(68) Live From The Kennedy Center: Mariinsky Ballet Director Yuri Fateev and Dancer Timur Askerov

Summary: Welcome to Live From The Kennedy Center: Mariinsky Ballet Director Yuri Fateev and Dancer Timur Askerov.  A few weeks ago we were in Washington, DC to cover a busy weekend of ballet at the Kennedy Center.  While we were there, the Mariinsky Ballet was in town performing La Bayadère.  We had the pleasure of sitting down with the acting director of the Mariinsky, Yuri Fateev and one of their star dancers, Timur Askerov.  Mr. Fateev graduated from the Leningrad Academic Vaganova Choreography School in 1982 and joined the Mariinsky Ballet the same year.  In 1996 he became a coach with the Mariinsky and has been a guest coach with the Royal Ballet in London, ABT, and Russia’s Bolshoi Theatre.  He has been Acting Head of the Mariinsky Ballet since 2008.  Mr. Askerov was born in Azerbaijan and graduated from the Baku School of Dance in 2008. From 2009–2011 he danced in Ukraine before joining the Mariinsky in 2011.  He has danced lead roles in the majority of the company’s repetoire and has toured with the Mariinsky to Europe, Asia, and America.<br> Timur prefered to answer our questions in Russian, so Yuri was nice enough to translate for us.  In this version of the interview we have done a voice over to translate for Timur.  If you would like to listen to Timur’s complete answers in Russian, we have tacked that interview on in it’s entirety to the end of this episode.  To listen to that version, please fast forward to 50 minutes and 30 seconds in the time stamp now.  We really enjoyed chatting with these two to get a better idea of what is happening at the Mariinsky, so we hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did.<br> This episode is sponsored by Body Wrappers and The Kennedy Center.  For more on the events happening at the Kennedy Center, visit kennedy-center.org.<br>