Nina Ananiashvili

Starting up

It was a difficult situation in the fifteen years after the Soviet collapse. It was a hard time for everybody. There were just two big theatres that survived, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky, because they were government paid. Without money, it’s difficult to keep costumes and sets in shape. So we really started from the beginning. And I told them, “I do not want to hear, ‘Oh, we cannot find this,’ or ‘this is too expensive,’ or ‘we cannot do this …’” I want-ed everything at a high level, immediately – good materials, everything from scratch.

Alexei Fadeyechev, my partner from the Bolshoi, was with me the first few years, and we did “Swan Lake,” “Giselle,” “Don Quixote” – very quickly.

Being artistic director of the State Ballet

This was a difficult decision and [initially] I wasn’t going to do it because I was dancing. But when the young president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, invited me to speak with him to let me know that at that moment, at that time, Georgia needed me to help raise Georgian ballet to the level that it used to be, I was so shocked I couldn’t say no. He said, “Well, it’s your country first …” I couldn’t say no to that. And I understood, because I ...