Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili

Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili is a large touring company built on a folk dance tradition and drilled to concert-stage standards. It is not a heritage display. The dancing is fast, athletic and exactly synchronised, and the company treats the vocabulary it inherited as material to be pushed rather than preserved.

It was founded by Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili, two dancers who set out to draw separate regional traditions into a single stage language. The result divides the labour sharply. The men supply height and impact, including work on the tips of the toes in soft boots and sequences of staged blade combat; the women move in long gliding lines that seem to travel without visible steps. Ensemble unison counts for as much as individual display.

From an original company of about twenty it has grown to more than a hundred dancers and musicians, with a touring record running to hundreds of international tours and tens of thousands of performances, and a school that keeps replenishing the ranks. Live, the appeal registers physically before it registers culturally: an audience feels the drop of a knee-fall or the speed of a spin long before it identifies which region a dance came from.