Maya Plisetskaya — Pole of Magic

19 August 2025 – 8 February 2026

The exhibition project is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maya Plisetskaya — a legendary prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre and an iconic figure in the history of world ballet. It is part of the large-scale anniversary programme organized by the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, with venues spanning cities across Russia (Moscow, Kazan, Ryazan, Tula) and abroad (Luxembourg, Beijing, Brussels). Each exhibition in the series invites audiences to engage with the phenomenon of Maya Plisetskaya — a symbol of an entire era in ballet history. Her name is inseparably linked with the pinnacles of 20th-century choreographic art: Swan Lake, Carmen Suite, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, The Sleeping Beauty, The Little Humpbacked Horse, The Nutcracker, Giselle, and other legendary productions. The ballerina collaborated with outstanding choreographers — Leonid Yakobson, Leonid Lavrovsky, Yury Grigorovich, Maurice Béjart, Roland Petit, and Serge Lifar — as well as with leading theatre artists Boris Messerer, Valery Levental, Simon Virsaladze and the renowned couturier Pierre Cardin. The exhibitions feature unique materials from the collections of the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum: photographs, paintings, set and costume design sketches, posters, stage and evening costumes created for Maya Mikhailovna by prominent artists and couturiers, as well as family archive from the personal collection of Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin. Our online collection presents a selection of items included in the anniversary exhibitions: photographs of Maya Plisetskaya both on stage and in daily life, sketches, dresses and fragments of stage costumes created by Pierre Cardin, original posters and theatre programmes, lithographs by Marc Chagall inscribed personally to Maya Plisetskaya, and other materials.