10 August marks the completion of the 56th season at the Leonid Yacobson Ballet Theatre. Our creative team is staying true to our threefold path: promoting the heritage of our Theatre’s founder, collaborating with up-and-coming ballet masters, and working on our classical repertoire. We are also quite proud to have received new additions to our priceless collection of honours and awards. 598 Beats, a ballet found exclusively on our playbill, has just been recognised with St. Petersburg’s most prestigious theatre award, the Golden Soffit. Ballet master Vyacheslav Samodurov, who worked on the production, also received the National Golden Mask Award in the Best Choreographer category. And incidentally, we contributed to the Golden Mask Award season by going on tour to Moscow and performing at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre. This was far from our only visit to the capital! As a send-off like no other, we closed our season with 9 fully sold-out performances at the historical Bolshoi Theatre venue, between 28 July and 3 August.

Overall, our tour programme throughout the season has been quite diverse. We will never forget our show at Manama, the capital of Bahrain, where the theatre truly felt like something out of Arabian Nights, or our much-anticipated return to see our friends in Yerevan, or the performances in Vladivostok and Chelyabinsk. The blend of ballet classics, Leonid Yacobson’s unique works, and contemporary dance productions is what makes our main tour programmes truly unique.

One can hardly move forward without experimenting, and our troupe is always delighted to embrace this. Bruch. Suite is a brand-new show that was brought into the world by aspiring choreographer Igor Bulytsyn as recently as in mid-July, but it is already evident that it has piqued the audience’s interest and earned the critics’ favour. As we look back on the 2024/25 season, we can confidently say that even at the peak of its maturity, the troupe maintains its youthful zest and drive for innovation.