You can buy a black market ticket to the ceremony on 31 March for $5,000 (stanis-sadal, in Russian),

"Russia's leading independent movie producer, Alexander Rodnyansky, has taken a majority stake in one of the country's leading art-house distribs, Kino Bez Granits" (Variety).

Mikhail Baryshnikov/Kate Moss collaboration (Hot Momma Gossip) (thanks, MK).

Dance of the wife of the mayor of Kiev (via LJ stanis-sadal)..

Anastasia Volochkova, former prima ballerina, has published a book, Confessions of a Russian Ballerina. Here's an interview with her about her relationships with her mother and her men (MK v Pitere, in Russian).

Ukraine's Got Talent: Alla Kushnir.

The Baryshnikov Art Centre is four years old (Herald Tribune).

More on the cultural flowering in Perm (Sophia Kishkovsky/Scotsman).

On the cultural flowering in Perm (NYT):

... Sergei Gordeev, a wealthy senator and patron of Soviet Modernist architecture, has been a driving force behind Perm’s current cultural ambitions. He and other philanthropists have committed to giving a total of about $3 million a year toward the new contemporary art museum’s collection. Donors include Lukoil and Viktor Vekselberg, the oil and aluminum magnate, while the regional government is financing the museum’s operating costs.

The legacy of St Petersburg-born George Balanchine [né Giorgi Melitonis dze Balanchivadze] dominates the ballet world, to the exclusion of half-hour romps with subjects such as gas pumps, sailing ships, ranch hands, servicemen, outlaws and murderers (WP) (thanks, MK). 

Ballerina Ekaterina Maximova of the Bolshoi Theatre has died (AP). Quite a leap here:

Chelles Battle Pro 2009 1/4 final, Dream Team Russia vs Sans Limite.

Woz is Following His Dreams with Karina Smirnoff (Wired) (thanks, MK). This pairing seems in fact to be a producers' attempt to reprise the recent UK experience with Strictly Come Dancing: chubby journo John Sergeant partnered by Russian dancer Kristina Rihanoff swept up the popular vote until backstage bitching forced them out (Times).

Documentary film Ballerina, about dancers at the Mariinsky Theatre (DC Examiner) (thanks, MK).

Cossack dancing to Benny Goodman jazz.

New book: Ballet's Magic Kingdom (Toni Bentley/IHT):

This is a fantastic book. We find out not only about the vicissitudes of Pavlova's alimentary canal but also about the skeletal structure of her knees, the size of her arch, the height of her jumps, her "sensuous" lower lip and the slope of her "ravishing" shoulders. All this and a clear explanation of the layers of her ample soul.

The legendary ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, winner of four Stalin Prizes, has died (Open Space, in Russian).

Leonid Monastyrsky, a former director at the Moscow Arts Theatre (MKhAT) has been sentenced to six years in a harsh-regime prison-camp for commissioning an attempt on the life of his wife, Bolshoi Theatre ballerina Irina Dmitrieva, his daughter and his son-in-law in an attempt to gain sole ownership of their 5-room flat in central Moscow (RIA Novosti, in Russian).

Anna Pavlova, Dying Swan, circa 1907.

52%: in ballet, ambition is irrelevant if your physical structure falls short of perfection (Silverdocs).

The annual Kamchatka dance marathon was cut short to 7 hours 30 minutes this year because of bad weather; last year it lasted 15 hours 31 minutes (mail.ru, in Russian).

Star ballerina Maiya Plisetskaya and composer Rodion Shchedrin celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary today (gazeta.ru).

The International Konstantinovsky Charitable Foundation in St Petersburg has bought the Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky collection of Russian theatre art for "under $20 million" (John Varoli/Art Newspaper).

Why is Russian ballet different? With link to NY Times article (registration required) (webcowgirl).

The forgotten Bloomsbury Group girl, ballerina Lydia Lopokova: "At the peak of her ballerina fame, she was far more famous and more written about than any other member of the group" (Guardian). But she was a Russian and therefore an outsider. From the point of view of posterity, it is usually catastrophic to abandon your national context.

Another chapter in the old struggle between Westernisers and traditionalists: a shake-up at the Bolshoi Theatre (Ismene Brown/Telegraph).

Somewhere, I presume, in the post-Soviet space: what women do when left to their own devices. You have to watch up to the minute mark, or thereabouts, to get the full, er, impact.

Sentimental education a la russe circa 1960

The Times on Nureyev's early sex-life (pdf; see also here), featuring the predatory mother-figure Xenia, a menage-a-quatre and a "boy with an erotic presence as visible as a heat haze". So much for no sex in the Soviet Union. But, as a comment wonders, who wrote the article? The "a" before "heat haze" suggests a Russian.

Nureyev in Chicago tonight

A TV documentary (pdf): Nureyev: The Russian Years  (9 p.m. Wednesday,  WTTW-Ch. 11), including amateur footage shot before his defection in 1961.

(And what about the non-Russian years? Once upon a time, when yours truly was scarcely a teenager, his parents took in a lodger in the person of a very personable German art student. One evening the art student didn't come home. But he turned up the next day, explaining that he'd spent the night with Nureyev.)