In Tbilisi, the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art has become a temporary archive of movement. From October 2 through December 1, its white-walled galleries are lined not with canvases but with garments that once spun in the air, photographs of bodies mid-leap, and the quietly monumental documents of a company that has carried the pulse of Georgia across the world for eight decades. The exhibition, “80 Years of Triumph,” marks the anniversary of the Georgian National Ballet, known simply—affectionately, nationally, almost as a proper noun— as Sukhishvilebi.
For most audiences outside the Caucasus, “national ballet” tends to evoke either state institutions of classical dance or the folkloric troupes of mid-20th-century cultural diplomacy. Sukhishvilebi, founded in 1945 by Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili, belongs to neither category entirely. It emerged from the folk traditions of the mountains and valleys—those fiercely athletic circle dances, the sword-flashing martial steps, the quicksilver footwork of the highland men—yet it transformed those vernacular forms into a stage language capable of conversing with global modernity. When the company appeared at the Paris Opera in 1957 and later toured the United States, they astonished audiences accustomed to classical uniformity. Here was a vision of a nation moving as if each dancer’s spine carried a line of ancestral melody, each heel-strike a fragment of mountain percussion.
The anniversary exhibition avoids nostalgia in the sentimental sense. Instead, it proposes that Sukhishvilebi is itself a form of living archive. The curators—working closely with the company’s current directors, the descendants of its founders—have treated costumes not as decorative memorabilia but as choreographic documents. These garments are eloquent: they speak of the dialogue between folk pattern and stage spectacle, between the Georgian landscape’s earthy palette and the demands of the proscenium.
The photographs lining the walls function less as heroic portraits than as a cartography of movement across time. Early black-and-white images show Sukhishvili himself, wiry and intense, caught in a suspended mid-turn. Nearby, color prints from the 1970s capture the ensemble as it embraced grander, more theatrical formations in dialogue with symphonic arrangements of traditional melodies. More recent images reveal the company’s experiments with lighting and spatial composition that resonate with contemporary dance aesthetics while remaining rooted in the idiom of the ensemble.
In Georgia, the company’s story has long been intertwined with the country’s own sense of cultural continuity. Through decades of political upheaval—from the late Soviet period to independence and the challenges of a globalized era—Sukhishvilebi carried an idea of Georgianness that was neither narrowly nationalist nor merely folkloric. It offered an embodied argument that a culture’s vitality can be preserved not by freezing it in time but by staging its capacity for reinvention. The juxtaposition reveals not rupture but continuity through adaptation—a principle as relevant to cultural heritage as to choreographic practice.
Exhibiting a dance company poses a paradox: how to present an art of motion in the stillness of a museum. The Tsereteli Museum resolves it by framing the exhibition as a study of traces—the marks that movement leaves behind. In doing so, it aligns itself with a broader contemporary interest in performance archives and the anthropology of gesture. Scholars of dance history will find in this show a case study of how vernacular movement can be codified for the stage without losing its improvisatory spark. Cultural historians will recognize in it a narrative of a small nation’s assertion of visibility on the world’s stages. For the general visitor, it is simply an encounter with the beauty and discipline of bodies in motion, mediated through the objects and images that have outlasted the ephemerality of performance.
The Georgian National Ballet at eighty is not a relic; it is a reminder that certain artistic forms endure precisely because they have learned to transform themselves. By assembling its history within the rooms of a modern art museum, the curators suggest that choreography, too, belongs to the archive of modernity—not as a fossil but as a living thread of memory, carrying forward the rhythms of a place and a people.
By Ivan Nechaev
