Young Americans Embrace Rigors of the Bolshoi

Joy Womack, an American student at the Bolshoi academy in Moscow, preparing to go onstage in an end-of-term performance. She moved to Russia on her own last year at 15.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NYT

MOSCOW — The curtain rose on the Bolshoi Ballet’s revival of “Esmeralda,” and soon boys and girls dressed in Renaissance costumes took to the stage, pairing off in a spirited dance that they had learned in the Bolshoi’s own hothouse of an academy.

They were the future of Russian ballet, heirs to centuries of glorious Russian tradition, an elite few who had been chosen from across Russia.

Except, that is, for the one from Montana.

There he was, a boy named Julian MacKay, who not long ago was gathering eggs from a flock of chickens behind his home in Bozeman, who had turned his life upside down by moving to this strange land with its even stranger language to pursue his dream. All of 12 years old, he was having his Bolshoi debut in Moscow.

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