Mariinsky Ballet

Russian ballet company based at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, founded in 1738. Originally called the Imperial Ballet, it was renamed Kirov Ballet in 1935 (after the Bolshevik leader Sergei Kirov). In 2001, after the fall of communism, the theatre reverted to the name Mariinsky and the company became known as the Mariinsky Ballet. The Mariinsky dancers are renowned for their cool purity of line, lyrical mobility, and gravity-defying jumps; the corps de ballet is famed for its precision and musicality. The classical ballets of Marius Petipa make up the backbone of the company's repertory and many of the world's most acclaimed classical dancers, such as Anna Pavlova, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, are graduates of the company. Oleg Vinogradov (1937– ) was artistic director 1972–97, and his wife Yelena Vinogradova has been deputy artistic director since 1990.

Formed in 1738 as the St Petersburg School of Ballet by French dancing master, Jean-Baptiste Landé, and Empress Anna Ivanovna, the company performed for the court during the mid-18th century. With the influx of French and Italian teachers, virtuoso dancers, and choreographers during the 19th century, the company grew in strength. It was under the directorship of Marius Petipa that the company was given a permanent home at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1860. Petipa's ballets of the 1890s, La Bayadère (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), Swan Lake (1895), and Raymonda (1898), form the bedrock of the classical, in particular the Mariinsky's, repertory.

After the 1917 revolution, the company was renamed the Mariinsky State Theatre and an attempt was made to bring dance within the reach of the people rather than as a diversion for the aristocracy. During the 1920s and 1930s, the company, called the State Academy Theatre for Opera and Ballet (GATOB), created some of the most important Soviet ballets, culminating in Romeo and Juliet (1940). After World War II, the emphasis shifted from Leningrad to Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, but the Kirov's reputation was enhanced when it first visited Paris, London, and New York in 1961. It was during these visits abroad that some of the company's most acclaimed dancers defected – Rudolf Nureyev in 1961, Natalia Makarova in 1970, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974 – artists who suffered from the isolation and creative sterility that marked the company since the 1950s. In the 1990s the company continued to tour the cultural centres of the West.