Dirty Dancing

Did a bitter feud at Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet prompt an acid attack on the company's artistic director?

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Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for TIME

Filin leaves the hospital on Feb. 4. He has introduced contemporary productions to the Bolshoi repertoire

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On a normal night, the one giving instructions to the dancers backstage would be Filin, with whom Tsiskaridze has not been on speaking terms for years. As artistic director, Filin is responsible for assigning roles, and Tsiskaridze and his students complain that Filin deprives them of the plum ones. Such gripes are amplified by the brutal competition for parts at the Bolshoi. Dancers have been known to place pieces of glass in a rival's slippers just before the curtain rises. Joy Womack, an American dancer in the Bolshoi's corps de ballet, says she was once the victim of such sabotage, which left both of her feet covered in blood. "The pressure made her do it," she says of the dancer she believes placed glass in her shoes. Filin has told reporters that this kind of competitive pressure could have made someone at the theater lash out against him.

On the night of the acid attack, he and Tsiskaridze attended the same gala in Moscow. "I sat in the center with all the important people," Tsiskaridze says. "He was in the back with nobodies." What happened to Filin later that evening does not elicit much empathy from Tsiskaridze. "It is horrible what happened to him," he says. "But he is no one to me. He is Iksanov's pawn."

Yuri Tyurnikov, one of the doctors who treated Filin, says it will be months before he is able to return to the theater. "The injuries to his eyes are grave," he says, speaking from the hospital burn ward on Feb. 4, the day Filin departed for Germany, where he will recuperate at a clinic near Düsseldorf. "We did what we could. The police investigators gave us some trouble. The first days, we had to fight them off for fear of infection." Those investigators, who were assigned to the case from the elite Moscow homicide squad, have not named any suspects or made any arrests, although Filin told reporters before leaving for Germany that the investigation is almost complete. "I know in my heart who did this," he said, declining to name any names.

In the meantime, the bad blood at the theater has cost the Bolshoi another star dancer. Prima ballerina Svetlana Lunkina announced a week and a half after the attack that she is staying indefinitely in Canada, where she has legal residence, and does not know when she might return to the Bolshoi. Her departure echoed the defections of star dancers of the Soviet era like Mikhail Baryshnikov, who abandoned the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad in 1974 and also fled to Canada. The motivation this time, however, is not a desire for freedom and opportunities but a fear of violence. Speaking by phone from her new home in Kleinburg, a small town outside Toronto, Lunkina says she no longer felt safe at the Bolshoi. One of her husband's business partners in Moscow has accused her family of stealing from him, and Lunkina says she has received threats of violence that are apparently related to the financial dispute. Her troubles have no apparent link to the acid attack against Filin, but when she learned about it, she says, "I realized that such threats, even in the world of ballet, can spill over into physical violence." So for now she has signed a contract to teach ballet to students at Toronto's Dance Teq studio--quite a comedown for a star of her stature.

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