From the corner of a gloomy rehearsal space, I watched his star dancers getting the Bolshoi equivalent of the hairdryer treatment. Simon Morrison’s Bolshoi Confidential lifts the curtain on Russia’s best-known cultural institution. Despite the foreign intervention, the new Bolshoi Petrovsky theatre, which rose phoenix-like from the smouldering ruins, was a potent symbol of newfound Russian pride. When I first went to the Bolshoi aged 15, the theatre seemed a sumptuous retreat from the greyness and empty shop shelves of Soviet Moscow. Small wonder that one Soviet ballerina, Lyudmila Semenyaka, said that to survive at the Bolshoi, you have to have “the teeth of a tiger and the hide of a dinosaur”.

Source: The Guardian October 31, 2016 07:00 UTC