Anastasia Volochkova Russian Actress From Saint Petersburg

Early life

Anastasia Yuryevna Volochkova was born on 20 January 1976 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg. Her father was a table tennis champion and coach, and her mother worked as a tour guide. When she was five, her mother took her to a performance of The Nutcracker at the Mariinsky Theatre, and she has said that the evening made her want to become a ballerina. She trained at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, where her teacher was Natalia Dudinskaya, and she also took private lessons at home.

Career

While still a student, Volochkova became the youngest soloist in the history of the Mariinsky Ballet, making her debut as Odette-Odile in Swan Lake in 1993. She graduated with honours the following year and joined the company as a soloist. In 1996 she won first prize and a gold medal at the second Lifar International Ballet Competition in Kyiv. Between 1994 and 1998 she danced in productions of Don Quixote, Giselle, La Bayadère, Le Corsaire, Raymonda, The Firebird, The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty, among others. She toured with the company across Europe, Asia and North America, and made her United States debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1995.

From 1998 to 2000 she was a leading soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, coached by Ekaterina Maximova. She danced Giselle, La Bayadère, Raymonda and Swan Lake there, and headlined a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington. In 2001 the choreographer Yury Grigorovich invited her back to the Bolshoi to dance the double role of Odette-Odile. She received the Prix Benois de la Danse for that work in 2002, and in the same year she was named Merited Artist of Russia.

Her relationship with the Bolshoi became strained, and in 2003 the company ended her contract. News reports said that she had been dismissed because she was too tall and heavy. A Moscow court ordered the theatre to reinstate her and awarded her back pay and damages, but she has said that the company has offered her no role since 2004. In the same year she brought a lawsuit against a former manager, Anatoly Iksanov, over harm to her professional reputation, and the court awarded her 6,400 dollars.

After the Bolshoi, Volochkova built an independent career. She has appeared with the New National Theatre Ballet in Tokyo, the Bordeaux Ballet and the English National Ballet, and in Russia as a prima ballerina with the Hermitage Ballet and the Grigorovich Ballet. She has given gala performances and recitals in cities including Moscow, Paris, London, Athens, Lausanne, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi and New York. In London she has headlined at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Opera House, the Coliseum, the Palladium and Sadler's Wells Theatre, where she made her debut in Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen Suite, a ballet that Maya Plisetskaya had personally directed her in. In New York she performed at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

In 2010 she formed a duo with the Ukrainian countertenor Alex Luna for a joint tour called Nine Stories of Love. That year she also made her first tour of Chile, performing the programme Tales of Destiny in Santiago and several other cities, with principal dancers and soloists of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky companies. She has danced benefit performances to raise money for causes involving Russian children, including children with health problems, orphanages in Saint Petersburg and the victims of the Beslan attack. Outside ballet, she has worked as an actress and a model, including a campaign for the jeweller Chopard, and she appeared in the first season of the ice-skating contest Ice Age.

Public roles

Volochkova is widely known in Russia from newspapers, magazines and television. In 2011, after eight years in the United Russia party, she left it. In an interview with Radio Liberty she said that the party had misled her into signing a statement condemning the imprisoned businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2014 she spoke against the annexation of Crimea by Russia, saying that she would always consider Crimea part of Ukraine.

She studied at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and completed an MBA there in 2010. She has said that she hopes to create a network of schools teaching choreography, visual arts, music and ethics.