Italy’s Jacopo Tissi is promoted to Principal Dancer at the Bolshoi

Italian dancer Jacopo Tissi has been promoted to the top rank of the Bolshoi Company dancers in Moscow. Tissi is now a Principal Dancer alongside Artemy Belyakov, Semyon Chudin, Vladislav Lantratov, Mikhail Lobukhin, Vyacheslav Lopatin, Artem Ovcharenko, Denis Rodkin, Denis Savin, and Igor Tsvirko, who has also been promoted.

He was congratulated by many of his Bolshoi colleagues on social media, including his frequent partner, Svetlana Zakharova.

The 26-year-old joined the Vienna State Ballet on graduating from La Scala's ballet school in 2014. A year later he joined La Scala's corps de ballet, and in 2016 he bravely left the company for Moscow. The gamble has paid off.

Below are three interviews with Gramilano: in 2016, just after he'd arrived at the Bolshoi, where he talks about his motivation for going to Moscow – a year later where he talks about his experiences with the company – and in 2019 where he talked about his career so far.

2016

La Scala dancer Jacopo Tissi joins the Bolshoi

Jacopo Tissi, the young Italian dancer who is starting to make waves, has been offered a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet Company. That's not something that happens every day. The Moscow company, like all Russian companies, has almost no dancers from outside the ex-Soviet borders. Tissi arrives via the Makhar Vaziev connection, the ex-director of […]

2017

Bolshoi Ballet's Italian dancer, Jacopo Tissi, on his first year in Moscow and dancing Diamonds at the Lincoln Center

Last August, young ballet dancer Jacopo Tissi, resigned from the La Scala Ballet to accept the offer a contract with the Bolshoi Company. As I wrote last September, it's not something that happens every day. Like all Russian companies, the Bolshoi has few dancers from outside the ex-Soviet borders in its ranks. However, Makhar Vaziev, […]

2019

Interview: Who is Jacopo Tissi? The Bolshoi's enigmatic Italian star talks about Moscow, Milan and London, “It certainly wasn't easy”

Three years ago, Jacopo Tissi left La Scala to join the Bolshoi Company in Moscow. Makhar Vaziev, the Company's current director, was previously the director at La Scala and had seen Tissi's work. It was Vaziev (on having to find a substitute for Sergei Polunin, who was himself a substitute for David Hallberg), who chose […]

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.