Victoria Jaiani says latest Joffrey role is one of most difficult yet
Victoria Jaiani, a principal dancer at the Joffrey Ballet, first met the choreographer Yuri Possokhov in her native country of Georgia. He was a principal dancer with the eminent, Moscow-based Bolshoi Ballet, and she was a child of maybe 10 or 11.
“I vividly remember when he used to tour to Georgia, and I remember him dancing onstage,” she said. It was an excerpt from “Giselle” that captivated her.
“I remember his Albrecht,” she said, referring to the lead male character. “As a little ballet student, we were allowed to sit on the stairs of the opera house, because it would be packed. And at the end of the show, students were allowed backstage to get an autograph. I would get in line, have him autograph [the program book], and then I would go back, make a circle, and get back in line to get another autograph.”
Now, decades later, Possokhov and Jaiani are frequent collaborators. On several occasions, he has created the choreography in the studio with her — set the dance on her, in the parlance of ballet. The Joffrey’s artistic director, Ashley Wheater, calls her Possokhov’s muse. Possokhov’s latest, “Eugene Onegin,” opens here June 4, with Jaiani dancing the lead role of Tatiana for several performances, alternating with Amanda Assucena and Jeraldine Mendoza.
The seed of Possokhov’s connection with the Joffrey was planted in San Francisco. Possokhov, Ukrainian by birth, moved from the Bolshoi to the Royal Danish Ballet to San Francisco Ballet, where one of his fellow dancers was Wheater, the future Joffrey leader.
When they retired from the stage, Wheater pivoted to leadership roles and Possokhov into dance-making, becoming choreographer in residence at SF Ballet. Around 2011, Wheater talked with Possokhov about the potential of creating new story ballets. “I wanted to do ‘Anna Karenina’; he wanted to do ‘Eugene Onegin,’” Wheater said.
The Joffrey’s “Onegin,” a co-production with SF Ballet, is based on the 19th-century novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Tchaikovsky wrote a well-known opera on the work, but the music for this ballet was newly composed, by the Russia-born, France-based contemporary composer Ilya Demutsky.
“Onegin” replicates a successful formula for the Joffrey. The “Anna Karenina” Wheater envisioned became one of the company’s biggest hits of recent years, a critical and commercial success that premiered in 2019 and was revived in 2023. “Onegin” brings back both Possokhov and Demutsky and fulfills the other half of the fateful Russian-lit conversation.
And both ballets star Jaiani. She originated the role of Anna in “Anna Karenina,” and Possokhov set most of the dance for Tatiana in “Onegin” on her last summer before returning to finish the work in San Francisco. The piece premiered there in January, with Jaiani sitting in the audience.
Jaiani’s first time working with Possokhov was also his first introduction to the Joffrey, on “Bells,” which premiered in 2011. “When [Wheater] announced to the company that Yuri Possokhov would be creating a work for us, I was like, ‘THE Yuri Possokhov?’”, she recalled.
“Bells” is a neo-classical piece, set to the music of Rachmaninoff. Jaiani was cast in a pas de deux with her husband, Temur Suluashvili, and the process of setting the dance was bewitching. “[Possokhov] was literally making steps up in the moment, as we were going,” she said. “It was really collaborative and very inspiring. The hours just kept running by. Like time stopped existing in the room.”
Time may have felt like it stopped, but the work didn’t. “His choreography is really hard,” Jaiani said. “Sometimes I even say it’s a little brutal, because it’s so hard on the muscles. It’s just very physical. He really wants everyone to be physical with their movements, not just pretty or standing.”
She said that style of choreography enables dancers to show their individuality. “He wants to really give dancers that power of individuality, of femininity and strength and sensuality — all of that to come up through the movement.”
Jaiani has logged an impressively long career with the Joffrey, beginning when she was still a teenager in 2003, and progressing through many principal roles over the years. She points to classics such as “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” and “Cinderella,” and also to parts from the Joffrey’s recent trend of staging new story ballets from familiar narratives, such as “The Little Mermaid” (the sad Hans Christian Andersen version, that is), “Carmen” and these Russian novels.
She also has become a familiar face, and not just to ballet lovers. That’s her in the “Onegin” ads on innumerable CTA buses, gazing achingly into the distance.
During the decades dancing here, she feels like she has grown, able to bring more nuance to her characterization with greater life experience, especially as a mother, to a now 12-year-old kid. “I feel like if an artist doesn’t grow, then what are we doing?” she said.
But it all grew out of the child she was in Georgia, sitting on the steps in the hall to see the Bolshoi stars barnstorming through town. “I still to this day have his autographs,” she said.
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