2. The South Africa Trail – The Anonymous Ballet Company The Heritage Ballet Revealed
In the first article on this blog about The Heritage Ballet, I wrote about the protests that arose when the Russian ballet company SPBT was scheduled to perform in South Africa in the summer of 2023.
Here are some links to the promotion for the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre's tour in South Africa in 2023. Do you notice anything particular when reading through the texts or watching the promotional video?
I can’t help but notice how sparse the information is regarding SPBT being the company touring South Africa in 2023. Similarly, there’s very little mention that Irina Kolesnikova, the prima ballerina and owner, is Russian. And yes, we recognize the photo of her that The Heritage Ballet is now also using to promote their tour in Sweden in 2025.
Andre
Sive Wana
Jane Mayne
The Newspaper
https://joburg.co.za/event/swan-lake-at-the-teatro-2023/?ref=avel.ghost.io
Anyone interested can search online to see how The Heritage Ballet’s promotional text for performances from 2023-2025 appears. The phrasing is identical to the promotional texts for the tour in South Africa. The South Africa trail will become more relevant later in this text.
Representatives of SPBT Entertainment s.r.o and The Heritage Ballet claim they completely severed ties with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre as early as 2018. This is also what they have communicated to concert halls in Sweden ahead of their upcoming nationwide tour.
This is the information the concert halls relay publicly when people inquire about The Heritage Ballet’s background.
Beyond stating that the ballet is based in Prague and features "Ukrainian and Italian" dancers, this is the reasoning municipal concert halls and privately owned venues like Cirkus in Stockholm cite for maintaining their rental agreements with the Czech company SPBT Entertainment s.r.o, owned by Russian Sergey Kuryerov. At the time of writing, they are set to perform in eight concert halls across Sweden, offering approximately 13,000 bookable seats.
Let’s remind ourselves that the first thing SPBT Entertainment s.r.o did in 2018, after allegedly cutting ties with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre in Russia, was register the domain name "spbt.eu." See here:
https://whois.eurid.eu/en/search/?domain=spbt.eu
Who is truly “breaking away” and “distancing” themselves from SPBT in Russia? We don’t know. Is it part of the ballet company “defecting” to “Europe”?
Nowhere on social media does The Heritage Ballet make any substantial statements. They only have very anonymous event pages on Facebook, and on Instagram, theheritageballet has a completely empty account with no content or followers.
Why is there no engagement on social media to build their newly launched brand? This is a question anyone experienced in marketing might wonder, and so might everyone else for that matter.
No matter how you look at it, SPBT Entertainment s.r.o and The Heritage Ballet continue to use the same stage design and promotional material as the Russian ballet.
What’s peculiar about the new SPBT ballet in the Czech Republic since 2018 is that it didn’t have a name. It wasn’t until 2023 that the name The Heritage Ballet appeared ahead of their tour in Sweden. More details can be found under "Events" on their website:
If you check when the domain name "theheritageballet.com" was registered, it was in February 2023:
Another peculiar detail in this context is that, despite claiming to distance themselves from "Russia," they have chosen to host their website on Russian servers provided by Beget and use a web publishing tool that is Russian. The tool, named Tilda, is based in Dubai for convenience.
We continue to examine the website spbt.eu, which SPBT Entertainment s.r.o registered when they distanced themselves from SPBT in Russia in 2018. Internet Archive stores older versions of websites, essentially creating an archive of how websites looked in the past.
Through this link, we can see how the Czech ballet’s website spbt.eu appeared in December 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201218031030/http://spbt.eu/
This would have been 2-3 years after they supposedly broke ties and distanced themselves from the Russian SPBT.
Here is a screenshot from the same link:
From the website in December 2020, the following can be read:
"About us
SPBT Entertainment is a promotion company that organizes tours of the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre around the world from 2018.
The organization of the tour includes: rental of stage equipment, organization of ticket sales by ticket offices, advertising campaigns, transfer and accommodation of artists, and other necessary actions to perform the tour.
During 2019, three tours were organized, more details of which can be found in the Event Archive.
The tour schedule for 2020 can be found in Events."
One of the concert halls, in their communication, highlighted my first blog post about the ballet and found it strange that I hadn’t mentioned in the post that The Heritage Ballet had distanced itself and broken ties with the Russian SPBT from St. Petersburg as early as 2018.
The reason I didn’t write that is because I knew the ballet had never truly severed ties. I allowed them to communicate this recently to the concert halls that had sent inquiries to them so that what we now know would have a greater impact — namely that, in 2020, the Czech SPBT Entertainment s.r.o stated on its website:
SPBT Entertainment is a promotion company that organizes tours of the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre around the world from 2018.
Let’s now return to the South Africa trail and examine what was written during the boycott on social media. On X/Twitter, someone wrote this about the ballet:
"Cooperating with the Russian government and Russian military."
This person also writes about the Russian ballet in a comment that could be added when signing the petition against the ballet's tour in South Africa in 2023:
St. Petersburg Ballet has close cultural and financial ties with the Russian military."
What these individuals have done — and what Cirkus and the municipally owned concert halls in Sweden, which have signed rental agreements with this "Czech" company SPBT Entertainment s.r.o., should have done — is investigate what this Russian ballet is actually involved in.
The founder of SPBT has a background in Russian special forces.
They operate out of premises located within the Western Military District facilities in St. Petersburg.
The woman currently featured in promotional images on the concert halls' websites as the ballerina for Swan Lake performances with The Heritage Ballet, Irina Kolesnikova, ran a company from 2016 to 2021 called "Russian Army Song and Dance Ensemble."
Their operations were based at the House of Officers in St. Petersburg, where the military district holds roundtable discussions on how to develop propaganda through Russian cultural activities. It’s also where GRU and the special forces units Spetsnaz Alfa and Vympel hold their meetings.
Furthermore, in early November this year, the artistic director Irina Smolina at Dom Ofitserov inaugurated an exhibition displaying war trophies from Ukraine, including a dozen armored vehicles from various countries.
Here are some of Irina Kolesnikova's business engagements, who currently adorns the concert halls' websites:
If you want to get an impression of the premises where SPBT is based, you can visit the Russian military's website. I’m linking directly to the article about the exhibition of war trophies in St. Petersburg, and the website can be translated using your browser. Note the significant presence of children and youth in uniforms, who are involved both in the exhibition and other activities in the building. This is where SPBT is headquartered, as I showed in the post a few days ago (please note that this link leads to a Russian government website):
Now, there are additional circumstances that show that they not only tried to hide which ballet was touring in South Africa — which I believe they are still doing now ahead of the tour in Sweden — but also that the ballet name The Heritage Ballet is connected to South Africa in 2023. Despite claiming they "broke" with SPBT as early as 2018.
Let’s take another look in the internet archive at SPBT Entertainment s.r.o's website theheritageballet.com, and here it indeed mentions something about South Africa in 2023:
The links have not been saved by the Internet Archive, but they look like this:
"https://www.theheritageballet.com/?tour=Stockholm-May-2023"
"https://www.theheritageballet.com/?tour=South-Africa-2023"
The link to "Sweden Dec 2023" is dead, as shown in the image.
I argue that the tour The Heritage Ballet presented in 2023 was the same tour as the anonymous "World’s Most Loved Ballet Swan Lake" tour that SPBT conducted that same year. In other words, SPBT toured "nameless" in South Africa. If SPBT Entertainment s.r.o. wishes to prove the contrary, I welcome that response.
Another detail in this context is that in the screenshot above, they write on the website theheritageballet.com:
"The website is currently under maintenance. Use headoffice@theheritageballet.com for further inquiries."
The same phrasing and similar-sounding email address appear elsewhere in the Internet Archive:
"This website is currently under maintenance. For any further business inquiry, you may use headoffice@spbt.ru..."
The wording and email address are strikingly similar for both The Heritage Ballet and SPBT in this context. Just as they have remarkably similar marketing texts for Swan Lake as late as 2024, which I showed at the beginning of this post.
Yes, so much is strikingly similar between these two ballet companies, in my opinion. Yet, SPBT Entertainment s.r.o. claims that there has been no connection to SPBT in Russia since 2018...
Another connection I’ve written about previously is that, as recently as a week ago, SPBT Entertainment s.r.o. listed the Russian-Romanian Sergey Kuryerov as the "managing director" and owner of the company in Prague on their website. This was removed when it started being questioned from Swedish sources a week ago.
In the two screenshots below, you can also see in the bottom left corner that the two icons for Facebook and Instagram link to St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre’s official social media account "spbtofficial" (the black text boxes appear when you hover the mouse pointer over the icons, but the pointer is not shown in the screenshot):
And in the text at the top right of the images above, there are more references to SPBT in St. Petersburg, etc.
In this link:
You can read this about SPBT Entertainment s.r.o:
"SPBT tours have ranged over six continents, travelling to Spain, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Austria, Finland, the USA, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Macau and Taiwan."
I think this touring description fits more with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre from Russia, right?
By checking spbtofficial on Instagram, you can easily get an overview of SPBT's touring.
We will conclude by reminding ourselves of what The Heritage Ballet, which "broke" from St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre in 2018 due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, wrote on its website in 2020:
So:
"SPBT Entertainment- is a promotion company, that organizes tours of the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre around the world from 2018."
And that’s what I’ve been asserting all along—that the Czech SPBT Entertainment s.r.o. is a front for the Russian St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, which has direct ties to the Russian military and the Ministry of Culture through the Russian Federation’s Western Military District in St. Petersburg and the Russian Ministry of Culture’s organization, Rosconcert.
Now, it’s up to the concert halls and Cirkus in Stockholm to decide how they will handle existing rental agreements with SPBT Entertainment s.r.o., which is a front for the Russian ballet SPBT, St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre.
The governing document that the concert halls now refer to when journalists and concerned citizens contact them can be found here:
And it reads (my translation and my emphasis in the second-to-last paragraph):
"Article from the Ministry of Culture
Sweden’s cooperation with Russian and Belarusian cultural actors
Published on October 18, 2022
On March 4, 2022, Sweden strongly condemned the unprovoked, illegal, and indefensible Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's actions are an attack on the European security order, and European countries are now united in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Extensive sanctions were quickly imposed on Russia and the Russian leadership. The government continues to push for sanctions against Russia, support Ukraine, and strengthen Sweden.
This applies to cultural collaborations between Swedish cultural institutions and authorities, and Russia and Belarus:
The government urges that contacts and collaborations with state institutions in Russia and Belarus be immediately discontinued, and that no new contacts or commitments be initiated.
However, there are individual contacts between cultural actors in Sweden, Russia, and Belarus. Many individual cultural actors, journalists, and artists in Russia and Belarus are part of a popular and sometimes open opposition to the Russian leadership and their actions. It is not possible to equate individual Russian and Belarusian cultural actors with state institutions and categorically call for breaking all ties with cultural actors.
The government’s starting point is that Swedish cultural institutions and authorities ensure, in each individual case, that any individual contacts and collaborations are appropriate. We urge Swedish cultural institutions and authorities to particularly consider the security policy aspects of collaborations.
The recommendation from the government is that Swedish cultural institutions and authorities take a very strict stance regarding payments, handling of applications, implementation of projects, entering into agreements, and similar activities involving Russian and Belarusian recipients."
I call this mapping of The Heritage Ballet "Operation bez boyu."
"без бою" means "walk over."
