Igor Yebra, the ballet dancer who learned to hide effort, and then his illness

Igor Yebra

Born	August 1, 1974 Bilbao
Occupation	Ballet Dancer
Awards	Delmira Agustini Medal · Distinguished Citizen of Montevideo

Classical ballet asks a dancer to make the hardest things look weightless, and Igor Yebra spent his career becoming very good at it. The Basque danseur noble partnered Carla Fracci and Svetlana Zakharova, carried the title role of Ivan the Terrible on the Kremlin stage and later ran Uruguay’s national ballet company. What the public did not see, until his memoir appeared this autumn, was that he had turned the same discipline on something else: a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis that he kept private for more than a decade, and for a while even from himself.

The book’s title reads as an argument rather than a confession: ¿Por qué somos tan estúpidos y no estamos ya bailando?, roughly “Why are we so stupid that we are not dancing already?” It is a fair summary of the man. Yebra has always talked about dance as something closer to a public necessity than an elite pastime, and his working life has been less a straight line through one institution than a long negotiation between teachers, stages and countries.

Igor Yebra Iglesias was born in Bilbao on 1 August 1974 to parents who ran a dance school and who named him after the hero of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. As a boy he wanted to be a footballer, and he still follows Athletic Club. The turn came when his parents took him to see Khachaturian’s Spartacus with Vladimir Vasiliev in the lead, a performance that showed him how physical male ballet could be. He began formal training at Víctor Ullate’s school in Madrid at around thirteen, late by classical standards, and made his professional debut with Ullate’s company at Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga in April 1988.

He stayed with Ullate until 1996, rising to principal and absorbing a neoclassical and contemporary repertoire by Hans van Manen, Rudi van Dantzig, Nils Christe and George Balanchine. In 1989, still a teenager, he took the special jury prize for contemporary dance at the Eurovision Young Dancers competition in Paris. In 1996 the Italian magazine Danza & Danza named him dancer of the year and he won second prize at the Maya Plisetskaya competition. Then he left company life altogether and went freelance, starting with a guest stint at the Australian Ballet that opened a career built on invitations rather than contracts.

Three relationships shaped the years that followed. Through Charles Jude he became a fixture of the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux, where he danced as a guest étoile for well over a decade and where Jude created Basilio in Don Quixote and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet for him. Through Carla Fracci he became a guest principal of the Rome Opera Ballet. Through Yuri Grigorovich he reached the role he is most often remembered for: in January 2004 he danced the title part of Ivan the Terrible at the Kremlin, the first non-Russian to take it. Along the way he partnered Fracci, Zakharova, Viviana Durante and Lorna Feijóo, and guested with companies from the Ballet Nacional de Cuba to La Scala.

Teaching followed without ending the performing. He opened his own school in Bilbao in 2006 and two years later set up the municipal dance school in Amurrio. As a choreographer he worked largely for opera, staging dances for La Traviata, Carmen and Aida, and he made the children’s ballet Pipi Bailarina. His most travelled piece is El Cisne XXI, a male version of The Dying Swan that he danced at galas for years. Television claimed him briefly in 2018 as head of the academy in the Movistar+ revival of Fama, ¡a bailar!, a job he left by mutual agreement once his new post in Uruguay made the two impossible to combine.

That post was the artistic direction of the Ballet Nacional Sodre in Montevideo, where he succeeded Julio Bocca in January 2018. He programmed John Cranko’s Onegin, Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon and Léonide Massine’s El sombrero de tres picos, and he commissioned new local work: El Quijote del Plata in 2018 and, for the centenary of Mario Benedetti, La tregua in 2020. His first season drew close to 150,000 spectators across the company’s Montevideo performances, its tours and its education programmes. When the pandemic shut the theatres, he moved the company’s choreographic workshop online under the banner Seguimos con vos.

The ending of that tenure is where the tidy story breaks. Despite the attendance figures, Uruguay’s government decided not to renew his contract, and from 2021 the company passed to María Noel Riccetto, its former star ballerina. On his way out, Montevideo named him an illustrious citizen and he received the Delmira Agustini Medal, the country’s highest cultural distinction, two verdicts that sit uneasily side by side. At home, the celebrity press has long filed him under a single heading, his short marriage to television presenter Anne Igartiburu, which began in September 2004 and ended in separation early in 2006. That framing crowded out three decades of work on stages most Spanish readers never saw. The memoir complicates the picture once more: by the chronology he now gives, the diagnosis was already in his medical file when he accepted the Sodre job, and he ran a national company without the public knowing.

The book, published by Bao Bilbao in September 2026, fills in the rest. The first symptoms appeared in his left leg in 2013, and he blamed them on training. A lumbar puncture led to the diagnosis in 2015, but he did not want to hear it; he took the medication he was prescribed and asked nothing more until, he says, a doctor let it slip. In 2021 a new treatment brought side effects that other people could see, and he began telling those beyond his inner circle. His left leg is now the most affected, and walking is difficult. “I have always been very reserved, very much so,” he has said, explaining that he wrote the book partly because he no longer wanted, or was able, to keep the illness secret. He stopped performing less than a decade ago and has worked since as a director, teacher and choreographer.

He is now in Montevideo, organising a competition designed to draw young children into classical dance, which is the memoir’s title turned into a working plan. For a dancer whose craft was hiding the weight of the body, the next stage asks something different: getting other people moving, without pretending any longer that his own movement costs nothing.

Tags: singers, Anne Igartiburu, Ballet Nacional Sodre, dancers, Igor Yebra, Carla Fracci