[Eng] Interview with Elizaveta Kokoreva - The Bolshoi Ballet's Youngest Ever Prima Ballerina

Interviewer and Text: Natasha Rogai

*This interview was originally conducted in Russian and translated into English.

“From my earliest childhood, I knew it was my destiny to become a ballerina.” Elizaveta Kokoreva says, “I never even thought of there being any other path because I always loved to dance.” 

The Moscow-born 25-year-old made headlines in the ballet world in 2023 when she became the Bolshoi Ballet’s youngest ever principal (prima ballerina) at the age of 22.  In town to make her Hong Kong debut guesting with Hong Kong Ballet (HKB) in The Sleeping Beauty, Kokoreva proves to be refreshingly free of airs and graces.  Intelligent, open and down to earth, with a self-deprecating sense of humour and an unremitting work ethic, there’s nothing of the diva about her. 

Curtain call of The Sleeping Beauty in Hong Kong

Photo: Natasha Rogai

So how did that path to becoming a ballerina begin? Kokoreva’s father was a ballet dancer, so she grew up “surrounded by the atmosphere of the theatre”.  However, although she loved watching ballet – and began to dance whenever she heard music – unlike so many little girls in love with ballet she never had lessons.  

When she was 10, her father took her to audition for the Moscow State Academy of Choreography – aka the Bolshoi School - and she started full-time studies aged 11. 

To get into the Academy, you have to pass three rounds of tests.  The first is to check your physical attributes: “You’re there just wearing your little knickers,” she giggles ruefully at the memory, “And they lift your legs, get you to jump, see how you respond to music…”  The second round is a medical examination and the third is to further check your physical abilities and test your talent for dancing, “You have to perform a little number.”

Once accepted, in order to keep their place, students must pass an exam every year.

Recently, ballet students being pushed to lose weight and the resulting health problems have been a talking point in the west. “I think that in Russia, especially at the Academy, a lot of girls suffer from this,” Kokoreva reflects. “It does happen, especially in the fifth year, when they are 14 and there are two exams that year.” With the examiners scrutinising the girls so closely to decide if they can stay at the school, “a lot of girls try to lose weight - there are even cases of anorexia.” 

Happily for Kokoreva, she has never had to lose weight.  “I’ve never been on a diet!" She attributes this to genetics and because “I’m not very tall [5’4”/1m63], have quite a small build and have always had lots of physical activity.” As a result: “I can eat burgers, desserts – whatever I like!”  Lately, she’s trying to eat more healthily. Although she eats salads, “it’s because I like salad, not because I’m trying to lose weight.”

Kokoreva graduated from the Academy aged 18 and joined the Bolshoi. The first day of the official season was 17 September – her 19^th birthday.  “I thought it was a lucky sign that the day I began was my birthday and that things would turn out well.”

As indeed they did. She started dancing leading roles almost at once - her first principal role, Maria in The Nutcracker, came within two months of joining the company – and she was dancing solo parts plus preparing principal roles while still performing in the corps de ballet.

The Nutcracker

Photo: Batyr Annadurdiev, Damir Yousupov

Although this may sound like a dream come true, it sometimes felt more like a nightmare. “I had a huge amount of work, it was only my first year and it was quite difficult to manage everything. At the Bolshoi, there are performances almost every day.”  She kept being given more roles and “I couldn’t say no because if I refused, those opportunities might not come again.”

Still young and inexperienced, the heavy workload left her too little time to recover and when she finally danced The Nutcracker, “I tore my Achilles tendon during the performance.” She continued to the end, but when she finished, “I couldn’t even stand on my leg.”

In Russia, Kokoreva says, even if you’re sick, you have to show that you’re strong enough to cope, so she kept telling herself: “It’s OK – then it [the injury] happened and of course you find yourself in trouble and have to start everything over again. That was the end of my first season – then came the pandemic and we had to shut down. So, we had a long rest!”

Although still a member of the corps de ballet, Kokoreva was soon dancing nothing but solo and leading roles.  After three years she was promoted to Soloist, with promotions to First Soloist and Leading Soloist following quickly. 

Despite this rapid rise, when the promotions to principal of Kokoreva and her equally exceptional classmate Dmitry Smilevsky were announced on stage after a performance of The Pharoah’s Daughter, “I didn’t believe it!”

It was, she says, hard to grasp the idea that she was actually a principal. She vividly describes how, when one very grand senior ballerina enters the room, everyone makes way and almost bows before her. “That’s a prima!” she says, laughing, “And now I’m supposed to be a Prima? Really?”  

For Kokoreva, being a principal is not the most important thing: “I never thought that because I was a prima, that I could just stop there.”  Even in the corps, all that mattered to her was to dance as well as she could and that hasn’t changed. “I always want to dance better than I did yesterday, or the day before. I want to do my job well, to get satisfaction from that, to do the best I can.”

The company’s director, Makhar Vaziev, has played a crucial part in her career. “He gave me so many opportunities,” Kokoreva notes, “He always expected the best from me, expected me to do things on a different level.” In response, she would adjust the choreography, adding extra elements, making her extensions higher, turning more pirouettes: “I always tried to do more than the standard.” With so many talented dancers around, she points out, you have to find something special to offer.  “I understood that I needed to be different. I needed to show who I was.”

Was there jealousy when she was promoted? “Actually, I felt that most when I first joined.” Nobody had begun dancing principal roles that quickly and Kokoreva recalls how she would hear people saying: “How come she’s dancing that role? She must have rich parents, or be ‘connected’…”  She laughs. “A lot of the girls would tell me how lovely I was, then while I was dancing, they’d be watching me with sour faces.” 

She didn’t let what other people thought affect her and understands why her success was hard to take for dancers who had worked and waited many years to be promoted. She herself still doesn’t feel like a principal: “I didn’t do anything special; I just danced and worked and worked then all of a sudden I was a principal.”

At the Bolshoi, every dancer is assigned to one of the company coaches (mostly former principals) who will work with them on all their roles - this long-term, individual coaching contributes enormously to developing a dancer’s career.

When Kokoreva started, her coach was the legendary ballerina Nadezhda Pavlova. “She’s incredibly creative, incredibly musical, she taught me so much about how to use my arms, about music, about how to perform.” However, although Pavlova was “a wonderful coach, a wonderful person,” her fragile health made it hard to keep up with the number of roles Kokoreva had to prepare or attend all her performances.

Eventually Kokoreva switched to working with Maria Allash, who started coaching in 2018.  “She has lots of energy, lots of strength, when she teaches class, it’s one of the toughest classes.  She really keeps an eye on all the dancers, keeps us to a strict discipline.”

As a ballerina, the tall, imperious Allash was the polar opposite of Kokoreva: “She did Myrthe, I do Giselle; she did Aegina, I do Phrygia.”  However, if Kokoreva is preparing a role Allash didn’t dance herself they can call on other coaches.  For Shirin in The Legend of Love “where there are lots of little details and nuances with the arms,” she had help from Nina Kaptsova – “So nice and such a good coach, she really thinks about things.”

Kokoreva is determined to learn from different teachers whenever she can. “Here in Hong Kong as well - it’s really important to get other nuances, other comments,” she says. “Without this, you won’t develop [as an artist].”

HKB’s The Sleeping Beauty is different from the version Kokoreva is used to dancing in Moscow. This is a big challenge, in particular adapting to the way the company dances: “At the Bolshoi, we’re very light, we’re always jumping, running.” Here she finds the style is slower and the musical phrasing is sometimes different. “I’m still dancing more the way I would in Russia but I’m following the local version of the choreography, trying to get it right.”

Although most of the choreography for Aurora is the same, the steps for the Act 1 coda are not. That’s tricky, Kokoreva says, because when she hears the music, her instinct is to do the steps she knows. Perhaps the biggest difference comes in the grand pas de deux with the famous diagonal of three fish dives - these are not done in Russia, where instead the ballerina pirouettes then simply falls back over her partner’s arm.  “No, we don’t have the fish dives! I’ve never done them before and am quite worried about it!”

The Sleeping Beauty in Hong Kong with Yonen Takano

Photo: Tony Luk (Photo provided by the Hong Kong Ballet)

Another challenge is Hong Kong’s heat and humidity. When Kokoreva arrived, “I thought – oh, it’s warm! Great!” but after a couple of days, “It seems to have got hotter. My whole body is wilting! And because it’s so hot, I feel more tired.”  Luckily language hasn’t been a barrier – while Kokoreva’s English is not fluent, her partner, HKB principal Yonen Takano, began his career in St Petersburg: “He speaks excellent Russian. And he’s really nice.”

Photo: Tony Luk (Photos provided by the Hong Kong Ballet)

This is Kokoreva’s second experience of guesting in an unfamiliar production. Earlier this year she appeared with Japan’s K-Ballet in a new Romeo and Juliet created by company founder Tetsuya Kumakawa.  She had seen him many times on video and was clearly starstruck: “I never thought I’d actually meet him in the flesh!”

She loves dancing Romeo and Juliet and while this was a completely different version, she was able to learn the choreography quickly – in just five days – although, as in Hong Kong, it wasn’t easy to do new steps to such familiar music.

She was nervous about going to Tokyo alone, but the experience turned out to be “unbelievable. It’s the thing that has really stood out for me this season and I have the best memories of it.”  

“I’d been thinking this would be a scary situation – I’d be on my own, with a new company, new production, new class – so I was very worried inside,” she confesses, “But when I got there everybody helped me.” Fortunately, there was one person in the company who spoke Russian, and “the whole company were so lovely to me, so kind.”

A culture shock for her in both Japan and Hong Kong is the way rehearsals and run-throughs are conducted in a friendly atmosphere. In Russia, “They sit there with a microphone, shouting at you – “’What are you doing? Hold your position! Get your leg higher!’ While this is stressful, it’s what she’s used to and when, during run-throughs in Tokyo, nobody said anything “I was thinking, please, say something, tell me how bad I was! I kept asking – what did I get wrong?”   When told everything was fine: “I was thinking, no, this can’t be right – they’re not telling the truth!”

If the old school methods practised in Russia may seem harsh to outsiders, Kokoreva is her own sternest critic. “I don’t think I dance well. I know that I have some good moments - sometimes I even manage to look like a ballerina!” she says wryly. While actually dancing, she’s transported to another place. “There’s only me, the music, the feeling…” after the show she finds one thing after another she thinks was wrong.

Although spectators are not supposed to video performances at the Bolshoi, Kokoreva frequently sees bootleg recordings of herself on YouTube. “And I look awful! So many things were wrong!”  As for comments posted on the videos: “I know there are lots of very positive comments, but I always look at the negative ones.” Though recognizing that these come from people who have no real knowledge of ballet – and have nothing better to do – nasty comments are still upsetting, especially those about the dancers’ private lives: “You don’t know anything, why do you feel entitled to judge people?” she says. “How can they come out with all this filth? I just don’t understand it.”

Kokoreva’s repertoire encompasses a staggering number and range of roles, and her dancing combines extraordinary technical prowess with equally impressive acting ability in both comic and dramatic work.  What roles does she enjoy dancing the most?

When she began, she says, she dreamed of dancing Kitri in Don Quixote. “I thought it was perfect for me.”  However, after performing it again and again, “I got completely fed up with it! Even the grand pas de deux – I love it, but last year it felt like I was dancing it all the time.  So last time they asked me to do it in a gala, I said no, let’s do something else.”  She adds that, after not having done the ballet at all this year, she did do it in May and “it was fine”.

Kitri in Don Quixote with Alexei Putintsev as Basilio

Photo: Batyr Annadurdiev, Damir Yousupov

Nowadays, while she feels many people consider her more suited to light-hearted roles, she prefers to dance dramatic ones. “I feel much closer to roles like Giselle and Juliet… Maybe because I’m more grown up now, maybe I’m very emotional, but when I hear music which is so profound, so heartbreaking, it makes me want to cry. It’s really because of the music, which is so incredible.”

This year one of her goals is to guest with different foreign companies as much as possible and her dream is to be invited to dance Kenneth MacMillan’s ballets.  “I’ve never danced that kind of choreography, and it seems completely different – aesthetically it’s very beautiful, technically it’s very complicated and it’s deeply emotional.”

She used to love dancing Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale because the choreography flows “so naturally” but, like Balanchine’s Jewels and other works by western choreographers, it no longer features in the Bolshoi’s repertoire, presumably due to the geopolitical situation.

“Now we don’t have those ballets, but we do have a lot of new work by Russian choreographers,” Kokoreva points out. While overseas it’s often assumed that the Bolshoi’s repertoire is old-fashioned and conservative, in fact numerous new ballets have been created there in the past few years. Groundbreaking works include Yuri Possokhov’s ultra-dark adaptation of Pushkin’s gothic tale The Queen of Spades (in which Kokoreva portrayed her namesake, Lisa) and Vyacheslav Samodurov’s The Tempest, a modern, abstract take on Shakespeare’s play with minimalist designs. Kokoreva describes the latter as “a little strange” but believes it’s important for the Bolshoi to do things that are genuinely different.

The latest premiere took place just before Kokoreva came to Hong Kong – a brand new version of Prokofiev’s Cinderella by Bolshoi principal Vyacheslav Lopatin.  Renowned for his dazzling virtuosity, this was his first ballet as a choreographer and working one on one with him to create the title role was a special experience for Kokoreva. “He can do such incredible things with his body, with his back.  He’d show me the choreography, and I’d think there’s no way I can manage to do that!”

Anastasia Stashkevich, another Bolshoi principal and Lopatin’s wife, was also involved in the rehearsals and the couple have, says Kokoreva, “a different philosophy of ballet”. In particular, Stashkevich emphasized the importance of the relationship between partners.

“This Cinderella is not just about the choreography – although of course the choreography is different, the sisters have contemporary movement, Cinderella is neoclassical – but the most important moments are about feelings.” Kokoreva explains. “Sincerity, emotion, the relationship with your partner, how you dance with him, the way you look at each other.” Even when dancing separately, “The whole time you’re with him, you’re looking at him. It’s very real. All ballets should be like that.”

Her prince was Daniil Potaptsev – they have danced together in ballets including Giselle, Carmen Suite and the premiere of the recent high profile revival of Leonid Lavrovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.  “He’s still very young, four years younger than me, but he has a talent which I don’t think he even realises himself.” Off-stage he’s an “ordinary, funny guy” but as soon as he steps on stage, he’s transformed. “It’s amazing. Really pure natural talent.”

Potaptsev was the first dancer to be accepted into the Bolshoi from the Boris Eifman Dance Academy in St Petersburg – a school, says Kokoreva, which is “a bit different. I know that he gets very nervous dancing the classics, because it’s not very classical at Eifman.”  He also injured himself just before the Romeo and Juliet premiere, a similar injury to that Kokoreva experienced before The Nutcracker but his was worse. “He’s still young and it was difficult because just when they’ve started giving him everything, he breaks down and so he thinks that he hasn’t lived up to the theatre’s expectations.”

Beaming, she reveals that “I know all this because - he’s my young man (boyfriend)!” and in true Gen Z fashion whips out her phone and proudly shows a photo of the two of them. “He’s really an ideal Romeo – I think he’s the most beautiful Romeo!”

Juliet in Romeo and Juliet with Daniil Potaptsev as Romeo

Photo: Damir Yousupov

Kokoreva’s schedule is hectic, to say the least.  In Moscow she danced Don Quixote on 21 May and Cinderella on 28 May with The Sleeping Beauty in Hong Kong on 7 June. The day after that she was flying to Russia for a gala, then on to Moscow for Spartacus the following week.  Does she have any life outside ballet?

Photo on far left and right: Batyr Annadurdiev, Damir Yousupov

Photo in the middle: Tony Luk (Photo provided by the Hong Kong Ballet)

“I’m living ballet most of the time!” she admits. On her rare days off, as well as catching up on household chores she may go for a massage, take a walk or just lie in bed and binge watch TV series. She does have a few small hobbies: “I like knitting and I’ve ordered a sewing machine, even though I don’t know how to sew.”

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Natasha Rogai