Ballerina Irina Kolesnikova sets new ballet in a refugee camp

Following her visit to refugee camps on the Macedonian-Serbian border, Kolesnikova doesn't want ballet to preserve high culture
Star: in Swan Lake at the Coliseum
Alastair Muir
Alistair Foster22 April 2016

Russian star Irina Kolesnikova believes ballet should not “be the preserve of high culture” as she unveiled plans for a new version of Carmen in London to highlight the plight of refugees in Europe.

The prima ballerina of the St Petersburg Ballet Company recently visited camps on the Macedonian-Serbian border with Oxfam. More than 1.2 million refugees have passed through the region in the last six months and half of the hundreds of people living in camps are children, says Oxfam. Kolesnikova said: “As a mother of a young child, I was struck by the number of children that are caught up in this movement of people. Yet no country has a strategy for dealing with this. It’s madness. Gradually, countries are acknowledging that — whatever you think about migration, whatever your politics — when so many children are involved inaction is inexcusable.”

Kolesnikova helped create the ballet, Her Name Was Carmen — based on the Bizet original — which is set in a refugee camp and will run at the London Coliseum from August 25-28. She said: “We don’t think ballet should be the preserve of high culture. We think it should engage with important issues. Before we visited the camps, I was worried some people would interpret our setting of Carmen in a refugee camp as opportunistic or voyeuristic.

“Our visit proved to me that art isn’t in a separate sphere to ordinary human life. Visit Tabanovce [the site of a camp in Macedonia] and you visit a concert — people are dancing and singing. They even have ballet classes. The Her Name Was Carmen story speaks to timeless themes of hope and despair, suffering and a thirst for a better life. The hardship of the refugees is a very urgent expression of these concerns.”

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From every ticket sold, £1 will go to support Oxfam’s work in the region. Visit eno.org/whats-on/her-name-is-carmen

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