The Price of Freedom

I stumbled across this ballet on the ARTE Concert YouTube channel last week:

It’s telling the story of Rudolf Nureyev. Originally created for the Bolshoi Ballet, it was dropped in 2023 once it became clear that it did not shy away from the fact that Nureyev was gay.

The Moscow premiere scheduled for July 2017 was abruptly cancelled on the pretext that the corps de ballet “wasn’t ready,” but the production team believed that it was because of concerns that the ballet contained “gay propaganda.”

When it finally premiered in Moscow in December 2017, one of the key members of the production team, the politically outspoken, openly gay director Kirill Serebrennikov, had already spent several months under house arrest. More on the background here.

Now the Staatsballett Berlin has brought this extraordinary production to the stage for the first time outside Russia.

Both Nureyev and Serebrennikov paid a price for their freedom.

The production is outstanding, with David Motta Soares embodying the spirit of Nureyev. Watch it.