Bolshoi Ballet and LRBS Provide 700 Children with Opportunity to Join Audience at London Palladium

For one night only, London Russian Ballet School (LRBS) will continue its collaboration with the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet and Theatre, bringing ballet and classical music to young people in London.

700 children from Lambeth, Brent, South West and West London, who have never visited a theatre to see ballet and most of whom have never heard of the Bolshoi Ballet, will join the audience at the London Palladium for free, with transport provided. Romantic Revolution is a philanthropic endeavour to engage these young children in ballet and impart the richness of this art.

Leading Bolshoi principals will present an outstanding programme with LRBS students, to include the spectacular classic Don Quixote. A new work will be premiered which has been specially created for Alexandrova and Lantratov. Accessibility is the driving force of Romantic Revolution with tickets priced affordably to enable as wide an audience as possible to see Bolshoi artists perform.

LRBS, based in Clapham, is a vocational school and charity which teaches ballet to and educates young people from widely diverse backgrounds. Its Artistic Director, Evgeny Goremykin, danced with the Bolshoi Ballet for over twenty years and founded the school on the principles of his own ballet education with a dominant ethos of opportunity and inclusivity.

Photo: Bolshoi dancer Artemiy Belyakov in 'Celebration', courtesy Igor Zakharkin

The goal of the school is to give students the best of the past in order to work for the future; in this vein, students train with former artists of the great theatres and ballet schools of Russia where tradition and knowledge are passed from one generation to the next. LRBS believe that the Russian method, one of the finest in the world, may be applied to any individual with great success.

Dame Gillian Lynne comments, The London Russian Ballet School is an inspirational, tough and practical ballet school. It is extremely good and inspired by the addition of the Bolshoi's impeccable standards. Russian ballet training has always been extremely effective and important and these children are very lucky to be able to be part of the beautiful art that ballet incorporates and also to have the chance to develop, lead and inspire the talent within their souls. I am in a unique position to talk about Russian Ballet training given that I was lucky enough to work with Vera Volkova during the war who also trained Margot Fonteyn. Dance has no barriers, it is a universal and powerful art which will always endure and should be accessible to all. This year, over 700 children have been invited to the London Palladium in September to see the LRBS pupils perform with leading principal artists from the Bolshoi Ballet, something they would otherwise never have been able to do. It will give them a chance to experience the extreme discipline of this teaching which will lead to their enjoyment of the beauty of ballet and the enriching of their souls which this kind of training will produce.

LRBS has an extensive outreach performance programme to engage young children in the world of ballet and classical music. It regularly performs for over 3,000 children each year in local underprivileged schools. These children experience ballet accompanied by young musicians in their school halls. The Head of Inclusion from a Lambeth Primary commented, It was lovely to see our children's full attention taken by such a wonder on the stage...and for nearly all it was the first time that they had seen a ballet production on stage.

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