I’m ready to dance, says Bolshoi star jailed for acid attack
LIKE thousands of ballet dancers, Pavel Dmitrichenko is focused on one goal – getting on stage at the Bolshoi Theatre. “Why shouldn’t someone who dances well, who has worked there for 11 years before, do the job if he is able to?” said the lithe, talkative 33-year-old.
But Dmitrichenko is no ordinary dancer. In 2013, he was jailed for organising a horrific acid attack on Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi’s then artistic director.
The case sent shockwaves through the Russian and global artistic communities, partly for its brutality – the battery acid thrown in Filin’s face nearly left him blind – and partly because of the light it cast on what a former artistic director called a “cesspool” of rivalries and cruelty blighting the famous company.
Dmitrichenko, released after serving nearly three years of his six-year sentence last May, said both he and the theatre were keen to put the case behind them. “The Bolshoi has been my home. I don’t want to dance anywhere else,” he said.
For Dmitrichenko, dancing is in the family. His mother and father were both ballet masters, and like most professional dancers he began training early, and at his parents’ insistence.
He not only enjoyed it, but proved to have talent, and at 18 he was recruited into the corps de ballet.
Shortly afterwards, he caught the eye of Yury Grigorovich, the legendary ballet master, and began to win headline roles as a lead performer.
By 2012, just before his fall from grace, he was making headlines as the star of Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible. Then, on Jan 17 2013, came the horrific attack on Mr Filin.
Amid revelations of vicious rivalry at the world’s top ballet company, police arrested Dmitrichenko. The experience, he said, left him profoundly disillusioned with the justice system.
“I never admitted my guilt,” he repeated often during an interview with
The Sunday Telegraph in a Moscow restaurant. “The case against me was fabricated. It is as simple as that.”
He has evidence, he said, that demonstrated he was framed, and one of the investigators has since been arrested for attempting to obstruct the course of justice in another case.
Dmitrichenko also claimed that investigators tried to bully him into testifying against another dancer who had feuded with Filin.
“They beat me. And they’d lock me for five hours at a time in an unheated police van in winter,” he said. “When I refused to say Nikolai was the organiser, they said ‘OK, now you’re the prime suspect.’ I said, ‘Go on then, prove it’.’’ .
He also said that he was pressured into saying in court that he had complained about Filin to Yuri Zarutsky, the man convicted of carrying out the attack, and had gone along with the idea that the artistic director be “roughed up”.
After a trial that made headlines around the world, Dmitrichenko was sentenced to six years.
Since his release last year, such is his devotion to the Bolshoi, he has turned down several offers of work from other prestigious theatres.
“No one at the theatre believed all that nonsense [about my guilt],” he said. “It was like a celebration. From the dancers, to members of the orchestra, the front-of-house staff, there was nothing but positive emotions.”
Dmitrichenko was granted permission to attend rehearsals so he could get back in shape.
For Dmitrichenko, the notion that his future career might be dogged by controversy is almost incomprehensible. At any rate, he said, he certainly was not concerned by the idea.
As far as Russian law is concerned, he has paid his debt to society. “And if the company sees no reason why I shouldn’t be there, if the directors see no reason I shouldn’t be there, why shouldn’t I?
“If people who don’t know the whole story want to write things, let them,” he said. “Any scandal is the best kind of advertisement anyway.”
None the less, it is an obviously delicate issue.
Filin, who after more than 30 operations has regained sight in one eye but lost it in the other, said in a New York
Times interview last year that he did not feel safe at the theatre because of the prospect of Dmitrichenko’s early release. He left the artistic directorship last March, supporters say, partly due to the sheer physical and emotional toll of his ordeal.
Filin now runs a choreography workshop, but is no longer involved in the daily running of the theatre.
The two have crossed paths since, but Dmitrichenko brushed off their meetings. “I just went into a room and he was there. He said hello and that was that,” he shrugged.
After many hours in the rehearsal hall, he says he is in shape. And he seems confident that he will again be dancing for an audience.
“Today, I’m ready to perform.” Does that mean we will see him back on stage in the near future?
He paused before answering. “I know the answer,” he said with a smile. “I’ll send you an invite.”