Igor Moiseyev was a ballet dancer during Russia's most turbulent years of revolution who later turned choreographer. He managed, under Stalin's reign, to set up a national folk dance school and academy. Today the Moiseyev Company is one of Russia's leading artistic groups.

Never a member of the Communist Party, he knew how to operate in the realm of the possible, steering clear of obvious politics while keeping his repertoire alive. He avoided much of the woodenness that permeated officially sanctioned Soviet art, and his company's performances were praised domestically and internationally for their technical excellence. His philosophy was to take the essence of the folk dance and interpret it, using the discipline of classical ballet, and adding artistic innovation to their execution.

He was always on the lookout for new inspiration, while his early repertoire was based primarily on folk traditions present throughout the lands governed from Moscow. He also worked on folk dances from Spain, Greece, Argentina and Korea.

Igor Alexandrovich Moiseyev was born in 1906 in Kiev. His father, Alexander Mihailovich Moiseyev, whose aristocratic family had fallen on hard times, worked as a lawyer, spoke excellent French and was often in Paris. There he met Igor's mother, Anna Alexandrovna, who was half French, half Romanian and worked in fashion.

Igor's father, who described himself as an anarchist and saw all power as violence, was no friend of the Tsarist regime, and in 1909 the French handed him, and several other Russian radicals, over to the Russian Tsarist authorities. Igor was three years old when his mother placed him at a French boarding house so she could return to Russia to plead her husband's cause. He was soon taken in by his aunts who lived in Poltava.

Igor's father appealed successfully against his incarceration and the family planned to return to France, but the First World War intervened, and in 1915 they moved to Moscow. The Russian Revolution changed Russia's political scene forever. His father ceased practising as a lawyer, instead teaching French, and his mother worked as a seamstress to get by.

Moiseyev was 14 when his father paid for private ballet lessons under Vera Mosolova, a leading Russian ballerina. She saw his potential, and in two months time he had joined the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet School. By 1924, Moiseyev had just become a solo dancer in the Bolshoi troupe.

Moiseyev was an early proponent of experimentation with form, content and discipline in ballet, and it was in one of Kasyan Goleizovsky's experimental ballets that Moiseyev made his first solo debut on the Bolshoi stage. Soon, however, Goleizovsky was replaced as ballet director at the Bolshoi, and it was clear there was to be a return to a traditional repertoire and style. Moiseyev joined others who wrote to the director of the Bolshoi asking for Goleizovsky not to be replaced. The group was dismissed, but Moiseyev, undaunted, wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar for Enlightenment, successfully winning his support to their cause, and managed to get the ballet rebels reinstated. However, Vasily Tikhomirov took the helm at the Bolshoi and Moiseyev knew so long as that was the case, he would never play a lead part or solo. But from Tikhomirov's retirement in 1930 Moiseyev was allowed to make his own ballets, starting with the satirically comic The Footballer. Several of his creations were much liked but unfortunately his biggest Bolshoi production, Khachaturian's Spartacus in 1958, was a flop.

Moiseyev's interest in folk traditions developed apace. His father was a keen orientalist, and they travelled widely within the Russian Empire. Thus he gained his first insight into the folk customs, costumes and dances of the peoples of the Empire. In 1936 his choreographed mass acrobatics in Red Square became the iconic symbol of Soviet health and national vitality. Stalin was pleased. The following year, at the height of Stalin's purges, Moiseyev was granted permission to set up a national folk dance school and academy, and it became known as the Moiseyev Company.

After the Soviet Union joined the Second World War in June 1941, Moiseyev, his new wife Irina Alexeevna (a dancer in his company) and the troupe were evacuated from Moscow. They travelled east in three train wagons, rehearsing and performing en route.

The Moiseyev company made a successful London debut in 1955. Its first tour to the USA in 1958 resulted in rave reviews, with special mention being made of their dance parody of Rock and Roll, entitled Back to the Apes. They continued to tour throughout the Cold War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As recently as September this year they performed in North Korea, where Kim Jong Il watched their rendition of a Korean fan dance, and also of a work based on Night on Bare Mountain with music by Modest Mussorgsky.

In 2005 President Putin announced that the Moiseyev Company would be one of the recipients of a new annual grant for folk music and dance groups in the Russian Federation.

Speaking in 1989 Moiseyev said “the truth is we are working the same way as before... I believe glasnost has done a great thing for drama theatres who are now able to say many things that were impossible to say before. But we were always saying what we felt anyway because it is very difficult to censor dance. I always did what I wanted to do.” Moiseyev's health prevented him travelling with the company from 2001, but he remained at the artistic helm of the organisation. He never lost his dedication his art, and constantly sought to challenge the expectations of an ever more jaded audience.

Moiseyev was appointed a People's Artist of the Russian Republic, and in 1967 he was awarded a Lenin Prize.

He is survived by his wife, Irina, and daughter Olga Igorevich Moiseyeva.

Igor Moiseyev, choreographer, was born on January 21, 1906. He died on November 2, 2007, aged 101