One night in July, the curtain closed on the United Ukrainian Ballet’s performance of Giselle at the Segerstrom Center in Orange County, California, and then it opened again. On stage was the Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Budko, who lost both his legs in the war. “He was sitting on stage, without his prosthetics, and he started to dance,” says Alexei Ratmansky, who choreographed Giselle. “It was silence – 3,000 people as one, not breathing,” he remembers. The dancers joined in, lifting him high in the air. “It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had,” says Ratmansky. “The response was tremendous.”
The two worlds of ballet and the battlefield seem so remote, but in the Ukraine war they have collided. Dancers turned soldiers are dying on the frontline (including Ratmansky’s former colleagues from the National Opera of Ukraine, Oleksandr Shapoval and Artem Datsyshyn) in Ukraine; and here a soldier became a dancer, bringing the harsh reality of the Russian invasion to an American theatre, alongside a company of exiled dancers.
Finding himself at the centre of this moment in history is Ratmansky, 54, the most significant classical choreographer of the current era. Born in St Petersburg, he grew up in Kyiv, trained in Moscow, started his professional career in Ukraine, and later became the artistic director of Russia’s Bolshoi ballet, his identity closely entwined between the two countries.
A forthcoming biography of Ratmansky by dance writer Marina Harss engagingly chronicles his career so far, including dancing with companies in Winnipeg and Copenhagen, and a 13-year spell as artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre in New York, as well as being wildly in demand as a choreographer worldwide. He’s famed for engaging deeply with ballet tradition, while bursting with original movement ideas, in works including Concerto DSCH, Russian Seasons and his Shostakovich Trilogy. The book closes with the Russian invasion. Although he lives in New York, Ratmansky was choreographing a new work at the Bolshoi when the invasion began. He immediately left Moscow and loudly condemned the war, forcing a schism with his own past.
Ratmansky talks to me over video call from his New York flat, the clear open sky visible through the window behind him. He’s about to take up a dream job as artist in residence at New York City Ballet and tells me how excited he is about working there, but his days are inevitably haunted by the war. His parents and in-laws are still in Ukraine. “The horror continues,” he says. “We stay up half the night checking the news, and in the morning we start with the news. And the news is bad,” he says. “It’s not safe, but they can’t leave. They won’t leave.”
His manner is measured and calm, he’s open and thoughtful in conversation. He has never been an “issues” choreographer, he wasn’t seeking a platform for his views, he wasn’t mouthy or opinionated. Ratmansky was only interested in making and researching dance, in illuminating music and creating beauty, levity and luminosity through moving bodies. But since the war began, he’s been actively drumming up support among other artists for Ukraine, calling out Russian artists supporting Putin and sharing news on his Facebook and Telegram feeds. Amid waves of support, a few angry voices have criticised Ratmansky for not speaking out against Putin’s regime earlier, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and for continuing to work at the Bolshoi and Mariinsky in that period. Does he regret not speaking publicly sooner?
“Yes, I do, I do,” he says firmly. “I also regret – and it’s something I’m going to have to live with – that I went back and worked there. I was thinking art is outside of politics, or could be. But the invasion opened my eyes. And I have to admit that this guilt of not speaking out is very strong.
“It’s not as if I didn’t fully understand,” he adds. “Because every time I was about to fly to Moscow I had this conversation with my wife [Tatiana, a former dancer who sometimes works as his assistant]: ‘Why are we going?’ And then the arguments from both points of view. And somehow making these ballets, working with these dancers, and continuing what I started when I was director of the Bolshoi, seemed more important. Wrong,” he says bluntly, in a manner that’s characteristically straightforward, and also a little heartbreaking. He realises now how “the silence of the cultural elite led to this tragedy”.
The ramifications of this rejection of Russia run deep for Ratmansky, both personally – only a handful of Russian friends expressed their horror of the situation to him, some have called him a traitor, most are defensive or silent – and professionally. He asked for his works to be removed from the repertoires of Russian companies, although some are now being performed against his wishes, with his name removed. Much of his own work is deeply connected to Russian music (he has choreographed extensively to Shostakovich) and to the country’s ballet history, especially his lauded series of sensitively reconstructed ballets – Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Paquita – built from original archive scores.
One of Ratmansky’s biggest hits was his wry re-creation of The Bright Stream, a 1930s ballet set on a Soviet collective farm. It’s a rollicking yarn, full of broad humour, spirited dancing and inventive choreography, and it helped to make his name internationally. “When I choreographed it in 2003, the Stalinism, everything from this time, seemed to be something of the past,” he says. And thus it could be spoofed in retrospect, as a postmodern reading of what used to be called “tractor ballets”. “Then in a few years, it became the new reality. We’re back to that time now: the arrests, the killings, the invasion.” That makes it impossible for him to think of returning to it: “I don’t think I ever want this ballet to be staged again. It’s dead. It’s done. It’s very dear to me because I think it’s a good ballet and it’s very much part of me, but it’s cut. The door is shut.”
Russian music has been dropped from many concert programmes, but the idea of cancelling historical Russian artists is a complex one. Ratmansky recently had a long-planned project in Munich, set to Tchaikovsky. “It’s amazing music, really inspiring, but at the beginning I was really struggling,” he says. Of course, Tchaikovsky himself has nothing to do with the current war, but after the Russians bombed the Mariupol theatre, with hundreds of people inside, “they occupied it and covered the theatre with big banners with portraits of Russian culture icons: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky. It is great culture but it is being actively used as a propaganda tool today. It is part of the Russian horrors somehow.”
Ratmansky’s own energy to create has been “up and down” since the war began, but he finds it’s better to be busy. He made the ballet Wartime Elegy “as a response to the shock”, set to Ukrainian folk music and work by modern Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov. He’s making a new Coppélia for La Scala to premiere in December. And he’ll be at New York City Ballet, a place that feels like his spiritual home. He loves working with the dancers that NYCB founder George Balanchine’s system of training creates. “The energy is very different from the Bolshoi,” he says. “It’s not out to impress or make you believe in a story; it’s energy that comes from the connection to the music, the dynamics, the cleanness and the speed. It’s the physical side that’s most exciting.”
The choreographer is also spending a lot of time researching Ukrainian ballet, often little known or hard to find, sharing clips of archive performances to celebrate Ukraine’s own cultural identity and style, as distinct from Russia’s. There are still professional ballet companies working in Kyiv and Odesa, Lviv and Dnipro. “They’re still performing, and they stop when there is an air-raid siren, they go to the shelter, and then they continue when it ends,” says Ratmansky. “I think it’s important for them to continue – for the dancers, for the audience, for the whole world. It says something about the spirit of the Ukrainians: it’s unbreakable.”
Ratmansky’s embrace of his own Ukrainian identity is echoed across his country. “The whole nation is so united now,” he says. “The more Putin wants to destroy it, the more it comes together.”
• The Boy from Kyiv by Marina Harss will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 3 October.
