Laurent Hilaire

Ballet Director

Laurent Hilaire has been Director of the Bayerisches Staatsballett since May 2022. After completing his training at the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1979, Laurent Hilaire became a member of the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris. In 1985, Rudolf Nureyev appointed him ‘danseur étoile’ after a performance of Swan Lake. He subsequently took on the leading roles in ballets by Pierre Lacotte, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Serge Lifar, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Fokin, Kenneth MacMillan, Roland Petit, Maurice Béjart, Merce Cunningham, Jiří Kylián, William Forsythe, Angelin Preljocaj and others.
Hilaire has appeared as a guest soloist with the Royal Ballet in London, La Scala Ballet in Milan, the American Ballet Theatre, the Australian Ballet and the Staatsballett Berlin. His regular partners have included Sylvie Guillem, Isabelle Guérin, Elisabeth Platel, Altinai Assylmouratova, Darcy Bassel, Alessandra Ferri and Svetlana Zakharova.
From 2005, he was ballet master at the Paris Opera. With the company, he worked on choreographies by Jerome Robbins, Pierre Lacotte, Rudolf Nureyev, Serge Lifar, George Balanchine, Maurice Béjart, Angelin Preljocaj, Jiří Kylián, William Forsythe, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker and Alexei Ratmansky, among others.

In 2011, he was promoted to ‘Maître de ballet associé à la direction de la danse’; in this position, he worked closely with Brigitte Lefèvre, the artistic director of the Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris. Hilaire was involved in the artistic planning of the ballet programme and was responsible for the entire production process.
As ballet master, he has also worked with the National Ballet of Canada, the Ballet of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm, the ballet of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Shanghai Ballet Company and other companies.
From 2017 to 2022, he was artistic director of the ballet company at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre in Moscow. Under his direction, the company added a number of new choreographies to its repertoire, including works by Alexander Ekman, Serge Lifar, William Forsythe, George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Jacques Garnier, Marco Goecke, Ohad Naharin, Johan Inger, Trisha Brown, Angelin Preljocaj, Sharon Eyal, Andrey Kaidanovskiy, Maxim Sevagin and Hofesh Schechter.
The ballet company at Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre was awarded the ‘Golden Mask’ for the best classical ballet of the year in Russia in 2018 and for the best contemporary ballet of the year in 2019. Laurent Hilaire resigned as artistic director of the company in February 2022.

Honours awarded to Laurent Hilaire personally:

Prix Benois de la Danse (2004 as a dancer, 2007 for lifetime achievement)
Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (2004)
Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (2007)
Médaille de la Renaissance française (2019)

(Information as of January 2025)