The Big Ballet is coming to town

Eat Now While You Still Can… The Big Ballet is coming to Town!

20-Stone Russian Ballet Stars set for extensive UK tour

In a pre-tour warning, theatre producer Alexej Ignatow of Amande Concerts suggests food-stocks may run short in Billingham this spring as the world’s biggest ballet stars, The Big Ballet, are back in the UK and set to perform at the Forum Theatre on 1 April.

Russia’s alternative ballet company, The Big Ballet - comprising 16 female dancers each weighing a strict minimum of 17-Stone and a combined average of 20-Stone – will be returning to the UK with an even bigger theatre tour of 65 UK theatres, with 31 theatres scheduled for this spring and a further 34 in autumn.

Prior to his murder in 2002, top Russian ballet choreographer, Panfilov, assembled a new kind of ballet troupe; The Big Ballet. Regardless of their size, the dancers move with grace, dignity and flare. Having now performed for much of Europe and, hot on the heels of their hugely successful UK debut last year, The Big Ballet will undertake an even bigger tour of the UK this year.

The Big Ballet’s Dance Captain, Ekatarina Yurkova, remains less convinced about possible food shortages, commenting “We eat normal amounts of food, and the same kind of food, as everybody else – our size is in our genes. Either way, since Panfilov gave us the confidence, we all love to dance and look forward to putting on an even bigger tour than last year.”

The Big Ballet hails from Perm, a beautiful city in Russia’s Ural Mountain range, also home to two of ballet’s pre-eminent geniuses, Peter I. Tchaikovsky and Serge Diaghlev. Formed to challenge social standards in a world where slenderness and beauty seems obsessive, The Big Ballet dancers courageously and imposingly, prove that grace, elegance, charisma and nimbleness are not the sole preserve of the ‘thin’ and proudly present their voluptuous, yet surprisingly sinuous and flexible, figures.

Leading Big Ballet dancer Tatyana Gladkaya jokes “You definitely have to have a sense of humour to be in The Big Ballet, but we still take our work very seriously. Having said that, it’s easy to do the splits with 120 kilos of down-force”.

TS23.gazettelive.co.uk, February 5, 2008