For decades, Russians have known about exercise. When bad news looms, such as the death of a leader, or a convulsive event, such as the Chernothroughl disaster, state television adjusts its programming and begins broadcasting Tchaikovsky’s ballet, “Swan Lake. “There is nothing to see here, folks. But also consider the selection of distraction. Ballet is at the heart of Russian society. . . and the Russian image. Dancers breaking through the air and defying the legislation of physics and gravity constitute civility and grace. But after Feb. 24, when Russian army troops invaded Ukraine, Russian ballet companies canceled their western tours and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater closed performances because administrators criticized Putin’s war. As we first reported earlier this year, this brutal war is taking up positions on the most sensitive fronts, leaving ballet in exile.
When ballet dancers are described as God’s athletes, well, you may just be offering Olga.
Smirnova as proof of support. She walks in the air, getting into small cat paws. She is a Russian star dancer, one of the greatest dancers in the world. But a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Smirnova did a pirouette and descended from his level in the famous Bolshoi. Theatre, with dramatic brilliance. He took to social media to make his outrage explicit. And then he fled the country, defecting the edition of Nureyev or Baryshnikov.
Jon Wertheim: When you sat down to write this message on social media, what did you communicate?What did you mean?
Olga Smirnova: I just couldn’t stay inside. I am so ashamed of Russia. That’s the truth. I am not ashamed of being Russian, but I am ashamed because Russia has introduced this action.
Jon Wertheim: I need to read what you wrote. You said that you opposed this war with each and every fiber of your being. “But now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after. “
Olga Smirnova: That’s how I felt. February 24 is, that the line, because everything has changed. Everything has changed. The reputation of Russia and the Russian people, even if you are not a soldier, you are only Russian. That’s it, it still overshadows you.
Jon Wertheim: Being Russian.
Olga Smirnova: Being Russian. And it is, it’s painful.
Unsurprisingly, Smirnova’s message went viral. She was, after all, a star of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. From the Russian word for “great,” Bolshoi is the world’s largest ballet corporation and the most prestigious. The theater is physically close to the Kremlin, a few steps away, and also inextricably aligned with the Russian government. For decades, communist leaders used the Bolshoi Theatre for political staging, holding rallies, and national speeches there.
Alexei Ratmansky: This is anything that celebrates Russia. All vital guests who visited the Soviet Union would be invited to the Bolshoi, to see the show. And it is a pride of Russia at all times.
Alexei Ratmansky trained at the Bolshoi School and for a time was its artistic director. He was born in Russia, but grew up in Kyiv, where his parents still live. At the time of the invasion, I was in Russia choreographing two ballets. He left the country. Immediately, no less than to continue running in a world so tied to the Putin regime.
Alexei Ratmansky: While driving by taxi to the airport, I felt two sand castles collapse on my back.
Jon Wertheim: Those sandcastles the task – the task you had done
Alexei Ratmansky: Yes, yes, yes. It’s agony. It’s a very complicated day.
And, of course, a catastrophic day for Ukraine. Indiscriminate bombing and missile movements are raining down on the country, shattering lives and dreams. . . including those of an emerging dancer from Kyiv, 17-year-old Polina Chepyk.
Jon Wertheim: You’ve been looking to be a dancer for years and years. What was it like when suddenly you couldn’t go to school anymore, you couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t dance anymore?
Polina Chepyk: I was surprised. And I say, “Oh my God. “And first about what I think I left my nails in college. It’s my Christmas tree. . .
Jon Wertheim: Was that your first thought?
Polina Chepyk: Yes.
Jon Wertheim: You left your nails at school.
Polina Chepyk: Yes. I actually left.
The war did not stop him from following in his footsteps. He danced again at home, all he could do like a bar. well-connected figure in the ballet community: Larissa Saveliev, founded in New Jersey.
Jon Wertheim: You’re getting an avalanche of emails from. . . of and dancers. What. . . what. . . What do they ask of you?
Larissa Saveliev: Oh, “please get us out of here. ” They are willing to give up everything else, but they have to dance. And the parents were, you know, “No matter what we do, they have to dance. “
Jon Wertheim: It’s almost his – his lifeline.
Larissa Saveliev: That’s it. They simply. . . they. . . they couldn’t believe they weren’t dancing.
In the 1990s, he founded Youth America Grand Prix, a ballet festival and scholarship program, which associates budding dancers with ballet from around the world.
Now, in a humanitarian crisis, she and the foreign ballet network have rushed to take action. Saveliev has operated its vast network, relocating more than a hundred young Ukrainian dancers into new and host families.
Larissa Saveliev: We give the child a number, just to pass faster. And we say: “Okay, the number 55 is, like, just one position in Stuttgart, it’s okay. Okay, number 54, just one position in Dresden. “
Jon Wertheim: Remove it from the list.
Larissa Saveliev: “Remove it from the list”
When a space opened for Polina, she filled a suitcase with leotards and tutus with a bottle of her mother’s perfume, a reminder of her home. And then he went to the Kyiv train station.
Polina Chepyk: And my parents are in the window of the train. They said, “Goodbye. Everything will be fine. “And I was crying. And we were all crying. I thought I might want to take my suitcase and move back to my circle of relatives because my center was broken.
Jon Wertheim: How did you succeed on that? What made you not get off that train?
Polina Chepyk: Because it’s an open door for me. Is. . . a door to my dream.
Seventeen years old, Polina has documented the lonely odyssey on TikTok. Trains and buses. Five days and 1,200 miles. Kyiv in Lviv, Poland in Berlin. Finally, in Amsterdam where he landed at the Dutch National Ballet Academy, one of the schools in the world.
Jon Wertheim: When you came to the new school and danced again, how did you feel?
Polina Chepyk: Oh, I’m very happy. Yes. I have. . . my mind. . . has been replaced. Because I think all the time about my parents, my family, my sister. And when I move on to ballet class, the. . . this global has replaced me. I have some other global. . . a global ballet.
Her adaptation became less difficult when she discovered other Ukrainian dance scholars who, thanks to Larissa Saveliev, also found a safe haven in Amsterdam. Polina immediately fell into a regimen. At the dawn of a professional career, she prepares for final exams. She used to be nervous. She left relieved, triumphant, and eager to let Mom know about her.
Jon Wertheim: What did you do to him?
Polina Chepyk: That, I was nervous, but when I started, you, I do everything right.
While the war has turned some Ukrainian dancers into refugees, others have become soldiers. When war broke out, Oleksii Potiomkin, principal dancer of the National Ballet of Ukraine, put on the tights for the army uniform. Here he is in the center of Lviv, behind his medical department.
Jon Wertheim: What was your life like before the war?
Oleksii Potiomkin: Before the war, I have to, I’m preparing, a new premiere in ballet, Ukrainian ballet. You know, like genuine general life. And just for a moment, it changes. But I have to do something. I can’t stay home in a shelter and watch TV, how my friends die and everyone does something.
Jon Wertheim: What have you noticed in months?
Oleksii Potiomkin: Every day is scary. They crushed everything. They destroyed — homes — of civilians. They are brothers–sons–parents, sisters.
If he says that he is shocked by what he has seen scattered on the battlefield, he is also dismayed by a war position on the Bolshoi front.
Oleksii Potiomkin: Like the Bolshoi now, it’s poisonous theater. No one needs to paint with you.
Jon Wertheim: Are you toxic?
Oleksii Potiomkin: Toxic, yes. In Russia, art is political. Is. . . the Russian government is. . . is. . . ballet. . . it’s like a weapon.
The weapon was deployed at the Bolshoi last April when the theatre relaunched a production of Spartacus amid the Russian army’s invasion, which baffled many actors from the dance world, and added veteran Dutch National Ballet director Ted Brandsen.
Ted Brandsen: Well, that was very transparent that “we want to help our guys who are in an army operation to save Ukraine from the fascists. “Which is a completely ridiculous concept, of course.
Jon Wertheim: This allegory, Spartacus, about the slave is a kind of co-optation of. . .
Ted Brandsen: Yes.
Jon Wertheim: The competitive superpower?
Ted Brandsen: Absolutely. Now, it’s not. . . It’s not. . . it is not for nothing that one of the emblematic ballets of the Emp. . . of the Soviet era. . .
Abroad, the ballet network held concerts to raise funds for Ukraine, while prominent Russian companies, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg, had their tour dates cancelled.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain. . . the artists will have to decide on one side. Alexei Ratmansky left Moscow for the American Ballet Theatre in New York, where he is an artist-in-residence, and where we spoke to him remotely last April.
Jon Wertheim: It looks like you. . . he’s not content with this concept that, listen, Americans don’t take on the duty to. . . Acts of state? This ar– artists should only be artists.
Alexei Ratmansky: No, I don’t think artists are separate from politics. And besides, it’s not, for me it’s not politics. It’s about humanity. It’s about responding to war crimes, responding to the crimes of your government, of your president. He simply clarified which things are vital and which are not. And you make a decision. You where you need to belong.
For Olga Smirnova, this selection became a reality a few days after she condemned the war. He left Russia and landed standing at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, just around the corner from polina’s school.
Jon Wertheim: It must have been incredibly difficult to leave the Bolshoi.
Olga Smirnova: If you choose, you have consequences. But that’s how it works. I had to leave everything. Like my home, my theater, my repertoire, my partners, my parents, my sister, my brother, everything. But I don’t regret it.
Jon Wertheim: I don’t regret it.
Olga Smirnova: No. Because at least I can be fair to myself.
Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Broadcast Associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Matthieu Lev.