Ballet of the Serbian National Theatre

The first audience for the permanent ballet in Novi Sad saw Scheherazade on 25 May 1950. Marina Olenina, the company’s first leader, choreographed the piece to Rimsky-Korsakov’s score. Only a few months earlier, on 8 March, the Serbian National Theatre had established its ballet ensemble. The distinction matters in a city that had long seen dance on tour. A visiting troupe could introduce a ballet to Novi Sad. A resident ensemble could rehearse it again, teach its roles to a new generation and develop an audience that would remember one interpretation when it saw the next.

The company’s first Swan Lake, on 8 January 1955, brought the first graduating class of the local ballet school onto the stage. It places an often anonymous part of ballet history in plain sight. Before an audience can see a line of swans move as one, a city needs teachers, rehearsal time and enough trained dancers to sustain that line. Another landmark came in April 1981, when the ensemble danced Stevan Hristić’s The Legend of Ohrid in its new theatre. The choice of a work by a Serbian composer gives a different picture of the company’s inheritance from the familiar list of Russian classics alone.

The relationship between inherited steps and a particular production is still audible in the way the theatre credits its repertoire. Its Don Quixote is Gyula Harangozó’s staging after Marius Petipa. When it opened the September 2026 run, Marianela Nuñez and Patricio Revé were guests in the leading roles. The following evening the theatre billed Rajna Remović and Taisei Takahashi. For Giselle, the company credits Aleksandar Antonijević with the choreography of its March 2026 production. These are distinct stagings, even when their titles are familiar from another company’s playbill.

Aja Jung, who founded the Belgrade Dance Festival, became Director of Ballet in November 2024. One sign of her programming is the distance between those story ballets and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Fall. Set to music by Arvo Pärt, Fall was first made for the Royal Ballet of Flanders in 2015. Novi Sad introduced it in October 2026 and took it to the Visavì festival in Nova Gorica that same month. The occasion was a company premiere of an existing work.

The 166th season extends that conversation. A February programme is announced around Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Serenade and Who Cares? The theatre has also announced work by Sharon Eyal and Paolo Mangiola. For a visitor coming to Novi Sad through Giselle, these choices offer a way to follow the same ensemble across very different demands, from the collective timing of the Wilis to the shifting weight of Cherkaoui’s dancers.