One of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century, the father of the Nutcracker ballet, Yury Grigorovich, is celebrating his 85th birthday today.

      Grigorovich is considered as the man who turned the Nutcracker, a children fairytale, into an adult drama and the signature ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre. This evening, the famous perfomance will be shown at the Bolshoi in maestro's honour.

      Yury Grigorovich graduated from the Leningrad Choreography School and danced as a soloist of the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky Theater)

      After staging Sergey Prokofiev’s The Stone Flower and The Legend of Love in the early 1960s, he established a reputation as a promising choreographer. In 1964 Grigorovich got a job at the Bolshoi Theatre. His most famous works there were The Nutcracker, Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible. Grigorovich has also reworked the legendary Swan Lake to create a happy ending for the story.

      In 1997 he left the Bolshoi Theatre because of disagreements with the theatre's managers and returned only in 2008, after the death of his wife, the great ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova.

      Now Yury Grigorovich is 85 and he has a lot of plans. In particular, he intends to rework Sergey Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible. Later this month the award-winning choreographer is set to go on a tour to Japan tour with the Bolshoi Theater, after which he will be heading to America for a three-month tour with his Krasnodar Ballet company.

Source: KP.ru rbk.ru Image: rbk.ru