Andrea Santolaya
“Prelude”
Photography Exhibition / 10th October - 9th November 2013

"… Nacho Duato opened the doors to the Mikhailovsky Theater to allow me to photograph his world of interpretation. For months I lived with the dancers of this amazing and mysterious place, and I was able to photograph the secret corners of the theatre and experience the day-to-day life of one of the oldest theaters in the world and the bodies of the most demanding dance that exists".
Andrea Santolaya

Invited by the famous Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, Artistic Director of the Ballet Mikhailovsky, Andrea introduces us, with the black and white subtlety of her images, to the heart of the Russian Ballet in one of the oldest and most prestigious classical theatres, the Mikhailovsky Theater St. Petersburg, created in 1883.

In the Andrea Santolaya’s photographs we can see how the passage of time does not affect the beautiful and the sublime, as the contrast of light and dark narrates the details of Santolaya’s work and seduces the viewer.

Following the visual line of her previous works, “Around,” presented in 2011 at the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid, or her recent book published by La Fabrica Editiorial “Manolo Valdés. Botanical Garden of New York” in 2013, Andrea Santolaya displays an increasingly refined visual language, in which the forms fuse in suggestive shades of gray.

This project was born from an interest in representation within dance and its origins in Russian Ballet. In order to develop this I went to the birthplace of classical theater: The Mikhailovsky Theater of St. Petersburg. The Mikhailovsky Ballet is formed of exclusively Russians; dancers, artisans, and choreographers… all those who belong to the theater are Russian. Nacho Duato is the first foreign artists to direct the ballet. In the ballet world where classics such as Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet or Giselle coexist, Nacho Duato has boldly introduced choreographies like Duende, Nunc Dimitis and the reinterpretation of the classic Sleeping Beauty.

Nacho Duato opened the doors to the Mikhailovsky Theater to allow me to photograph his world of interpretation. For months I lived with the dancers of this amazing and mysterious place, and I was able to photograph the secret corners of the theatre and experience the day-to-day life of one of the oldest theaters in the world and the bodies of the most demanding dance that exists.

Nacho Duato has been adopted by Russian dance as its new Tsar; in the same way that Nijinsky’s Fauna Siesta was a ‘before and after’ in the history of dance, Nacho Duato has become a benchmark for Russian ballet, seizing the stage to create a new era in the cradle of ballet classics.

Usually protagonists are portrayed just before entering the scene, during rehearsals, or in the day-to-day. In the Mikhailovsky everything is woven into the theater, human relations, family, and friends… This is the case of Olga Lavrinenko, a dancer who lives inside the theater with her young son Rastislav and combines dance with aspirations of becoming a soccer player in the Zenit of her son. There is also Anna Kuligina. She is a dancer, mother and wife to the stage director’s son, who is also a dancer. There is also her friend, Yulia Tikka, with whom she shared a room in the dancer halls of residence wing of the Mikhailovsky Theater.

My intention has been to document, from a contemporary point of view, this rigid universe, which has hardly changed since the Russian Revolution and survives in St. Petersburg through the morphology of their faces, costumes, settings or architecture. The Russian imperial epoch. Andrea Santolaya, Madrid, 2013.

Andrea Santolaya, Madrid, 2013