AGON ( G. Balanchine; Bolshoi Ballet 2004)

Heres my staging of AGON for the Bolshoi Ballet from 2004 with a very young Ekaterina Shipulina and Ruslan Skvortsov. He was just 21 and I think she was even younger. Yan Godovsky and Anastasia Yatsenko were the other two leads. This was quite a challenge on many levels. The company had done the ballet some years earlier but it was not a success with the audiences. The 12tone Stravinsky music and complex choreography was definitely not the Bolshois thing. The dancers really did NOT want to dance thisat first. For the first few weeks I was killing myself showing them each step fullout because they just refused to understand me. They even flatly refused to use counts Eventually (I think because they felt sorry for putting me through this) they began to get it. Suddenly it was like a lightbulb went off and they began to actually enjoy it. Soon their teachers and coaches were coming in to watch rehearsals. Anastasia Yatsenko, who had been in the earlier corps cast, but now I had dancing the castan