#TheaterPH - That Feeling When Your Favorite Show Comes Back, Except It's Actual Royalty of the Ballet World
You know that specific kind of excitement when a band you love announces a reunion tour, and you're already checking your calendar before you've even seen the ticket prices? Multiply that by several octaves of tutus, adagios, and technical brilliance most of us can only dream of pulling off after two cups of coffee, and you'll understand what's happening in Manila's ballet scene this August.
Last year, two dancers swept through the Aliw Theater stage and left local audiences in a kind of stunned, teary-eyed silence that only happens when you witness something you know you'll be talking about for years. Renata Shakirova and Kimin Kim, both principal dancers of Russia's Mariinsky Ballet, one of the most storied companies in the world, performed in Don Quixote and, by most accounts, thoroughly ruined everyone's expectations for what a live ballet performance could feel like in this city. Now they're coming back, and this time they're bringing something even heavier: La Bayadère, a 19th-century tragedy set in ancient India that's basically opera-level melodrama on pointe shoes.
This is where Ballet Manila comes in, quietly doing what it's done for years: bridging the gap between world-class artistry and Filipino audiences who don't always get the chance to see it up close. Founder and artistic director Lisa Macuja Elizalde has talked about how overwhelming last year's response was, how audiences embraced the pair so warmly that bringing them back almost felt inevitable. And when you look at who these two dancers actually are, it makes sense why people couldn't stop talking.
Shakirova, who's originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, won the 2025 Benois de la Danse, which people in the dance world casually refer to as the Ballet Oscar. She's known for a kind of musicality and dramatic weight that makes her equally convincing as the doomed temple dancer Nikiya or the icy, privileged Gamzatti, both pivotal roles in La Bayadère. Kim, meanwhile, has one of those career arcs that sounds made up: he didn't start ballet until he was around ten, considered late by professional standards, and still became the first foreign male principal dancer in Mariinsky's history. Together, they even won a televised ballet competition in Russia back in 2016, which tells you they've had chemistry on stage long before Manila ever saw them dance.
What makes this run genuinely special is that Kim and Shakirova aren't just performing La Bayadère, they're performing roles they already know intimately from their home stage at the Mariinsky. That familiarity tends to translate into something audiences can feel even if they can't name it: a kind of ease inside the tragedy, a confidence in every extended line and controlled fall. The show runs at the Aliw Theater on August 14 at 8 PM, then August 15 and 16 at 5 PM, and if last year's crowd reaction is anything to go by, this isn't a quiet, polite theater outing. It's the kind of night people leave talking, comparing notes on the parts that made them gasp.
There's something worth sitting with here, beyond the choreography and the accolades. A love story that ends in ruin, told through a body language that took decades to master, still manages to say something universal enough that a crowd in Manila cries the same way audiences do in St. Petersburg. That's the quiet power of ballet nobody warns you about until you're already in your seat, feeling it.
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