For the past five years this fine company has appeared regularly in theatres around our area.

During that time it has proved to be probably the best of the Russian companies that tour this country, with high-quality performances of the classics.

The company was founded in 1981 by graduates of the Moscow and St Petersburg choreographic schools, but it was only with the arrival of Sergei Bobrov as choreographer that it began to reach the standard that has now brought it international acclaim.

“I began my career as a dancer in the Bolshoi Theatre”, he told me, “and I danced there for 20 years. During that time I started to make choreography — in fact I started making dances at the age of 25.

“I was a pupil of the famous Russian choreographer Yuri Grigorovich. I was very proud of that, and, because things went well, I became very keen to have a company of my own.

“Twelve years ago the company in Siberia invited me to become their resident choreographer and since then I’ve put on 15 different ballets, and I’ve also been producing operas.”

The company was founded with the best intentions, but, when Bobrov arrived, he found that it wasn’t good enough to put on the great classics and other ambitious pieces that he wanted them to perform. “Unfortunately they did not have the high standard that is required to tour abroad with productions like Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle.

“So I made it my goal to give them the same standards that we had at the Bolshoi Theatre. To achieve this I invited some friends and teachers at the Bolshoi, and they gave me a lot of help training.

“Of course we had people from other regions around the country as well. I tried to persuade them to come to our city for a full year, or half a year, depending on their commitments, and I think they have helped to raise the company to a very high standard. I also invited very famous dancers as guests with the company. Now I feel I can say that we are approaching the standard that I experienced at the Bolshoi.”

The company is based in Krasnoyarsk, and most of the dancers come from that town or the surrounding area, and many actually trained at the company’s school. Sometimes we invite dancers from Moscow, from the Bolshoi Theatre, but we are also bringing up our own dancers. For example just now we have a young boy who has come up through the school, who we think is going to be a very big star. His name is Dimitri Sobolevskiy.

“He was clearly very talented when he was at the school, and he has now won a major prize in Moscow. He’s getting better and better every year, so he’s a local, but he’s very, very good technically and emotionally. Dimitri is one of the dancers who will be doing the lead in Giselle and in Swan Lake.”

Bobrov’s production of Swan Lake keeps the much-loved Petipa/Ivanov choreography, but has an unusual ending: instead of Odette and Siegfried dying together in the lake, it’s the evil sorcerer von Rothbart who drowns, followed by Siegfried, leaving Odette alone and sorrowing among her swans. I asked Sergei Bobrov to explain the thinking behind this. “I wanted it to be more tragic, so the Prince dies saving Odette, but the audience can’t tell whether she stays living as a human or as a swan. But what I’m showing is that the body is not important. What’s important is the soul, so the couple’s love continues in spirit despite Siegfried’s body dying.”

Swan Lake will not be seen in Oxford, but it will be on at The Wycombe Swan.

At The Waterside, Aylesbury, the company is performing a rarity, based on a version of La Fille Mal Gardee made long before Sir Frederick Ashton’s much loved English production. In fact it was the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina’s memory of this work that caused her to persuade Ashton to recreate the ballet.

“This is a new version, but it’s based on influences from my childhood, when we had Gorky’s version for a school performance. So I have taken some of the humour from his work, which I saw when I was a child, but also added a lot of my own choreography. I have used a previous score by Peter Ludwig Hertel”.

The Russian State Ballet of Siberia is a real class act, with highly enjoyable performances of the major works it takes on tour, with its own orchestra. It’s at The New Theatre Oxford with Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty from January 16 to 18; at The Wycombe Swan from February 2 to 4 with those two works plus Swan Lake; and at the Aylesbury Waterside with La Fille Mal Gardee on March 15.