Yuri Grigorovich, one of the most significant choreographers of the 20th century, who served as the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet from 1964 to 1995, reshaping Russian ballet in the late Soviet era, died on Monday. He was 98.
His death was announced by the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
Mr. Grigorovich was best known for his 1968 production of “Spartacus.” Reporting from Moscow soon after its premiere, the dance critic Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times that it was “a turning point in Soviet ballet,” one of the biggest successes in decades.
The ballet told the story of the enslaved gladiator Spartacus, who led a failed revolt in ancient Rome, a tale that might bring to mind another revolution, one that did not fail: the Russian Revolution of 1917. Compared with earlier Soviet productions set to Aram Khachaturian’s 1954 score, Mr. Grigorovich’s was streamlined and simplified, with obvious good guys (Spartacus and his wife) and bad guys (the rich Crassus and his courtesan mistress).
What made the work most distinctive, though, was the style of dancing: It was big and bold, epic in scale and emotion.
Masses of men filled the stage, in armor or bare-chested, marching, kicking, jumping. Spartacus and Crassus, in soliloquy-like solos, spun like tornadoes and leaped impossibly high, with slashing, stage-spanning, split-kick jumps. Their climactic battle was a dance-off to end all dance-offs.
In its emphasis on dancing — and dancing as athletic spectacle — Mr. Grigorovich’s choreography departed from the previously dominant style of Soviet ballet: dramatic ballet, or “drambalet.”
To conform to political strictures around art — under Socialist Realism, abstraction was to be avoided — drambalet de-emphasized dance steps in favor of gestural storytelling, and favored acting influenced by the school of Konstantin Stanislavsky. (His approach, which stressed the actor’s use of lived experience, would become the basis of Method acting.) The height of drambalet was a 1940 production of “Romeo and Juliet” by Leonid Lavrovsky, the man Mr. Grigorovich replaced as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 1964.
The attention to male dancers in “Spartacus” was also new. “At last the Bolshoi men are allowed to dance,” Mr. Barnes wrote, “and indeed the ballet is as much for them as, say, ‘Swan Lake’ is for women.”
“Spartacus” was a huge hit, at home and abroad, as was a 1975 ballet film featuring the heroically explosive Vladimir Vasiliev in the title role. The production became the Bolshoi Ballet’s signature piece, as well as the model for later Grigorovich works, including his 1975 version of “Ivan the Terrible.”
Mr. Grigorovich’s ballets were popular nearly everywhere, and he was considered a genius by most Russian critics. Some Western critics came close to agreeing. Mr. Barnes hailed him as “the most talented Russian choreographer since Mikhail Fokine,” of the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg and the Ballets Russes in Paris.
Many Western critics, though, found his choreography lacking in subtlety and taste — especially those in America, where the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine set the aesthetic standards.
“What it’s designed for is force,” Arlene Croce wrote of “Spartacus” in a 1975 review in The New Yorker. She called the work relentless and repetitive, describing it as a “bludgeoning,” yet she praised the passionate dancers. “Even in trash like ‘Spartacus,’” she wrote, “Bolshoi dancers can impress you with their love of theater, their rage to perform.”
The Russian ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov, shortly after his defection to the West in 1974, told The Times: “Whether you like his ballets or not out here in the West, Grigorovich is a name that means a great deal to Soviet dancers.”
In his 1982 version of “The Golden Age”, a tale of Communist youth facing corrupt gangsters, set in the 1920s to a 1930 score by Shostakovich, Mr. Grigorovich provided starring roles for his new protégé, Irek Mukhamedov, and Natalia Bessmertnova, whom he married in 1968 after divorcing his first wife, the esteemed ballerina Alla Shelest. But “The Golden Age” would be his last new work.
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, amid various internal power struggles at the Bolshoi, Mr. Grigorovich faced accusations that he had dried up creatively and was an arrogant, inflexible autocrat who would not allow other choreographers into the company. Prominent dancers, including the aging star Maya Plisetskaya and Mr. Grigorovich’s former protégé, Mr. Vasiliev, openly criticized him.
For years, Mr. Grigorovich had clashed with the Bolshoi management. In 1995, objecting to changes in the hiring of dancers, and to the hiring of Mr. Vasiliev as the artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater, Mr. Grigorovich resigned. The day after the announcement, Bolshoi dancers refused to perform. It was the closest thing to a strike in the company’s history. To many, he remained a hero.
Yuri Nikolayevich Grigorovich was born on Jan. 2, 1927, in the city then called Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father, Nikolai, was an accountant, and his mother, Klaudia (Rozai) Grigorovich, was a dancer from a family of dancers and circus entertainers. Her brother, Gyorgi Rozai, was an acclaimed character-style dancer in the Ballets Russes.
Yuri trained at the Leningrad Ballet School (later the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet). Upon graduating in 1946, he joined the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky). Short in stature, he performed demi-character roles like the Golden Idol in “La Bayadère” and a Chinese dancer in “The Nutcracker.”
Mentored by the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov — who advocated a Russian classical approach and had also mentored Balanchine in the 1920s, but whose work had been classified as “formalist,” a taboo in the Soviet Union — Mr. Grigorovich began presenting his choreography in 1956. The following year, the Kirov debuted “The Stone Flower,” his remake of a drambalet with the addition of abstract dancing. It received the official sanction of being remounted at the Bolshoi. His 1961 work, “Legend of Love,” was also a success.
Soon after, during the upheaval over the Kirov star Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West, Mr. Grigorovich became the chief ballet master at the Kirov. Then, at 37, he moved to Moscow to lead the Bolshoi.
Over the years, Mr. Grigorovich made his own versions of most classic ballets: “The Nutcracker,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Giselle,” “La Bayadère” and more. Sometimes, as in his 1973 version of “The Sleeping Beauty,” he restored original choreography that earlier Soviet versions had discarded.
Mr. Grigorovich’s “Sleeping Beauty” beefed up the male roles, as did his 1969 version of “Swan Lake,” but it was censured by the Ministry of Culture, and Mr. Grigorovich, who had altered the standard Soviet happy ending, was forced to restore it. This was not the last time he clashed with Soviet authorities, though it wasn’t until the power of the Communist Party was waning, in 1990, that he made his disagreements public, in an interview with The Times and in other forums.
Among the many awards and official honors he won were the Lenin Prize, in 1970; the Order of Lenin, in 1976 and 1986; and the U.S.S.R. State Prize, in 1977 and 1985.
The death in 1989 of Simon Virsaladze, a stage designer he had collaborated closely with on most of his works, put a damper on Mr. Grigorovich’s creative output. “There is enough to running a company without being a choreographer,” he told The Times in 1990.
After resigning from the Bolshoi in 1995, Mr. Grigorovich moved to the southern Russian city of Krasnodar to start a new ballet company under his own name. He headed juries at several international ballet competitions, including the Benois de la Danse in Moscow. In 2005, Alexei Ratmansky, then the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, brought Mr. Grigorovich’s “The Golden Age” back into the repertory, and Mr. Grigorovich visited the company as an honored guest.
Mr. Grigorovich has no immediate survivors. His wife, Ms. Bessmertnova, died in 2008, and he had no children.
After Mr. Ratmansky’s resignation from the Bolshoi in 2008, Mr. Grigorovich returned to the company as a choreographer and ballet master, a position he retained until his death.
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