This year's Graduate Show at St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Ballet Academy celebrates its 270th anniversary, and highlights the new generation of Russian ballet.

The list of Vaganova Academy graduates includes such diamonds of dance, as Anna Pavlova, Galina Ulanova, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolph Nureyev.

Altynay Asylmuratova is the artistic director of the Vaganova Academy.

She is the former prima of Mariinsky and, of course, a graduate of the Academy. She has appeared on this stage hundreds of times. Now she sits in the hall, but is as excited and nervous as if she were still among the dancers. And the thunderous applause and bravos belong as much to her, as to the young performers.

“We have brilliant teachers at our school. They have a lot to give to the students – their huge dancing and teaching experience. Our teachers are like second parents. We love our students, we care about them, and of course, we criticize them as well,” Asylmuratova says.

Expression the specialty

It takes eight years of extremely hard training and study until the young dancers are ready to take to the Mariinsky stage at their graduation gala.

It's a big honour to study in Vaganova Academy. Not many people can enter this school. Sometimes there are 800 aspiring dancers in one year, and only 60 of them pass the audition.

They enter the school at ten-years-old. Every year the programme becomes more intensive, as new subjects are added to the curriculum.

Vaganova's graduates and teachers say it's tradition which makes this school so unique.

It is the oldest ballet school in Russia, and was founded as The Imperial Theatre School in 1738, by the Decree of the Empress Anna. The academy got its modern name in 1957, from the world-renowned ballerina and teacher Agrippina Vaganova.

When she became the director, a new era in the school's history – and ballet education in general – was launched. Today the Vaganova method of training is the most common form of teaching classical dance in Russia.

“The specialty of our school is expression. This expression is the main speciality of Russian ballet. It comes from the movement of the arms, head and body, and from special elasticity. We do our best to preserve it all. And of course, it's about hard work,” Tatiana Aleksandrova – a classical dance teacher – says.