Few ballets have helped shape Elena Glurjidze’s career as profoundly as Swan Lake. The Georgian-born former principal ballerina of English National Ballet spent years performing the role of Odette/Odile, eventually choosing it for her final performance before retirement. Just watching her move her arms as she demonstrates the familiar gestures is as captivating as watching the entire ballet.
Now, more than a decade later, she is guiding a new generation of dancers through the same masterpiece as choreographer for Cape Ballet Africa’s forthcoming production.
Yet Elena is not interested in reinventing Swan Lake. Instead, she has spent months looking back. While preparing the ballet, she revisited some of the earliest available interpretations of the ballet, studying archival footage and historical stagings to understand what audiences might have experienced closer to its origins.
What she discovered surprised her.
“I thought if I looked very, very far back, would it feel old-fashioned?” she says. “But it doesn’t.”
Rather than appearing dated, she found a simplicity and clarity often obscured in modern productions. The result is a staging that strips away excess and places greater emphasis on line, coordination, musicality, and emotional expression.
“By doing a little bit less but being precise, you actually see more,” she explains.
Spirit of Collaboration
During rehearsals in Cape Town, Elena has focused as much on understanding as on execution. Corrections are rarely limited to where an arm should be placed or how a step should be performed. Instead, she explains why movement works, helping dancers understand the mechanics and intention behind every phrase.
To her, technique is not an end in itself.
“If you don’t have the technique, you don’t have the freedom,” she says. “It’s like language. You need the vocabulary before you can express yourself.”
The approach appears to be resonating with Cape Ballet Africa’s young company. What has impressed her most is not individual talent but a collective willingness to learn.
“They all work, and they listen,” she says. “The most important thing is the willingness.”
That spirit of collaboration is central to her vision for this staging. While audiences naturally focus on the principal dancers, Elena believes the emotional power of Swan Lake emerges when the entire company moves and breathes as one.
“When everybody is feeling it, everybody is involved, and everybody is dancing together, that’s when the emotion comes across.”
It is a production that looks backwards without feeling old-fashioned. Elena’s Swan Lake is about rediscovering qualities that remain timeless: elegance, musicality, and storytelling.
A Life in Ballet
Elena Glurjidze is an internationally acclaimed ballet artist, teacher, and stage director whose career spans more than two decades at the highest levels of classical ballet.
She trained first in her native Tbilisi before being accepted into the prestigious Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg at the age of 12. There, under the guidance of renowned ballerina Lyubov Kunakova, she developed the technical and artistic foundations that would underpin an international career.
In 2002, Elena joined English National Ballet as a Principal Ballerina before being promoted to Lead Principal Ballerina in 2007. During her time with the company, she built an extensive repertoire that included leading roles in Swan Lake, Giselle, Don Quixote, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, Manon, Coppélia and The Snow Queen, among many others.
Her portrayal of Manon earned exceptional praise. Lady Deborah MacMillan, widow of legendary choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan, described Elena as among the finest interpreters of the role she had seen.
Her performances earned widespread critical acclaim. The Observer described her as “hauntingly and compellingly beautiful in performance”, while The Guardian called her “outstanding”. The Financial Times praised her as “the ballerina the piece demands – bold and assured”.
Among her many career highlights was her long association with Swan Lake. Elena first performed Odette/Odile with English National Ballet in 2002 and chose the same role for her farewell performance at the London Coliseum in January 2015.
Since retiring from the stage, she has established an equally respected career as a teacher, coach, and artistic director. She founded London’s Masters of Ballet Academy in 2016, a vocational school whose graduates have progressed to prestigious institutions, including the Royal Ballet Upper School, the Vaganova Academy, the Bolshoi Academy, the Dutch National Ballet School, and the John Cranko School.
She has also taught at the Royal Ballet School, staged productions internationally and, in 2023, directed the worldwide tour of Swan Lake for the United Ukrainian Ballet.
Today, she brings that wealth of performance, teaching, and staging experience to Cape Ballet Africa’s production, drawing on a lifetime dedicated to one of the genre’s most enduring masterpieces. The result is a Swan Lake that trusts the strength of the original work, allowing its music, choreography, and storytelling to speak for themselves.
I first encountered Elena in 1996 as a young arts reporter for the Daily News Tonight in Durban. She was touring South Africa with a group of dancers from St Petersburg, performing excerpts from Swan Lake, Don Quixote, and Le Corsaire. In those days, newspapers seldom published reviews after a production had closed, so I no longer have a record of my response.
Watching her rehearse Swan Lake nearly three decades later, however, the impression remains unmistakable. You do not forget artistry of that calibre.
Booking information
Book through Webtickets for the Teatro, Montecasino, Johannesburg, from 7–23 August.
Follow Cape Ballet Africa on social media for updates on bookings for Swan Lake at the Artscape Opera House in Cape Town from 3–14 February 2027.
