Alexander (Sasha) Gouliaev was a principal with Dutch National Ballet for ten years. He has been working as a ballet photographer for a few years now, and his work has not gone unnoticed. Gouliaev takes a completely different approach to his fellow dance photographers, and nowadays takes photos of international stars such as Ulyana Lopatkina and Vladimir Shklyarov. So what’s his secret? ‘I stand where nobody wants me to – in the wings. Right up close to the dancers’.
Sasha Gouliaev (1966, Irbit, Russia) had to stop dancing in 2004. He had torn the ligaments in his knee, tried hard to get back into shape but eventually had to admit that it wasn’t going to work. For years, he found it ‘too painful’ to go and watch ballet performances. He retrained, studying graphic design and desktop publishing, and eventually became a lithographer. He still earns his keep with that job, but when he bought a camera a few years ago, his passion for ballet was inflamed again. ‘Photography led me back to ballet and I’m incredibly happy that I found a way to return to it’.
Gouliaev’s photos are extremely innovative in the world of ballet photography. They are more expressive – in their composition, their poetry and their virtuosity. He says, ‘I knew right from the start that I didn’t want to look at other photographers and imitate them. I wanted to do something original, so I chose to stand in the wings. Everyone said, ‘That’s really the wrong spot’, but I thought to myself ‘I’m just going to stay put and show them that it can work’. Of course, ballet is directed towards the audience, so if you want a nice symmetrical dance photo that is representative of the choreography, you have to stand in the auditorium. But I wanted to take a risk. In the wings, the spirit of the ballet is much more tangible. I’m so close to the dancers that in my heart I feel I’m dancing with them, along with my camera’.
He is hardly ever welcome in the wings – at the beginning at least. ‘People don’t want me there. At the Ballet of the Paris Opera, I was supposed to photograph Ulyana Lopatkina, and it was even written into her contract with the company. But when Brigitte Lefèvre, the former artistic director, saw me in the wings, she yelled at me to go away. That was a tough moment; I had tears in my eyes’.
Fortunately, more and more people in the dance world are highly appreciative of Gouliaev’s approach. In St Petersburg on 17 April, for instance, there was a presentation of his book of photos that he had made at the request of Vladimir Shklyarov, star principal of the Mariinsky Ballet.
The poster for Dancers of Tomorrow shows dancer Martin ten Kortenaar in Maurice Béjart’s Seven Greek Dances, a photo taken by Gouliaev at the last edition of Dancers of Tomorrow. ‘I hadn’t planned beforehand to take photographs on that occasion. I wasn’t prepared and just took the photos spontaneously. But it was a great experience, also because I’d never photographed kids before’.
www.sashagouliaev.com
Info: in the coming months, Gouliaev is working on a webshop where he’ll be offering his photos for sale.
Gouliaev is one of the National Ballet Academy’s two resident photographers. The next newsletter will contain a short portrait of Antoinette Mooy, who has been working with our school for years.