Anna Laudere

Anna Laudere was born in Sigulda, Latvia. She completed her dance training at the Ballet School in Riga and at the Ballet School of the Hamburg Ballet, becoming a member of the company in 2001. In 2008 she received the Dr Wilhelm Oberdörffer Prize, and was promoted to soloist. In 2011 she was promoted again, to principal.

John Neumeier has created several roles for her, among them the Maiden Who Never Laughs in Parzival – Episodes and Echo, Calliope in Orpheus, Mother in Christmas Oratorio I–VI, Friend (Isadora Duncan) in Duse, the title role of Anna Karenina, solo roles in Beethoven Project I and II and Ghost Light, and A Widow in Dona Nobis Pacem.

In addition, she has performed the title roles in John Neumeier’s Lady of the Camellias, A Cinderella Story, Tatiana and Giselle, and interpreted Solveig and Aase in Peer Gynt, Frau Muskat in Liliom, Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, Odette and Princess Claire in Illusions – Like Swan Lake, Louise in The Nutcracker, Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina and Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya in The Seagull and Eleonora Bereda in Nijinsky.

She also works regularly with young choreographers such as Edvin Revazov, Thiago Bordin and Yuka Oishi.

Her repertory includes ballets by George Balanchine (Jewels and The Prodigal Son) and Michel Fokine (Les Sylphides), along with such roles as Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin, Woman in Mauve and Woman in Green in Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, the Wife and the Ballerina in Robbins’s The Concert and the Queen of the Dryads in Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote.

Guest engagements have taken Anna Laudere to Munich, Stuttgart, Lausanne, London, Milan, Tallinn, Riga, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Beijing, as well as to the World Ballet Festival in Tokyo in 2015 and 2018.

In 2018 she won the Premio Positano Léonide Massine, and in 2019 she was awarded the Excellence Award in Culture, and the Benois Massine Prize. She has also been awarded the Order of the Three Stars, the highest civil order in Latvia.