Ballet lovers are in for an treat this week when the Moscow Festival Ballet visits George Mason University to perform three of its magnificent productions. “Giselle” appears at the Hylton Center in Manassas on Thursday, followed by “The Sleeping Beauty” on Friday and “Cinderella” on Saturday, the latter two at the Center for the Arts in Fairfax.
The company was founded in 1989 by Sergei Radchenko, a graduate of the Moscow School of Dance who at age 20 was hired by the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet. He worked for the company 25 years before successfully striking out on his own.
When queried about the source of his inspiration to devote his life to ballet, he credited his mother. “When I was a 6-year-old boy, my mother didn’t want me running around the neighborhood with the other kids, so she enrolled me in a ballet school,” he said. “Over the years, it grew on me and by the time I was 9 years old, my mother decided to send me to the Moscow Choreographic School.”
| Onstage |
| Moscow Festival Ballet |
| Where: George Mason University Center for the Arts, Hylton Arts Center |
| When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 4 p.m. Saturday |
| Info: $27 to $54; 888-945-2468; cfa.gmu.edu, hyltoncenter.org |
During the quarter-century Radchenko spent with the Bolshoi Ballet, he had a personal connection with many fascinating productions.
“Because I was a specialist in character parts and had success dancing these parts in the framework of classical ballets, ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Carmen Suite’ are my personal favorites,” he said. “However, my favorite classical ballet is ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as it is associated with the Bolshoi Ballet. It is a concentration of the genius of classical choreography.”
Marius Petipa created the original choreography for “The Sleeping Beauty,” an accomplishment regarded as the pinnacle of his great career. Radchencko explained the history of this work.
Unlike “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella,” “Giselle” is a more serious and complicated ballet. Radchenko is equally fond of it. A love story of a village lass with two sweethearts, a forester and a duke, it ends in sorrow brought about by fairies, dancing sylphs and phantoms with grudges against male mortals.
Nothing pleases Radchenko more than watching audiences enjoy the ballet. To him, it is a universal language that everybody understands no matter their nationality. The audience response inspires him to work harder and continue to make them happy.
“There is no need for people to prepare themselves for the human emotions they will experience while watching classical ballet,” he said. “I want the audience to discover the beauty of classical movement and its choreography and for a few minutes to forget their own difficulties and simply enjoy the dancers they are watching and the music they are hearing.”
