Lyceum series brings Russian ballet

In the middle of a four-month, coast-to-coast tour of the United States, the Moscow Festival Ballet will be stopping at Truman State on Saturday for the Kohlenberg-Lyceum. 

The Moscow Festival ballet will perform "Sleeping Beauty," which they have been performing since the creation of the dance company in 1989, said Elena Radchenko, Artistic Director and company co-founder. 

Radchenko, along with her husband Sergey, who was a legendary principal dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, began the company striving to keep Classical Ballet alive in its purest form, she said.  

 Marius Petipa originally choreographed "Sleeping Beauty, " according to the synopsis of "Sleeping Beauty" on the Moscow Festival Ballet's page of Columbia Artists Management Inc.'s website. The music was arranged by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and originally premiered in 1890 in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

Radchenko said "Sleeping Beauty" is one of the jewels of the Classical Ballet Repertoire and a timeless fairy tale the audience will be able to recognize and enjoy through its portrayal of characters through dance. 

"We feel the spirit and emotions expressed in Classical Ballet are timeless and we find our audiences enjoy our performances tremendously," Radchenko said. 

The Moscow Festival Ballet began its U.S. tour Jan. 4, and has toured throughout the world including Europe and Asia, according to the website. Most of the company's 40 dancers are about 20 years old, Radchenko said. 

The company will be performing several different ballets on their current tour including, "Swan Lake," "Don Quixote," "Cinderella" and "Les Sylphides." The Kohlenberg-Lyceum committee decided which show the Moscow Festival Ballet would perform at Truman.

"We wanted to pick a performance that would be a story that people were familiar with so that all audiences could understand and appreciate what was happening on stage," said Zac Burden, Kohlenberg-Lyceum committee co-chair and Missouri Hall director. "But we also wanted something that was unique, that people could say ‘Well, I've never seen ‘Sleeping Beauty' performed before.'"

Winston Vanderhoof, Burden's co-chair and Truman's Senior Graphic Designer, said the committee started by sifting through material sent by agencies representing performance groups. They then looked at each to determine if the performance would fit the series. Burden said that once the committee saw previous performances sent in by the Moscow Festival Ballet, they knew it was the kind of performance they want for the series.

Vanderhoof said Kohlenberg-Lyceum Series' last ballet performance occurred during 2007, and this will be the Moscow Festival Ballet's first trip to Kirksville. 

"Bringing in a ballet company from Russia to put on a rather famous ballet will be a great edition to the series," Burden said.

Vanderhoof said one of the reasons the Kohlenberg-Lyceum Series can bring in performances like this is because groups want to fill in dates between their larger performances. Truman also gets a better deal because of this, he said. Vox Lumiere's "The Phantom of the Opera," performed earlier this year, advertises for about $48,000 a performance, where as Truman paid less than $16,000 because it is on the way to another venue, Vanderhoof said.

The next Kohlenberg-Lyceum event will be a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by the American Shakespeare Center on March 20.