Igor Moiseyev turns 98 and continues to dance

Creator and director of the State's Ensemble of National Dance Igor Moiseyev, has celebrated his 98th Birthday on Wednesday.

The event was celebrated at Moscow's State Philharmonic Society in Tchaikovsky's concert hall, where triumphant performances of Moiseyev's Ensemble had been taking place for nearly 70 years, reports “Interfax”.

The Ensemble had numerous performances overseas. “As I reflect on my life, I begin to realize that it is much easier to write a guide book than an autobiography,” states Moiseyev in his book. “Our Ensemble have toured more than 60 countries. Some of those countries have been visited more than ten times. About eight month in a year we spent touring the world.”

Moiseev began his career from staging and choreographing traditional Russian dances. Afterwards, he started staging Ukrainian, Belarusian, French, Moldavian, Kirgiz, Hongarian, Czech, and Argentinian dances, dancing scenes and various historic and modern plays.

The master staged several hundreds of original dancing routines, which are still being performed by his students. Igor Moiseyev even at 98 continues to choreograph his ensemble and continues to create. He is also an acting director of the ensemble.

Moiseyev raised an entire array of magnificent dancers in Russia and abroad.

The choreographer describes the genre of national dance in the following way, “We are not trying to collect national dances. We are not pinning them to the wall like butterflies. By using traditional dance, we are attempting to expand our possibilities of folklore dance by enriching it with professional technique and choreographer's imagination. So basically, we use traditional dance as a mere creative raw material.”

Igor Moiseyev was born on January 21 1906 in Kiev in a family of hereditary lawyer from incredibly poor noble household. The master acquired his education at a ballet school at the Bolshoi Theater. It was the starting point of his career as a dancer, a choreographer and a director. First rehearsals of his Ensemble of National Dance took place in 1937.

Moiseyev possesses an incredible amount of various awards and titles – Soviet, Russian and foreign. Igor Moiseyev is a national artist of the USSR, laureate of Lenin's and other five State awards, three times cavalier of the highest Lenin's order of the USSR and Russia, as well as a cavalier of the most prestigious medals of all European countries, laureate of the American “Oscar” for dance, and an honorable member of the French National Assembly.

 

Source: NewsRu  

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Author`s name Andrey Mikhailov
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