The ballet company appeared in Ekaterinburg together with the opening of the opera house in 1912. Leonid Yakobson, Yuri Grigorovich, Igor Belsky, Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilev, the well-known Soviet choreographers, worked here in different years. Reboot of the company and its return to the ‘big league’ of the Russian ballet took place in 2011, when Vyacheslav Samodurov became its head. Here he created a number of new stage productions (including Salieri Variations, Zvetodelica, Romeo and Juliet, The Order of theKing; he started the ‘Dance-platform’ project to support young choreographers in cooperation with the Eurasia Ballet Foundation and initiated annual Winter and Summer Galas in collaboration with Ekaterinburg fashion designers (Ural Ballet Fashion-gala, 2018).

His approach to repertoire includes preservation of the 19th century classics, performance of the neoclassic pieces of the 20th century and creation of original works. Ural Ballet was the first Russian ballet company that staged the ballets by Hans van Manen (Five Tangos), Paul Lightfoot and Sol León (Step Lightly) and was the first to perform George Balanchine’s Walpurgisnacht Ballet. The theatre regularly orders new music scores from the Russian composers: new ballets were created by Artyom Vasiliev (The Snow Queen), Yuri Krasavin (Paquita), Anatoly Korolyov (The Order of the King) especially for Ekaterinburg theatre. Here, the project of Marius Petipa’s ballets reconstruction, once started at the Mariinsky Theatre, was further developed and marked the end of an era in the Russian ballet theatre (The Wayward Daughter and Paquita).