Kiev Ballet

Kiev Ballet
General information
Name	Kiev Ballet
Year founded	1867
Principal venue	National Opera of Ukraine
Website	http://www.opera.com.ua/
Artistic staff
Artistic Director	Denis Matvienko
Other
Formation	Principal First Soloist Soloist Corps de Ballet

Kiev Ballet is a leading ballet company based in the city of Kiev, Ukraine. Kiev Ballet, also known as the National Ballet of Ukraine, performs works of classical ballet and tours internationally. It currently has 24 ballets in its repertory, one of the largest in the world, and has had many notable dancers among its members.

The National Opera of Ukraine, a performing arts theatre with a resident opera company, was established in 1867. It also included a small resident troupe of ballet dancers, who would perform mainly folk-style dancing during opera productions. By 1893, this grew to a troupe large enough to stage large ballets. Folk dancing and ballets with Ukrainian stories were among the early productions.

During the 1910s, the dance scene in Kiev saw a rapid development in classical ballet and contemporary dance training and performance. Mikhail Mordkin, a former soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet, travelled to Kiev with a troupe and gave performances with Art Nouveau approaches, containing Spanish and Oriental themes. He was hired by the experimental Kiev Young Theatre between 1916 and 1919, and gained a reputation as an influential teacher of movement and dance.

Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky and a former soloist with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, fled to Kiev in 1916 to escape World War I upheaval in Western Europe. Her husband, also a dancer with the Ballets Russes, was hired as ballet master at the Kiev Opera. Nijinska founded a modernist dance school, the École de Mouvement, in Kiev. This was an influential step forward in Kiev's dance culture, exposing artists there to the avant garde of Western Europe. Following the Communist Revolution in Russia and Ukraine, however, Nijinska was forced to flee once more, to Poland, and the school disbanded shortly afterward. Her most prominent pupil while in Kiev was local dancer Serge Lifar, who went on to become principal dancer with the Ballets Russes in 1923, and was considered the most important dancer and choreographer of his generation.

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