Replaced 95% of the troupe, but failed to win over the audience. What the ex-premier of Russia's Mariinsky is doing with Belarusian ballet

Igor Kolb. Photo: BelTA

As stated in a recent interview with the theater's chief ballet master Igor Kolb in "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", his path in Minsk began in a difficult atmosphere.

Four years ago, when the former premier of the Mariinsky Theatre took charge of the Belarusian troupe, he encountered a collective that, in his own words, "was not entirely competitive." Of the 115 staff positions, 38 were vacant. A third of the troupe was simply missing.

Igor Kolb resorted to radical measures. "Today, the troupe has been renewed by 95 percent," he states. This figure means that almost the entire artistic staff was replaced within four years.

After the protests in 2020, the theater experienced a wave of dismissals. The personnel vacuum created by political purges across the entire cultural sphere of Belarus began to be filled by specialists from Russia. Igor Kolb, a native of Pinsk who worked for 26 years at the Mariinsky Theatre, became one of these "anti-crisis" managers. He formed a new team of young graduates and, he claims, even attracted foreigners.

However, the "restart" of Belarusian ballet turned out to be very painful for the audience.

Kolb's new productions caused a wave of indignation among avid theatergoers, who saw them as tasteless and "profaning the sacred." After the premieres of his ballets "Dances (Carmen-Suite)" and "The Nutcracker", social networks exploded with outraged reviews. "Sideshow," "quiet horror," "the ballerina is carried like a stretcher with cement" – such epithets were used by viewers to describe what they saw, demanding the return of classical productions by the master of Belarusian ballet, Valentin Elizariev, to the stage.

Igor Kolb himself admits in an interview with "RG": "Other performances that I staged caused huge debates. It even reached the point of hate."

Creative claims were soon joined by accusations of plagiarism. Russian choreographer Oleg Gabyshev publicly stated that Igor Kolb had appropriated his idea for a ballet about Marc Chagall, which Gabyshev had personally presented to the leadership of the Minsk theater a year and a half before the announcement of a similar production.

Against the backdrop of internal scandals, the tours in Moscow look like an attempt to gain recognition abroad. Moreover, Kolb is not just bringing a restored performance to the Russian capital, but his new author's edition of the ballet "La Bayadère". The Minsk theater's repertoire already had an old version, essentially a copy of the Mariinsky Theatre's production. But, according to Kolb, he "had a chance to propose his own edition".

The main innovation was a reworked finale, for which the musical score had to be completely re-orchestrated. Thus, its own, original version of the world-famous ballet emerged. Which, according to the ballet master, the audience in Minsk received "surprisingly kindly".

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