For the opening, Ukrainian ballet dancer and choreographer Oksana Serheieva will make a performance resonating with Anna Jermolaewa’s work Rehearsal for Swan Lake.

Based in Puchberg, Austria, Oksana graduated from the Odessa School of Arts and Culture (2005), where she studied ballet and choreography teaching. Soon after, she joined the troupe at the Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. On Odessa’s biggest stage—as well as on tour throughout Europe and Asia—Oksana danced in numerous productions, including solo parts in Don Quixote, Swan Lake, Carmen Suite, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, La Bayadère, Firebird, and Carmina Burana.

In 2014, expecting her first child, Oksana left the troupe and moved to Cherkasy. The next year, she opened a school of classical ballet. The school had almost a hundred students and built a repertoire of The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Thumbelina, and Gifts for Christmas, which they performed on the stage of the Cherkasy Regional Philharmonic every six months. Even tho the school was successful, it was forced to close on February 24, 2022, the day of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Rehearsal for Swan Lake – realized in collaboration with Oksana Serheieva — refers to a memory from Jermolaewa’s teen years: in times of political unrest, for instance the death of a head of state, Soviet television replaced their regularly scheduled broadcast with Swan Lake…in a loop for days. In Soviet cultural memory, Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet became code for a change in power. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake, a group of ballet dancers rehearse selected scenes, turning Swan Lake from a tool of censorship and distraction into a form of political protest – here, the dancers rehearse for regime change in Russia.