Yuri Grigorovich, choreographer who ruled the Bolshoi Ballet for decades with his brazen, macho style

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19-05-2025

Yuri Grigorovich, the Russian choreographer, who has died aged 98, was artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet for more than 30 years, its defining choreographer and the single most influential figure in Russian dance. His ballet Spartacus became a world hit, a cultural landmark redolent of Soviet might and masculine force, and contains probably the most demanding male lead role ever choreographed.
Grigorovich was a forceful representative of Russia's traditional adherence to iron dictators, whether in politics or culture – fearless, devious and impermeable to challenges either to his rights as leader or the artistic merit of his choreography. To some observers, his exceptional talent as a choreographer excused, or at least explained, his style. To others, he was an appalling example of the most old-fashioned kind of Russian chief – self-absorbed, repressive, and damaging to the country's progress.
A little over 5ft tall, like many of Russia's leaders, he ruled the Bolshoi Ballet through the Cold War and into the post-communist mid-1990s, when a combination of dancers' mutinies and Western audiences' coolness caused his removal. But it told of his formidable nature, and the failure of more democratic modern ideas of leadership in his successors as Bolshoi director, that at 81 he was back in de facto charge of the company, his autocratic style suiting Putin's era quite as well as it had suited Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's.
Grigorovich assessed his own position in a potted biography: 'Yuri Grigorovich is considered to be the greatest living choreographer in the world of ballet today.' This opinion was widely held in Russia and, even if it was hubristic, many European and US ballet watchers could agree that he was a major creative figure in dance history.
He moulded a vision of late 20th-century Russian ballet that for all its faults proved remarkably durable for modern audiences – glamorous, slick, acrobatic and powered by a stereotypical sexuality, in which men are muscled and women are florid courtesans or pliant, docile flowers. The brazen style, though it lacked musical or expressive sensitivity, strongly appealed to Russia's most beautiful ballerinas and most macho male dancers, and ensured that on Bolshoi world tours, even if the ballets were harshly criticised, the dancers looked amazing.
Born on 2 January 1927 in Leningrad, Yuri Nikolaevich Grigorovich came from a dancing family: his uncle was a character dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and his mother had ballet training. Others in his family were circus artists, and acrobatic fearlessness was a given in Grigorovich's ballets, often including hair-raising lifts in the duets.
He trained at Leningrad's great ballet academy; during the siege of Leningrad by Hitler's forces, the school was evacuated to Perm, along with many of Leningrad's leading artistic figures. He joined the depleted Kirov Ballet in 1946; there, due to his small, athletic build, he was categorised as a 'character grotesque dancer', excelling in high jumps and flexibly distorted body shapes.
For 15 years he performed classical ballet's character roles such as the bravura Golden Idol in La Bayadère, Puss in Boots in The Sleeping Beauty and one of the Chinese dancers in The Nutcracker, as well as sturdy parts in Soviet folk-ballets. 'To every role he brought a psychological and emotional nuance,' wrote the Leningrad ballet critic Igor Stupnikov. This fusion of physical and emotional extroversion became a characteristic of Grigorovich's own ballets.
His first two full-evening productions for the Kirov, The Stone Flower (1957) and The Legend of Love (1961), both later staged for the Bolshoi, revealed, according to the country's senior choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, a new master of ballet. They remain for many his most original works and are still regularly performed in Russia.
The composer Dmitri Shostakovich (whose sister had been Grigorovich's music teacher) exclaimed that the inner spirit, emotional complexity and gymnastic expressiveness of Grigorovich's choreography heralded a new era for dance-theatre.
In the disciplinary fall-out within the Kirov from Rudolf Nureyev's sensational defection in 1961, Yuri Grigorovich was elevated to chief ballet-master. In 1964 he was headhunted by the Kremlin for the directorship of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, the USSR's flagship company in political and social terms.
For the next 31 years, from 1964 to 1995, Grigorovich was the exclusive creator and artistic dictator of the Bolshoi. He made few ballets, but he did them on a monumental Soviet scale, and they became iconic Bolshoi events, as much politically intended as artistic.
The bold, melodramatic Spartacus in 1968 remains his enduring masterpiece, its title role giving rise to a special Bolshoi superhero type of male dancer, notably Vladimir Vasiliev, considered by Russians the greatest male dancer of all time; Irek Mukhamedov, who later joined the Royal Ballet; and more recently the remarkable Ivan Vasiliev.
Subsequent performances by Western stars such as the Royal Ballet's Carlos Acosta and Paris Opera Ballet's Nicolas Le Riche exposed an unexpectedly universal humanity in the work, proving Grigorovich's art to be something more than simply Soviet propaganda.
Other Grigorovich ballets travelled less well, such as his beetling study of Ivan the Terrible (1975); Angara (1976), a ballet about Siberian land pioneers; and The Golden Age (1982), set to Shostakovich's rip-roaring Twenties score, in which good Soviet footballers trounced decadent Western ones.
He filled the Bolshoi repertoire with his idiosyncratic versions of the classics: The Sleeping Beauty (1963), The Nutcracker (1966), Swan Lake (1969), Romeo and Juliet (1979), Raymonda (1984), La Bayadère (1991), Don Quixote and Le Corsaire (both 1994). Their dominance at the Bolshoi remained for many the chief stumbling-block to the company's artistic revival, but groomed the 'big' style for which it was world-renowned. As head of the Leningrad ballet academy's choreographic faculty (1974-88), Grigorovich also wielded total control over the emergence of other native choreographers.
Constant mutinies rose in the Bolshoi over lack of variety in repertory, and his casting preferences – usually favouring his wife, the ethereal ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova – kept many a dissident ballerina out of view.
Most vocally hostile was the Bolshoi's senior superstar Maya Plisetskaya, whose vast home popularity enabled her to maintain her own loyal group of performers within the Bolshoi, with the power to commission her own ballets (such as the celebrated Carmen) in rare defiance of the Grigorovich monopoly. She wrote scathingly of him in her autobiography: 'Our servile, and later semi-servile life, gave rise to many a little Stalin. The mortar of Soviet society was fear... And there were plenty of reasons for fear at the Bolshoi.'
In the 1980s glasnost period, even Grigorovich's own greatest protégé, Vladimir Vasiliev, began to openly attack his cumbersome ballets, and dancers demonstrated against the monolithic repertory and the favoured status of foreign tours (the only opportunity make money and get outside critical feedback). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's more commercially sensitive political masters also listened to the Western impresarios who felt that the Bolshoi's artistic reputation and box office appeal were being damaged, and they dismissed Grigorovich in 1995.
Undaunted, he founded a new young company in Krasnodar, Siberia, and consolidated his standing as ballet's elder statesman by chairing the juries of leading ballet competitions. Meanwhile, he frequently commented on the inability of the Bolshoi to find a choreographer or director equal in force to himself.
His loyalist coaches and dancers within the Bolshoi stirred dissatisfaction with subsequent directors, most significantly Russia's only other truly gifted choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who found the vicious internal politicking on Grigorovich's behalf impossible. When Ratmansky resigned in 2008, the 81-year-old Grigorovich was reinstalled as the Bolshoi's main choreographer and ballet-master.
Yuri Grigorovich was much decorated by Soviet and post-communist governments, notably by Leonid Brezhev and Mikhail Gorbachev. He won the Lenin Prize in 1970 and 1986, the Order of Lenin in 1976 and the USSR State Prize in 1977 and 1985, as well as several lifetime awards from post-Soviet governments and a host of honours from Eastern European countries.
He was married twice: first to the Kirov ballerina Alla Shelest, whom he divorced; then in 1965 the Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova, who died in 2008. He said: 'I married my first wife for her intelligence, and my second wife for her beauty.' He had no children.
Yuri Grigorovich, born January 2 1927, died May 19 2025
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