Moscow, Sept 19: One of Russia’s best-known ballerinas and post-Communist celebrities has been fired by the Bolshoi Theatre after a war of insults more reminiscent of a family feud than a pas de deux. Theatre officials are charging the dancer, Anastasia Volochkova, with one of ballet’s deadly sins: they say she has become too fat. "She is heavy for a ballerina; she is hard to lift," Katerina Novikova, the theatre’s spokeswoman, said in an interview on Monday, the day before the dismissal.
Volochkova, 27, spoke of mysterious forces working against her — she would not identify them — and also said theatre administrators, working on behalf of those forces, did not like her and had plotted to push her out. She says she is in top form, weighing in at 49.5 kg, or 109 pounds, and following a strict diet. "I don’t eat ice-cream now," said Volochkova, who once told a Russian interviewer that she adored it. "I eat spinach leaves and vegetables."
"This is a planned conspiracy against me," she said of the dispute, which has enthralled the Russian press and has involved security guards, a missing dance partner and publicity machines working overtime. On Tuesday, after her dismissal, she and her lawyer said they would sue the Bolshoi over her contract, which expired on June 30 but should have been extended, they said. The Russian press has been reporting that the blonde ballerina, who has the looks of a fashion model and behaves like a star, is 1.8 meters, or nearly 5 feet 11 inches, tall, making her even more unwieldy. Volochkova said she is 1.69 meters. "She is a modern young woman; she wears heels," her publicist, Gela Naminova, said, explaining the discrepancy.
The charges have flown so fast and furiously that Volochkova, after much negotiation, agreed to have her height measured on Tuesday by The New York Times. She is, in fact, 1.67 meters tall. "The situation with the Bolshoi is not about height or weight," she said, a chic pink scarf wrapped around her neck, and on the verge of tears. "Height and weight are not the test of a great ballerina."
Although she has her fervent fans, her detractors among critics and the public consider her an outsider at the Bolshoi who influenced the theatre’s administration with the financial support she attracted to the company. She was loudly booed last year inside the Bolshoi Theatre when she won a top prize at an international ballet competition.
Among Volochkova’s recent supporters in Moscow has been Suleiman Kerimov, an executive with a major oil company, Nafta-Moskva. Recently, corporate sponsors for her solo performances have included companies like Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly.
She has also been accused of difficult, diva-like behaviour and has attracted publicity for her close friendships with powerful men. "It’s not just her physiological state," said Novikova, the Bolshoi spokeswoman. "It’s her character as well. She has her own dressing room. She is not greatly respected. Not one other soloist is in the dressing room with her."
Commenting on the firing on Tuesday, Novikova said that there was no standard weight for ballerinas but that Volochkova "is bigger than others." She said one problem was a question of skill. "Someone can weigh 30 kg and jump badly and be hard to pick up," she said. "Another person can weigh a lot, but her technique makes her easier to lift." Novikova said on Monday that all of the Bolshoi’s male dancers except Nikolai Tsiskaridze had refused to dance with Volochkova and that he had agreed to partner her in Raymonda only because the ballet involved few high lifts. "Ballerinas dance en pointe, so even a 1.76-inch ballerina looks tall next to me," said Tsiskaridze, who is 1.83 meters. "It’s always attractive when a male dancer is bigger than a woman. I told Anastasia we wouldn’t look good together dancing Giselle."
Larissa Abyzova, a dance critic who teaches at the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, said "ballerinas are getting taller" and rattled off a list. She allowed that only petite ballerinas can dance some parts and said it was increasingly difficult to create traditionally proportioned duets, but she said Volochkova had no problems with size at the Kirov, where she danced in the 1990s. "I can only say that Moscow male dancers are bad at duets," she said. "Here she danced with everyone."
Volochkova has made a name for herself outside of the Bolshoi, staging solo performances that have led many critics to label her a commercial pop star rather than a classical ballerina. She says that she wants to experiment in dance and that many of her performances are for charity.
Volochkova has performed in the United States, to good reviews, with both the Kirov and the Bolshoi. The current dispute unfolded when she was scheduled to perform Swan Lake on September 5. She said she was informed by phone on the night before that she had been replaced.