Yevgeny Kulesh had worked at the Bolshoi since 2002. Photo / Supplied
Yevgeny Kulesh had worked at the Bolshoi since 2002. Photo / Supplied
A performer at Moscow's renowned Bolshoi Theatre was crushed to death on stage during an opera on Saturday night in front of a crowd of shocked onlookers.
The Bolshoi, one of Russia's most prestigious theatres, said the incident occurred during a set change in Sadko, an opera by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Videos showed part of the set falling slowly, and panicked performers pleading with staff to lift the prop.
Initial reports said the performer went the wrong way as the set descended, trapping him underneath. Other witnesses said he was simply unable to move out of the way of the rapidly descending set backdrop in time.
"The opera was immediately stopped and the audience was asked to leave," the theatre said in comments carried by the Interfax news agency.
Moscow investigators said they were probing the circumstances surrounding the death of the performer, named locally as Yevgeny Kulesh, 37. He is believed to have worked at the theatre since 2002.
Many onlookers at first believed the incident was part of the show, but performers on stage shouted "call the ambulance, there is blood", said Pavel Severinets, a journalist who was in the audience.
"It was terrible," one woman wrote on Facebook. "We arrived and took our seats, and then in the very first scene, when the scenery came down and inside there was a crowd of actors and stagehands as planned by the director, Volkhv [one of the characters] shouted: "Doctor! Come quickly, someone has fallen under the scenery." The orchestra stopped playing and the curtain fell."
The Bolshoi, one of Russia's most prestigious theatres, said the incident occurred during a set change. Photo / Maria Lysenko, Unsplash
Video shot from the stalls and published in Russian media showed a backdrop being lowered into place before several actors suddenly raise their arms and waving for help. The curtains then rapidly closed.
Members of the audience said the management initially announced an interval. Half an hour later they were told the performance had been postponed for technical reasons and were asked to leave the auditorium.
The Bolshoi Theatre has been one of Russia's most prominent cultural institutions since its foundation during the reign of Catherine the Great, enjoying lavish patronage from successive Imperial, Soviet, and Russian governments.
It has also known its fair share of tragedy and scandal, including deaths, fires, Cold War defections and allegations of corruption.
In July 2013, senior violinist Viktor Sedov died after falling into the orchestra pit.
In December the same year a Moscow court jailed ballet soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko for six years after he was found to have organised an acid attack on Sergei Filin, the company's artistic director, badly damaging his eyes.
The acid attack was one of a series of scandals that eventually saw the Russian government appoint a new director in a bid to defuse one of the worst crises in the theatre's 245-year history.
Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a former principal dancer at the Bolshoi who left at the height of the 2013 crisis, said blame for Saturday's tragedy lay with the management and shoddy back-stage safety procedures, not with Kulesh, and that he feared a cover-up.
"Backstage is hell. Dancers damage their legs when sets and staircases fall over. There are no windows or ventilation," he told the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.
"All the artists are saying with one voice that the victim did nothing wrong. Sure, now they will write that he should have gone left but he went right, as if he almost threw himself under the scenery. Like the sergeant's widow who flogged herself," he added, referencing a lie used by a corrupt official in Gogol's The Government Inspector.
