As the Bavarian State Opera announced on Thursday morning, Frenchman Laurent Hilaire will succeed Russian Igor Zelensky as ballet director in Munich.

Hilaire is following in Zelensky's footsteps for the second time.

In Moscow, he took over the direction of the ballet of the Stanislavski-Nemirowitsch-Danchenko Theater when Zelensky went to the Bavarian State Ballet in 2016. Hilaire is now benefiting from his departure from Munich.

Putin's war throws back to the beginning what had slowly developed over the last three decades: that not only Russian and Eastern European dancers go to New York, Berlin or London, but that western dancers, choreographers, major works, influences arrive in Russia.

shock of the beginning of the war

The Bolshoi Theater has just canceled Kirill Serebrennikov's great ballet Nureyev.

Hilaire had feared such developments after his Moscow resignation on February 27.

Shocked at the beginning of the war, he made his way back to the West with a “heavy heart”, as he described it to the French media.

More than a hundred dancers with whom he had worked for five years remained.

The fact that the sixty-year-old found it difficult to leave Moscow because of her was clearly visible on his face on television.

In Munich, his ensemble of seventy dancers is much smaller, but that doesn't bother Hilaire.

The company is big enough for the classics, and "to protect the classics", "to preserve them well", he sees one Munich task in this, the other, to open up the riches of contemporary dance, Hilaire told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

He promises "Un très bon èquilibre", a good balance between the epochs of the repertoire, and does not want to create too many expectations.

He stands for evolution, not for revolution, and although he "wouldn't forbid anything at all", it still applies to bringing wishes and reality together.

The reserved Hilaire will take office next Monday.

The 2022/23 season is still planned by its predecessor and with the world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky's full-length "Tchaikovsky Overtures" holds a world dance event.

But for 2024, Zelensky had irresponsibly not tied anything down.

How the Bavarian State Ballet will develop under Hilaire from then on is still unclear.

With Zelensky, the level of dancing had increased, and Hilaire, as a former Étoile at the Paris Opera, can certainly continue this effortlessly.

Like Sylvie Guillem, he was one of the very young, exceptional talents that Rudolf Nureyev promoted as director in Paris.

It's his brand of tremendous energy and historically informed inspiration that dance so desperately needs at this moment.