by It’s an English-feeling day – 20 degrees, sunshine, drizzle – but my surroundings are anything but. I’m with Nina Ananiashvili, a ballet star turned company director, in her office at the very neo-Moorish opera house in Tbilisi, and we’re talking ahead of the Georgian State Ballet’s first visit to England.
“Do you see Mother Georgia?” says Ananiashvili, referring to the huge 1958 monument that overlooks the capital from Sololaki hill. “She has wine in one hand and a sword in the other. Therefore, we always say, welcome to our country, with wine, everyone who comes in friendship. But if you come against us we will fight for our country. It’s in our genes. So many Russians come here and we have nothing against them – if they behave.”
My visit to Tbilisi supports her words. Georgia – the oldest wine-producing nation in the world, on the eastern side of the Black Sea – not only has its own language, but also its own script, culture and cuisine. The hill capital has its own architecture – a unique fusion of different styles – a magnificent natural waterfall and rapids close to its centre.
Every Georgian I meet – including Ananiashvili – is charming. But fierce anti-Russian graffiti is everywhere, as well as daily headline international protests in the streets against the Kremlin’s possible intervention in the country’s politics. Adding fuel to the fire, after the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, Russia continues to occupy two separate areas north of Georgia.
Ananiashvili (61, Nino in Georgia) has had an emotional connection to both countries for a long time. Born in Georgia in 1963, she is one of the most famous prima ballerinas of the 20th century. In Georgia, she is also a national heroine.
“I always say I’m Georgian. No matter where I danced, I was born Georgian, I am Georgian, I get Georgian. And I’m proud of that. I was also proud because if you see my newspaper articles around the world, they always said that Nina Ananiashvili is different from other ballerinas from the Bolshoi. So, all my life, I was proud to be a child of my country.”
But the longest and formative part of her training took place in Moscow. It was over her 20 or more years as a star with the Bolshoi, from 1981-2004 (along with great jobs at American Ballet Theater and then Houston Ballet) that she made a name for herself as a rare dancer of dynamism, flexibility and dramatic power. , as moving as Juliet or Giselle as she was stylish in Balanchine’s cool abstract works.
“Right now we have a nervous situation here,” she says. “But I can say in general, I am a Bolshoi ballerina – I was born a ballerina in the Bolshoi. My coach, my teacher, they were the people who ‘raised’ me – I mean, raised me as a ballerina.”
So are their loyalties divided? A proud Georgian who is also a proud member of the Bolshoi?
“This is my life!” she says. “I bring what I’ve learned here so far – but it doesn’t mean I like what’s happening.”
We will soon be able to see for ourselves what this amazing force, very much like nature, has given the 175-year-old company over the past 20 years – Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili invited the company to run and revive. Under Communism, it made Tbilisi (along with Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kyiv) one of the main ballet centers of the USSR, but it has since slipped into disrepute.
Over 11 days in August and September at the London Coliseum, the Georgia State Ballet will present Swan Lake. With the Bolshoi and Mariinsky – both of whom used to visit London regularly – now personae non gratae in the West, there is a void begging to be filled. And, to judge from her delightful theatrical production of The Sleeping Beauty, which I caught in Tbilisi, the surprises are good.
Although Ananiashvili points out that the staging is based on style and choreography from her time with the Bolshoi, there is one crucial difference: conflict. In one sense, where the famous 1895 version of Tchaikovsky’s ballet is almost always danced with two intervals, this performance has only one: “We do the first and second acts together, then the third and so on with together.” In addition, Ananiashvili and her former dance partner (now creative) Alexei Fadeyechev have also cut the ballet itself, which means that a more digestible two hours and 15 minutes come in instead of the usual three hours.
Why was compression necessary? Recalling times when she herself was in the Bolshoi audience, Ananiashvili says, “I remember everyone going away when they saw the Black Swan pas de deux [in Act III] – nobody wanted to see the fourth act, because it is so boring and so long.
“Even in Georgia – where we like classical ballet – the audience is different today. We are all rushing, as if clocks go faster. And if we make viewers sit for hours we will lose them. So we think, how can we do this so that we don’t destroy anything, and if you watch, you don’t miss anything?”
On stage in London as Odette-Odile and Prince Siegfried will be the principal Laura Fernandez (26, half-Ukrainian, half-Spanish but born in Switzerland) and the soloist Filippo Montanari (22, from a small town near Rimini in north-east Italy).
Smart, beautiful and both of them speak great English, they both show profound respect and affection for their leader.
“With some directors,” says Montanari, “you have this idea that they’re a horrible entity – not even like a person, but your director. But with Nina you realize that she was born not only to be a great ballerina, but also a great teacher.
“You can never be sure that these two things will go together – she is one of a kind.”
“I also love my former director,” says Fernandez, thoughtfully, “but this one, I feel like she’s my second mother here. She takes care of me, she helps me in my private life too – it’s not just about ballet, so I get a lot of support.”
Fernandez needed pastoral care. A former soloist with the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow, she quickly found life there untenable after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2020. Attracted by Ananiashvili’s reputation as a creative force, she decided to give it a try. Tbilisi.
“Because of the war it was difficult for me [in Moscow] at that time because I had relatives in Mariupol in Ukraine,” she says. “People were telling me how it will end soon – ‘Four days, and it will be over.’ And it didn’t end. Then my relatives started disappearing somehow for several days – we had no contact, because the connection was so bad – so we didn’t know if they were still alive or not.”
It must have been scary. “Yes, especially because I have a cousin who is like my brother. He doesn’t have a mother, so my mother was kind of taking care of him.”
Both Fernandez and Montanari are thrilled to be dancing in London, and Ananiashvili is about to return to the city where she was once a guest artist with the Royal Ballet.
“I was so sad I didn’t return to the Royal Bill after that [starring in The Firebird in] 1993,” says Ananiashvili, adding a twinkle in his eye, “But I think they were jealous because I went to the United States.”
“I am now delighted to bring a new generation of dancers to London. This is the first time for this company and I am careful about what I say, because it is not easy to operate in London. I know this: the audience is familiar, and they have these magical companies there, and a lot of modern companies too.”
And horror people like me with a notebook? She roars with laughter and squeezes my hand sincerely. “Let’s go to lunch!”
The State Ballet of Georgia will be performing ‘Swan Lake’ at the London Coliseum, WC2, from 28 August to 8 September. Tickets: londoncoliseum.org
