Much of the troupe is still abroad, performances are interrupted by air raid sirens and the number of tickets sold for each performance is limited to the number of people who can fit in the theatre’s basement shelter.
But as the curtain comes down on Sunday afternoon at the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv – the end of the storied theatre’s 155th season – the artists can reflect on a remarkably full year of performances for a theatre operating in the heart of a country at war.
The atmosphere in Ukraine’s capital city these days can feel jarring, with busy parks and packed restaurant terraces bringing back something of the pleasant summer vibe of pre-war Kyiv, despite the frequent night-time drone attacks.
Inside the grand opera house, too, on the surface much has returned to normal. On Friday, many of the audience were dressed in their finest outfits to watch a ballet double bill, waiters filled flutes with local sparkling wine at the interval and audience members posed for photographs in front of gilded mirrors and ornate chandeliers.
Go a bit deeper, though, and the majority of both the audience and artists are harbouring painful memories from the past 18 months.
Ballerina Olga Kifyak-fon-Kraimer lights a small candle on her dressing room table next to photographs of her father and brother every time she performs. Her father died a month into the war; her brother signed up to fight in July last year, planning to use his IT engineering experience to work with drones. He was killed in Bakhmut four weeks later.
During the traditional ritual of having the coffin spend a night in the family home before burial, Kifyak-fon-Kraimer had the idea that she could work on a dance honouring the memory of her brother and all the others who have died in the war. She will perform it at the closing gala, set to music by the Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk.
“People ask me where I find the strength to keep dancing. I feel like I have a void inside me, and when you lose someone this close to you, it will hurt for your whole life, but I try to push some of these emotions out on to the stage and it becomes a little bit easier to cope,” she said.
On 24 February last year the theatre had been due to put on the ballet La Bayadère when the season was interrupted by Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of the country.
But less than two months after Russian troops were pushed back from the outskirts of Kyiv, the theatre reopened with a skeleton crew of performers and technical staff.
Most dancers were grateful for the swift return of performances. “For us, we’ve given our whole lives to ballet and if you don’t dance, you lose your form, you don’t see the faces in the audience, you basically don’t exist. To have that back is very important to us,” said ballerina Raisa Betankourt, as a makeup artist set to work on her hair ahead of her performance in Bolero on Friday.
The ballet troupe has lost about a third of its members, many of whom found contracts abroad. Another change has been the removal of all Russian repertoire. But the theatre staged both opera and ballet premieres in the season just ending, and tickets for the reduced capacity auditorium usually sold out.
The company has also toured to France, Poland, Lithuania and Japan, though the management has had to battle againt several “fake” national ballet troupes, apparently trying to benefit from the international goodwill towards Ukraine.
“There was even a case of a group of Russian dancers trying to pass themselves off as the Ukrainian ballet,” said Dina Sazonenko, deputy director of the ballet troupe.
Even as the audience sipped their interval wine, memories of war were not far away. Next to the bar, a photo exhibit was dedicated to the career of Oleksandr Shapoval, a dancer who had retired from the stage but continued working as a teacher for young dancers.
Shapoval had no military experience; like most professional ballet dancers, he received a pass from conscription when he turned 18, as a year in the army could ruin the training and preparation of years of ballet school. But on the day Russia invaded he signed up, first for a territorial defence unit and later for the Ukrainian army.
“He had two grandfathers who had fought in world war two and survived,” said Maksym Motkov, a friend of Shapoval’s who danced and worked with him. “He often heard their stories and was proud of their feats, and I think somewhere inside him he wanted to repeat them. And so when it came to his time, he had no hesitations and signed up.”
Shapoval was killed in September in fighting in the Donetsk region. His coffin, draped in a Ukrainian flag, was brought to the opera house a few days later for a memorial ceremony.
Strange things can happen during a wartime opera season. Anatoliy Solovianenko, the artistic director, recalled talking to journalists in an enforced break for an air-raid warning during the dress rehearsal for his staging of La Traviata last autumn. One of the journalists suggested that with the war going on and death all around, perhaps it would be better if Violetta Valéry, the opera’s lead character, did not die and the opera instead had a happy ending.
“This would be absurd, it’s there in Verdi that she dies, we can’t change it,” Solovianenko recalled telling the journalist. “And then, on the day of the premiere, seven minutes before the end of the performance there’s another air raid warning, and everyone goes to the shelter, and we get a call from the security services telling us that we cannot continue the performance. So, probably for the first time in 100,000 performances of La Traviata, Violetta indeed did not die.”
At one performance earlier in the season, Solovianenko decided to walk among the audience at the interval to ask why they had come. “They told me that they came to the opera because it was like a portal away from everything going on now, even for just for a few hours. To me, that’s the whole goal of what we are doing, that is what art is for,” he said.
