Yuri Possokhov

• Recipient of the Isadora Duncan Dance Award for the choreography of Magrittomania (2001)

Yuri Possokhov was born in Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk). Graduated from Moscow Choreographic School (class of Pyotr Pestov) in 1982. From 1982 to 1992 he danced with the Bolshoi Theatre of the USSR/Russia Company, performing leading roles in classical heritage ballets and productions by Yuri Grigorovich, Michel Fokine, Roland Petit, George Balanchine.

In 1992–1994 Yuri Possokhov was a premier dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1994–2006 he was a premier dancer with San Francisco Ballet.

Since the late 1990s he has been working as a choreographer. Among his productions are Magrittomania by Yuri Krasavin (2000, San Francisco Ballet), The Damned based on Euripides’ tragedy Medea (2002), Studies in Motion to music by Scriabin (2004, San Francisco Ballet), The Firebird by Stravinsky (2004, Oregon Ballet), Waltz to music by Ravel (2005, Oregon Ballet), Sagalobeli to folk music (2008, Paliashvili Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre), Immersion in Lilac to music by Boris Tchaikovsky (2009, San Francisco Ballet), Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (2010, San Francisco Ballet), The Bells to music by Rachmaninoff (2011, Joffrey Ballet), Senseless Kindness to music by Shostakovich (English National Ballet, 2020), and The Nutcracker (Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre, 2023). For the Bolshoi Ballet, he has choreographed Prokofiev's Cinderella (2006), A Hero of Our Time (2015), Nureyev (2017), Demutsky's The Seagull (2021), and Tchaikovsky-Krasavin's The Queen of Spades (2024). The Mariinsky Theatre repertoire includes his productions of the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin and the opera Bluebeard's Castle (2023).
Information for July 2024