"The Staatsballett will continue to increase its international reputation and create great moments on stage. I am very pleased with this collaboration", welcomed in a tweet Serge Dorny, the director of the Staatsoper of Bavaria, which oversees the company and the orchestra.
"Laurent Hilaire is (...) an artistic personality very appreciated at the international level and having an excellent network", also commented the Bavarian Minister of the Arts, Markus Blume, quoted in a press release announcing this appointment.
The 59-year-old Frenchman, former star dancer at the Paris Opera, will take up his duties on May 9 in Munich.
He succeeds Russian Igor Zelensky who, after seven years in Bavaria, resigned earlier this month, citing personal reasons while his contract ran until 2026.
Laurent Hilaire had announced a few days after the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops that he was leaving his post at the head of the Moscow institution and the Russian capital.
"I regret this decision," he told AFP at the time.
"I worked in harmony (with the theater teams), I leave with sadness but the context no longer allows me to work calmly".
Appointed dance director of the Stanislavski Academic Musical Theater five years ago, Laurent Hilaire was the second Frenchman to lead a ballet troupe in Russia, almost 150 years after his illustrious predecessor, the dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa, a major figure in dance in the 19th century and director of the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg.
Considered one of the most brilliant French dancers of his generation, Laurent Hilaire has renewed the repertoire of the Russian company, the third after the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg.
Born in 1962, he graduated from the Paris Opera School of Dance.
Engaged in the ballet corps, he was named "Etoile" in 1985, at the age of 22, by Rudolf Nureyev, a dancer from the USSR who had defected to the Soviet Union.
© 2022 AFP