A new era dawns for the Bolshoi.

"They need to dance more new ballets, more premieres, more challenges," says Alexei Ratmansky of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, of which he has been named the new artistic director, a post the 35-year-old Bolshoi-trained Ukrainian will assume January 1, 2004. He will be the company's third director in five years.

Ratmansky, who has made a career for himself in the West as a principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet and as a choreographer for the Royal Danish Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet, among others, has been charged with the daunting task of infusing new life into the stagnant company (still the world's largest) that was once Russia's most favored, but which has been marked by power struggles and artistic inertia since the legendary autocrat Yuri Grigorovich was forced to resign in 1995.

Significantly, Ratmansky received the offer to take over the Bolshoi from fire Russian minister of culture, Mikhail Shvydkoi, and the general director of the Bolshoi Theatre, Anatoly Iksanov, last spring, when he was creating his first full-length work for the company, The Bright Stream, set to music by Shostakovich. A comic narrative about a troupe of ballet dancers sent to perform in connection with harvest festivities at a collective farm in the region of Kuban, The Bright Stream was banned by Stalin in 1936 and has not been performed since. Ratmansky, however, adores the music and says he "felt excitement and great response" from the dancers of the Bolshoi when working with them. He plans to revive more Soviet classics from the 1930s and '40s, including works by Vasily Vainonen and Leonid Lavrovsky, as well as introduce original works by young Russian choreographers. He feels that this is the right way to engage the company's dancers.

In a conversation from his home in Copenhagen, Ratmansky noted that "the Bolshoi presents maximum three new evenings of ballet a year, but the company has two stages, the Old Stage and the New Stage of the Bolshoi, and 230 dancers, and to capitalize on the vast resources of this great institution we should present a bigger repertory." Ratmansky said that he also hopes to draw on his European contacts to bring some contemporary Western work to Moscow.

In a commentary following the announcement, the Moscow newspaper Kommersant guessed that Ratmansky had been appointed to the job now "before any of the Western companies, who are in dire straits for talented directors, would snatch him up." Kommersant, however, is not convinced that the "sensitive" Ratmansky is the right man to be "administrative dictator," and asks why the theater did not hire him as resident choreographer only, instead of having him waste time and energy struggling with Bolshoi intrigues and bureaucracy.

This does not worry Ratmansky's predecessor, Boris Akimov, who will stay on as coach and head of the school. He points out that Ratmansky has learned his lessons trader the "hothouse conditions of the West, where the Royal Danish Ballet is marked by a brand of Socialism where the dancers are in power and even have their dental work paid for by the theater. And in London it can be almost impossible to get ladies of 96 to retire!"