When The Bright Stream premiered at the Bolshoi in 1935, the ballet, which takes place on a collective farm and features characters such as a guy in a dog suit and a vegetable parade, was denounced in Pravda as frivolous and ironic. Its composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, lost much of his paintings and its librettist, Adrian Piotrovsky, was shot dead.
When young choreographer Alexei Ratmansky presented his revival of The Bright Stream in New York in 2005, it was the city’s news. A program note explained that the play was “not overtly political” and encouraged audiences to treat it as a comedy. In an era of relative stability, most critics did, praising the production as “dazzling” and witty. One of the enthralled spectators was dancer Marina Harss. “I left the theater excited and full of questions,” she recalls in her new book. The boy from Kiev: Alexei Ratmansky’s life in ballet. Who was Ratmansky, and how did he manage to take something that might have been “anachronistic, ridiculous, stylistically retrograde” and make it human, even funny?
Ratmansky has been hailed as one of the few choreographers who has revitalized ballet for the 21st century, saving the art from its decades-long stagnation. In the afterword to her 2010 book, Apollo’s Angels, historian Jennifer Homans argued that ballet was dying, that no one had stepped in to fill the void left by the greats of the 20th century (George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton). “Contemporary choreography shifts aimlessly from unimaginative imitation to strident innovation, usually in the form of gymnastic exercises or ‘melodramatic excess,'” he writes. While ballet was once a colorful component of American culture, a venue for Cold War festivals alongside the Olympics and space, it had become increasingly marginal, with corporations relying on The Nutcracker for survival.
Reversing this trend would be a primary challenge for any choreographer, no matter how brilliant. Susan Jaffe, artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre, recently told the New York Times that Ratmansky had “taken ballet to heights far beyond what we imagined 20 years ago. ” In fact, ballet today is more specialized than 20 years ago. Between 1982 and 2010, ballet attendance among college-educated adults fell to about 50 percent. Meanwhile, dance politics disappeared from mainstream publications: in the 1970s, a new ballet could be reviewed by ten other critics; As of 2015, there were only two full-time dance critics left in the United States. Last year one of them was fired. Add to this that Ratmansky himself is deeply involved with ballet’s past, whether uncovering its history and traditions or resurrecting forgotten works like The Bright Stream. At a time when audiences are dwindling and dancers are better known for their TikToks than their technique, perhaps it would be unwise to fire a choreographer so deeply rooted in ballet history as the future of the art form.
Instead, Harss attempts to offer a more readily available edition of Ratguysky, tracing what she sees as his political awakening. The title, “The Boy from Kyiv,” refers to the nickname he was given at the Bolshoi Ballet School, as well as his commitment to his home country following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Harss attempts to present his subject, who has spent his life in the insular world of ballet, as a new political artist. But it also attempts to highlight, paradoxically, how Ratguysky was aloof, placid with those around him, and largely oblivious to sociopolitical turmoil: a guy more involved with ballet itself than with the world at large.
Born in 1968, Ratmansky was raised in Kiev through his mother, Valentyna, a psychiatrist, and his father, Osip, an engineer of secular Jewish origin. Alexei moved to Moscow to take exams at the Bolshoi Ballet School at the age of 10 and, after graduating, joined the Ukrainian National Ballet in Kiev. As a dancer, he developed a reputation for his musicality, elegance and natural strategy and worked in the national corporations of Canada and Denmark. “He was interested in music,” said one director. It’s so clean it’s almost like someone has washed every step,” said another. She began competing in choreography while dancing with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and in her early thirties, she quit dance to concentrate on choreography. Ratmansky landed in New York in 2009 as an in-house choreographer for the American Ballet Theatre, and in August moved to Lincoln Center Plaza as artist-in-residence at the New York City Ballet.
Ratmansky’s oeuvre, which encompasses more than a hundred ballets, draws on the many styles he assimilated as a dancer, from Russian bravura and folk dance to Danish naturalism and American speedArray. He’s equally comfortable reshaping an old narrative ballet (he’s created his own versions of Cinderella, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty) and resurrecting early music (often through Shostakovich) that follows his own intuition and commissions new composers. Humour, even awkwardness, are the hallmark of his work. The premiere of The Bright Stream at the Bolshoi in 2003 marked the first time in 50 years that “Moscow audiences burst out laughing at a classical ballet,” one Russian critic observed. His Namouna, a wonderful entertainment from 2010, features a group of women inexplicably dressed in bathing caps, as well as a solo of a cigarette-smoking femme fatale. His surreal Evening Whipped Cream (2017), which vaguely follows the dreams of a child who falls into a food coma, partly encouraged by his wife’s fondness for cans of whipped cream.
His output has been prolific: at 55, Ratmansky has worked with nearly every major company in the world. His boss at ABT, Kevin McKenzie, calls him a “creativity junkie”; Harss plays an obsessed man. “When he’s not in the studio working on a project,” she writes, “he’s at home thinking about the next one and the next. “Her career has been marked by a preference for the opposite of trends: presenting story ballets when they summarize fashionable paintings; digging into the Bolshoi archives of the 1930s ballets, which were in danger of being considered Soviet kitsch; he trained elite dancers, proud of their athletic jumps and spins, in an understated style of 19th-century ballet.
Ratguysky appears, according to Harss, as a man of kind and simple character, the product of loving and attentive parents and a simple magnet for friends. When he left Kiev for Canada at the age of 24, his director recalled that “He integrated without delay. “As a dancer, his difficulty evoking strong feelings held him back. Working with choreographer Mats Ek in 1999, Ratguysky, then a soloist with the Royal Danish Ballet, struggled to convey the intensity of his character. “He wanted me to look angry, but it was hard, because I almost never get angry,” he tells Harss.
As a choreographer, his behavior in the studio is unfailingly polite, even in stressful cases. In 2001, he was commissioned to create a new Nutcracker and a new Cinderella simultaneously, in other countries. Despite this, a Danish dancer recalled, “In the middle of the snowflakes’ most intense practice session, if someone sneezed, Alexei would stop them and say, ‘God bless you. ‘Perhaps the repetition of maximum tension described in the book will result in a minor war of words on the subject. Ratmansky repeats himself several times, and yet – in what seems to be his version of exasperation – he says: “How can I get you to adopt this attitude here?Harss – an expert on Ratmansky’s moods – sees this as a “very polite war”.
Maintaining this point of decorum is remarkable if we take into account the situations in which choreographers work: “against the clock and under the gaze of a score of people who stand there and look at you when you are stuck”, as Joan Acocella says. he expresses this in his 2001 review of Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins through Greg Lawrence. Robbins, who choreographed ballets such as The Cage and the Broadway hits Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story, “yelled at the dancers: they insulted their work, they insulted their bodies,” Acocella writes. Stephen Sondheim called him a sadist. But Robbins’ harassment wasn’t all that unusual. “Nijinsky made other people cry; Martha Graham slapped her dancers,” Acocella said. More recently, Peter Martins, who was artistic director of the New York City Ballet from 1990 to 2017, was disappointed during rehearsals; A former child dancer accused him of grabbing him by the neck and digging his nails into him.
On the wave of #MeToo, dancers began to take into account the custom of some of their idols. In early 2018, Peter Martins accused Peter Martins of sexual harassment and physical and verbal abuse; Later that year, NYCB sued through a former student, alleging that her boyfriend, a principal dancer nearly a decade her senior, had secretly filmed her having sex. In 2021, famed British choreographer Liam Scarlett committed suicide amid allegations of sexual misconduct. By contrast, the most lascivious moment in The Boy From Kyiv’s 496 pages comes when Ratmansky sends Wendy Whelan, a New York City Ballet star who is nearing retirement but for whom Ratmansky sought to create one last piece, a text punctuated with the center. emojis.
Despite relentless work and a travel schedule, Ratmansky maintained a remarkably solid private life. He has lived with his wife, Ukrainian dancer Tatiana Kilivniuk, since the age of twenty, and they have a son, Vasily, 25. exemplified through e-books such as Claire Dederer’s Bestselling Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, he occasionally wonders if it’s even imaginable to be an artist without abusing anyone, then Harss’s e-book suggests an encouraging answer.
Still, there’s one aspect of Ratguysky that’s out of step with the world around him. Harss glosses over some of Ratguysky’s mistakes and devotes only one page to an incendiary Facebook post that has garnered more attention than most of his ballets. In 2017, Ratguysky posted a retouched symbol of a ballerina lifting a boy above her head, accompanied by the caption: “Sorry, there is no equality in ballet. “The men pick them up and escort them off the stage, he said. The women dance on pointe and get flowers, “and that makes me feel very comfortable. “Harss admits that the comment was “tone-deaf,” but he excuses it: without much explanation, calling it “ironic. “Ratguysky faced the most commonly ignored reaction; Harss takes a similar approach and temporarily concentrates on his work.
But Ratmansky’s comment was not entirely isolated. Harss neglects to mention an interview she gave to The New York Times earlier in 2017, in which she was asked her opinion on the gender gap in choreography. That year, according to the Dance Data Project, more than 80% of ballets performed through U. S. primary corporations were directed by men. “I don’t see this as a problem,” Ratmansky said, before naming some successful women. Whatever Ratmansky’s true emotions about gender politics, there is something naïve about his public statements. In 2006, two years into his tenure as director of the Bolshoi, he told an interviewer that he would “be satisfied with firing” a third of the dancers who worked for him.
This naivety possibly stems from his lifelong immersion in the cloistered world of ballet. The dancers’ forgetfulness of the world around them (from the collapse of communism to the Chernobyl crisis and the spread of Covid-19) is a theme in The Boy. From Kiev. La Ratmansky’s time at the Bolshoi Academy coincided with the last gasps of the Soviet Union, but he and his classmates were so engrossed in their education that they barely learned. His days were carefully planned: from waking up at 8 a. m. to his ballet. elegance at 9:30 a. m. and its morning elegances, right down to its lunch (of compote and potatoes) and its interpretive elegances and pas de deux in the afternoon. “Outside of school, Russia is a deficient and chaotic country,” one of Ratmansky’s fellow elegants tells Harss. , “But on the inside, where we were, it was full of creativity. “
The life of the company is also very demanding. In 1986, Kilivniuk was dancing with the Kiev Ballet when a reactor exploded at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant, blanketing the territory with poisonous gases and sending radioactive clouds into Sweden. Kilivniuk only learned of the crisis from a friend. I like, what is Chernobyl?” he remembers asking, “What is a nuclear power plant?What is an atom? She and her colleagues were forced to keep performing, even as the audience dwindled; When he was allowed to return home, his clothes were radioactive and he was anemic.
In March 2020, Ratmansky was busy preparing for the premiere of Of Love and Rage in Costa Mesa, California; He paid little attention to reports that a deadly virus was circulating. Two years later, while running in the Bolshoi, he heard rumors of an impending invasion. “It occurred to me to leave to forget about the news, be professional and keep running. ” he said. Putin fired missiles at Ukraine the next day.
Even as a child, Ratmansky was shielded from the harshness of Soviet life. His parents protected him from his painful history, as well as from common tragedies. He was never told about his reports on World War II. When her great-aunt died just before her winter. On vacation, the circle of relatives hurriedly arranged the funeral before she returned home.
If women and good looks were Balanchine’s main themes, and English manners were Ashton’s, then ballet and ballet history are Ratmansky’s. “There is such a wealth of classical vocabulary that my entire life would not be enough to explore it alone,” he told the New York Times in 2017. When he had a rare free month in 2013, he took the opportunity to examine more than a hundred classical manuals. dance notation from years ago, seeking to decipher the enigmatic lines and dots that once represented ballet steps and musical notes. (Until the arrival of video cameras, choreographies were transmitted orally, from dancer to dancer). Every night, he and Kilivniuk tried to decode them together. “We would split up, figure out the steps on our own, and then compare,” Kilivniuk tells Harss. Finally, they managed to analyze the original scripts of classics such as Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Paquita, which had been distorted through a centuries-old game of telephone. Ratmansky devoted much of his power over the next few years to reviving them in the original taste: “component archaeology, component session,” as Harss put it. While Harss celebrates Ratmansky’s discoveries (a pas de deux in Swan Lake, for example, was once a pas de trois), it’s hard to believe that the mid-priced customer would get excited about it.
The humor of Ratmansky’s paintings (satires and parodies) is also based on the audience’s familiarity with the ballet canon. Jennifer Homans, who did not embrace Ratmansky with the same enthusiasm as Harss, wrote in The New Republic in 2011 that his paintings are “systematically disordered. “with influences, jokes and references to old ballets, to the point that his own voice sounds “lost”. The Bright Stream (which Homans, less inclined to his gory story, called a “surprising lapse of taste and judgment”) features a dancer performing a parody of the Romantic-era ballet La Sylphide. The joke is not only her dress (long, pointed tutu), but also the angle of her shoulders and the height of her arabesque. In The Carnival of the Animals (2003), the clumsy elephant dances through a ballerina who can’t straighten her legs; The Swan performs Anna Pavlova’s melodramatic 1925 solo, The Dying Swan.
Ballet is not the only influence of Ratmansky. Se was encouraged by fashionable art, Jewish folklore, and the museums of Copenhagen and Greece. But given his lighthearted tone, his “aversion to drama,” and his never-ending fascination with ballet itself, it’s hard not to think of his probably serene youth and idyllic memories of ballet school.
Danish publisher Tove Ditlevsen called the formative years “that library of the soul from which I will draw wisdom and delight for the rest of my life. “Of course, a few traumatic formative years are not a prerequisite for creating wonderful art. But it doesn’t help to think of Balanchine, abandoned at the Imperial Ballet School and nearly starving to death during the 1917 revolution. Or the effeminate Frederick Ashton, bullied at his British boarding school and abused by his homophobic father. In her memoir Push Comes to Shove, Twyla Tharp recalls. creating his first dance after watching his father cut off the head of a rattlesnake.
Before the war, Ratmansky doubted his identity, calling himself rarely Soviet, rarely Russian, rarely half-Jewish. In 2022, that replaced “Myself Ukrainian,” he told Harss. Ratmansky uses his social media to condemn Putin’s war and the Russian dancers and directors who support him. He asked the Bolshoi to prevent him from performing his ballets (this request was ignored) and performed Giselle for a group of Ukrainian refugees. His new Wartime Elegy celebrates Ukrainian folk heroes and recently launched a Telegram channel dedicated to the history of Ukrainian ballet. But when Ratmansky was asked, in the fall of 2022, whether the war had replaced him as an artist, he hesitated. I’ve definitely replaced him as a person,” she said. When asked what it meant to be a political artist, he said he didn’t know.
Do we want Ratmansky to justify himself? A central theme for him has always been the sacredness of art. Three years ago – before Covid, before the war – Ratmansky dropped his Voices at the New York City Ballet. Hailed as an artistic breakthrough, Voices is composed of six solos, each accompanied through a recorded speech by a female artist. At the end, punctuated by interviews with the painter Agnès Martin, 10 dancers enter and exit in horizontal lines, like a portrait of Martin brought to life in a colorful and exciting way. Martin’s cryptic statements sound like an exasperated manifesto. “Musicians compose music about music,” she says. “Painters can paint about paint, but my painting is about meaning. ” She looks tired. It turns out that she rejects any request for an artist statement, any expectation that an artist deserves to explain their work. “I like the horizontal line more than any other line,” she says in the documentary from which those quotes are taken. “We’ll have to not paint with our backs to the world. ” Something in her tone – or perhaps in her tendency to oscillate between meaninglessness (“I have absolutely abandoned the facts”) and profundity – makes you want to leave her alone and let her paint.
I watched Voices last year and thought of it as one of the most difficult ballets I’ve ever seen. Listening to Martin and looking at the dancers, I felt, for a moment, that I had understood something. What exactly do I do?not remember. But we’re not going to watch a Ratmansky ballet to get the message across. You’re just going to look.
Alice Robb stars in Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet.