Limitless Space, Endless Motion

Ballet dancers, for their whole careers, train exhaustively under the scrutiny of teachers and coaches. Yet choreographers are left to teach themselves. It’s extraordinary when you think about it. Nothing like the structured, formal, centuries-old process for developing dancers exists for the creators of ballet’s lifeblood, the new work upon which this painstaking art depends.

Dancers who want to try making a ballet cobble together their own systems of learning. They’re typically able to watch established choreographers at work in the studio by being cast in their new dances; they absorb lessons in composition from the rehearsal process and can find experts to give them feedback on their beginning efforts. It’s a sporadic, informal process of trial and error, relying largely on contact with working choreographers.

None of this was possible for Alexei Ratmansky, who rose to prominence in the early 2000s and is perhaps the most important creator of ballets to emerge in the twenty-first century. Born in 1968 in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then known) to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, Ratmansky spent his childhood in Kyiv but left at the age of ten for Moscow to study dance at the Bolshoi Ballet’s school, where he remained for eight years, well into the 1980s. These were the waning years of the Soviet era, and his school was cut off from Western contact. The Bolshoi’s curriculum, which included character dance (folk dances such as the mazurka and czardas) and acting, as well as classical ballet, steered clear of Western influences, with little mention of even as monumental a figure as George Balanchine, the St. Petersburg–born choreographer of Georgian descent who cofounded New York City Ballet.

Balanchine transformed ballet in the twentieth century with a modern, streamlined aesthetic, but it was late in Ratmansky’s training before he even glimpsed a Balanchine work. And though Ratmansky danced professionally for many years—as a member of the National Ballet of Ukraine in Kyiv in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet in the 1990s and the Royal Danish Ballet in the late 1990s and early 2000s—he had few chances to learn directly, in person, from contemporary choreographers. Yet as Marina Harss describes in The Boy from Kyiv, her elegant, perceptive biography of Ratmansky, his two-act comedy The Bright Stream (2003)—created for the Bolshoi and based on an ill-fated ballet of the same name from 1935—blew up decades of low expectations for story ballets and brought him instant fame.

Ratmansky’s hallmark as a choreographer has been to make something alive out of academic steps and old-fashioned structures—story ballets, divertissements—by blending them with a distinctive, more naturalistic mode of expression. The Bright Stream is a prime example: the earlier ballet, about a Soviet collective farm, had offended Stalin so much he destroyed it. It was apparently not serious enough: an editorial in Pravda condemned its depiction of farmers as “sugary paysans from off a pre-revolutionary chocolate box.” Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote the music, never composed another ballet. The librettist, Adrian Piotrovsky, was executed in 1937, and the choreographer and co-librettist, Fyodor Lopukhov, lost his appointment as director of the Bolshoi and his career subsequently dwindled.

The ballet disappeared—until Ratmansky chanced upon a recording of the music. Guided by it, and by the libretto, he created new choreography that evoked a world of sunshine and joy, in which a pair of eccentric ballet dancers visit a farm commune and throw everything into chaos. There are huge tottering vegetables and a tractor driver in a dog suit zipping around on a bicycle. The male ballet dancer disguises himself as a sylph in a white gown and pointe shoes; the ballerina pulls on trousers, and they both romp around in drag, on and off the bike, dodging a milkmaid skipping about with her pails. In one of several tender vignettes, a farmer loses his heart to the ballerina and confesses to her in an unspoken dance conversation, which unspools like a scene from a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. The smitten fellow pleads and cajoles; the ballerina resists, then gives in; they spin rapturously together as if through limitless space.

But this is a story of Soviet times, retold by a philosophical artist who witnessed the last years of the USSR. Things start to feel screwy toward the end of the ballet, and not only because the Grim Reaper, bearing his scythe, makes a cameo appearance, almost lost in the crowd. The farm folks’ airy lightness subtly hardens; bouncing en masse, almost mechanically, they call to mind firing pistons. A cityscape rises in the background, sharp-lined and industrial. In the work’s closing moments, Shostakovich’s cheerful music pitches toward shrillness, the dancers’ smiles look mildly strained and overeager, and the whole scene feels ironic, even slightly tragic.

When I first saw The Bright Stream in 2011, performed by American Ballet Theatre (ABT) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the delicacy of Ratmansky’s ending reminded me of the modern dance choreographer Paul Taylor, whose pair of works about war—Sunset (1983), on soldiers and their lovers and losses, and the deceptively upbeat Company B (1991), on war’s consequences back home—similarly showed lives changing before one’s eyes. Like Taylor, Ratmansky has a biting sense of humor. But it’s his finesse with the inner lives of everyday people, and the shifts from buoyant highs to inklings of darkness, that make his stories unforgettable.

One reason The Bright Stream caused such a stir was that hardly anyone was telling new stories in ballet anymore. In American ballet in particular, contemporary tastes have long favored short abstract works. Balanchine led an evolution toward plotless works that showcased the speed, athleticism, and litheness of the body—the better to show off the choreography. Later, artists such as the American-born William Forsythe, director of Ballet Frankfurt, pushed the exhilaration of pure movement even further, emphasizing extremes of line and flexibility. The ballet body became an apparatus of abstract art. Nevertheless, full-length romances such as Swan Lake, Giselle, and Romeo and Juliet remained widely popular. But where were the fresh stories?

Ratmansky supplied them generously in reimagined classics (a brutal, angular version of Cinderella, set in a tenement) and witty, original fantasies (Whipped Cream, a children’s tale of overindulgence). But his narrative talent wasn’t the only reason he stood out. He arrived in the US at a time when ballet in general had grown dull, starved of courage and invention. The twentieth century’s master creators were long gone—Balanchine, Frederick Ashton at England’s Royal Ballet, Antony Tudor in England and at American Ballet Theatre. And AIDS had ravaged a generation of dance artists. It killed established ballet choreographers (Ulysses Dove, Clark Tippet) along with who knows how many talents that had not yet emerged, and the breadth of these losses had been setting ballet’s progress back for decades.

In the early 2000s the British-born Christopher Wheeldon seemed to be the lone bright light in ballet; he was New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer at the time, and his style was lush and distinctively lyrical. Then Ratmansky’s works swept into view, at once cockeyed and sophisticated. They connected a present-day energy with ballet’s classical past, including graceful elements that had disappeared along the way to modernization. He restored, for example, the warmth and charm of épaulement, the term for a dancer’s fluid, musical use of her shoulders and upper body, and softness in the arms.

As the Bolshoi toured Europe and the United States, Ratmansky’s stature as ballet’s new flamethrower grew. In 2005, when the Bolshoi presented The Bright Stream in New York, Harss, a dance writer and critic, was among the enraptured audience members wondering who this young Russian dance dramatist was. Her book, resulting from this question, is a vibrant chronicle of Ratmansky’s origins and growth as an artist.

Ratmansky inherited an agile body from his father, a former gymnast, and music fueled his desire to move. He made up dances before he ever took a dance class, casting the children in his Kyiv neighborhood in the performances. His parents, seeing ballet as a serious profession with job security, sought the best possible training for him. That meant the Bolshoi school, formally known as the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, thirteen hours away from home by train.

During his school years ballet and academics consumed him. He spent extra hours in the school library reading novels and plays; he tracked down a newly published encyclopedia of ballet and studied it obsessively. Still, Ratmansky was not an ideal student according to the school’s standards, and he had to develop a granite work ethic to fit in. He was not particularly lithe, so he transformed his body with lengthening exercises. He had trouble picking up steps, so he scribbled down combinations after class and forced himself to memorize them. By the time he was fifteen, new steps were forming themselves in his mind, “like having a little TV in my head.”

On the weekends Ratmansky devoured more art with his mother’s best friend, a translator who lived nearby. She taught him English and took him to museums and plays. Moscow’s experimental, antirealist productions, including works by Brecht and a subtly transgressive version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, fascinated him. “Everything that was forbidden, everything that I felt was not official, was really interesting to me,” he tells Harss.

By contrast, the Bolshoi’s professional ballet company came up short. At that time grandiose melodrama dominated the company’s repertoire: Spartacus, Ivan the Terrible, and other ballets choreographed by the Bolshoi’s revered longtime director, Yuri Grigorovich. His works overflowed with showy virtuosity and over-the-top acting—everything Ratmansky, with his taste for the new, disliked.

One day, after classes had ended for the summer, a teacher discreetly showed him and a few other students a tape of Balanchine’s Apollo, which Ratmansky watched in disbelief. Here was elegance without exaggeration, tension and beauty without stagy excess. European dance companies on tour in Moscow also astonished him: in the humor of the Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián, Ratmansky saw for the first time ballets that poked fun at the world.

The Bolshoi Ballet didn’t hire Ratmansky when he graduated in 1986, and as a Ukrainian he was allowed to stay in Moscow only while in school. He was “the boy from Kyiv,” as the school labeled him, forever an outsider, and he was forced to go home. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl had just happened, eighty miles from Kyiv, and people were fleeing as he arrived. He joined the National Ballet of Ukraine there, and met and eventually married a Ukrainian-born fellow dancer, Tatiana Kilivniuk, who became his chief muse.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 its dancers were free to find jobs elsewhere. Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet was looking for strong male dancers and in 1992 snapped up the twenty-four-year-old Ratmansky, who’d impressed the director with his openness to corrections. Indeed, Ratmansky was a sponge, curious and eager, able to absorb new ways of moving and adapt his body as needed—the skill that had saved him at the Bolshoi school. He caught up on styles he’d never studied in Moscow and performed in ballets by the twentieth century’s greats, among them Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Twyla Tharp, learning their works from other dancers.

At the same time, he created his own ballets every chance he could get. His output barely paused for his 1994 wedding in Kyiv. He and Tatiana took a quick photo in their finery at the Kyiv Opera House, dashed to a studio for rehearsals, and headed to a competition the next day. Even as he pondered choreographing full-time, Ratmansky joined the Royal Danish Ballet in 1997 and moved with Tatiana to Copenhagen. Their son was born there, and Ratmansky soaked up the Danish company’s renowned emphasis on natural acting and storytelling.

One of the few prominent choreographers he worked with directly was Mats Ek, the Swedish modernist, who came to Copenhagen and cast Ratmansky in one of his works. Ratmansky seized the chance to get Ek’s opinion on his own ballets and showed him a video. “There are too many pirouettes,” Ek told him, “and pirouettes mean nothing.” But while Ek’s forte was storytelling, Ratmansky wasn’t always thinking about that. Classical steps might not move the plot along, but neither are they just for show, he felt. They can express the dynamics of the music, underscoring rhythm, tension, and release, aspects of pure design.

Around the time he arrived in Denmark, Ratmansky caught a crucial break from one of the great ballerinas of the age: Nina Ananiashvili, a native of Georgia and a star with both the Bolshoi and ABT. The desire for new ballets had begun to course through the countries of the former Soviet Union, and Ratmansky took advantage. Ananiashvili happened to see one of his works at a Moscow showcase and rushed backstage to ask him for a ballet; she needed one for the troupe of friends she organized in the off-season for a tour across Europe. Ratmansky’s thirty-minute piece for her group premiered in 1997; titled Charms of Mannerism, it unleashed the dancers’ personalities, presenting them as free spirits and best pals. The atmosphere was playful and easygoing, accompanied by Richard Strauss’s orchestration of bubbly keyboard compositions by François Couperin. Ananiashvili continued to commission works from Ratmansky and take them around the world, where they found a wide audience. He picked up more commissions and, in the six years between Charms of Mannerism and The Bright Stream, created fifteen ballets.

The Bright Stream marked a turning point. In 2004 Ratmansky quit dancing and accepted the directorship of the Bolshoi. In 2009 he moved to New York as American Ballet Theatre’s artist in residence. Over the next thirteen years he created an imaginative new Nutcracker for the company and nearly twenty other ballets, yet he was also free to work elsewhere. In 2023 he moved into a similar position at New York City Ballet; he was also recently appointed an associate artist at the Dutch National Ballet.

Many dancers praise Ratmansky for giving them their best roles, drawing new qualities out of them, coaxing them into devilishly tricky sequences, and watching patiently as they struggle and then succeed. One of these is Misty Copeland. When Ratmansky staged The Bright Stream for ABT in 2011, he cast her as the milkmaid in some performances; I happened to see her in the role, and she was radiant.

A year later he gave Copeland the title role in his new production of the 1910 Stravinsky ballet Firebird. (She led one of three casts.) This was a couple of years before her best-selling books and her promotion to principal dancer, which made her the first Black woman to reach the top rank at ABT. Ratmansky knew an untapped resource when he saw one, and Copeland’s performance was widely praised. Originating the leading role in Ratmansky’s ballet was of such consequence that Copeland later opened her 2014 memoir, Life in Motion, with that story. She described rehearsing with Ratmansky just hours before her premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House:

Alexei, ever the visionary and perfectionist, is changing the choreography up until the last minute. He tweaks a leap here, a twist there. We go through all my solos to ensure that the counts are exactly right…. Alexei changes my entrance to the stage several times before we finally agree on the steps that best suit me.

Harss skims over this story, though Copeland’s experience bolsters the theme running through her book that Ratmansky has taken a fresh approach to many aspects of ballet, and especially its roles for women. The ballerinas in his works are not glamorous, erotic objects to be adored, idolized, and put on display, as in so many ballets. They’re independent and equal to the men, free to act silly or capricious and to astonish us with their strength, personalities, and inner fire.

Ratmansky created a spectacular solo for one of New York City Ballet’s principal dancers, Sara Mearns, in Namouna, a Grand Divertissement, a wild, very funny fantasy from 2010, which Mearns describes in a video on the ballet company’s website as “probably the hardest two minutes I have ever performed onstage.” The difficulty comes from the rapidly shifting full-body dynamics; the dance is a complex series of whirling spins, hops, and leaps, and it changes directions all the time.

“It was terrifying,” she says in the video. “But Alexei gives you this confidence that you can do anything. And he choreographed this insane solo on me, so I really felt like I could do anything.” Previously, she’d never thought her jumps were special; he filled the solo with jumps, confronting her with her own talent.

Yet Ratmansky’s ascent as a choreographer has not been without friction. Among the fascinating threads in Harss’s book is how often he has been at sea in the ballet world. His quiet nature has at times made him an awkward boss, especially when he headed the Bolshoi. He didn’t always win respect, even as he transformed the company with an updated, original repertoire and taught a new generation of artists to adapt to different styles, as he himself had done. He also sought to feature younger dancers, going against the company’s long-standing pecking order. A few dancers pulled out of the original production of The Bright Stream, fearing a “fiasco,” Harss writes, though it’s not clear what they disliked. Was it the oddball characters, the cross-dressing, the wacky humor?

Ratmansky, who is now fifty-six, has seen plenty of dancers balk at his works, rejecting his approach as not classical enough or so classical as to be old-fashioned. Wendy Whelan, New York City Ballet’s associate artistic director, remembers when he arrived in 2006 to create his first dance for the company. A principal ballerina at the time, she was initially distrustful. “He was a Russian choreographer,” she tells Harss, “and I thought, They’re all really tacky and none of them are famous.”

At that point Ratmansky was feeling isolated at the Bolshoi. He titled his City Ballet piece Russian Seasons, and he told The New York Times—signaling, perhaps, the rift that would only deepen—that the ballet hinged on “a question of whether I’m Russian at all.” Whelan, who starred in that ballet, eventually warmed up to Ratmansky, crediting him with eliciting expressive abilities she didn’t know she had. She was customarily a cool, ethereal performer, but Ratmansky required her to act, to embody what it felt like to be Russian: to live with zest amid turmoil and trauma.

ABT dancers have also periodically shuddered. In 2015 one of the company’s leading ballerinas, Paloma Herrera, refused to close out her career in Ratmansky’s lavish new production of The Sleeping Beauty, created for the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary season. “It’s a whole different look,” Herrera told me when I interviewed her for The Washington Post shortly before her retirement. “And I felt even more that it’s not how I should be represented in my last performance.”

To be sure, Ratmansky didn’t center his Sleeping Beauty on impressive displays of classical technique, as many traditional productions do. Instead his fascination with ballet history—a continuous font of ideas since his early days—led him to the archives. He pored over notations of nineteenth-century productions and the Ballets Russes’ 1921 version. Beguiled by the details and finesse of these distant iterations, he developed a performance style of intricate footwork and flowing phrases.

Princess Aurora customarily wears a short, leg-baring tutu and flaunts high extensions and crisp positions—and classically trained ballerinas understandably covet the role for this reason. But Ratmansky’s Aurora wears tiered, knee-length gowns and a formal white wig, and she holds her legs low. The technique is understated, with a soft, rounded quality. Herrera performed the leading role in Sleeping Beauty’s initial performances. But she withdrew from an evening performance that she had been scheduled to give as her farewell appearance with ABT. She ended her career with a matinee performance of Giselle instead.

At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ratmansky was in Moscow, creating a new ballet for the Bolshoi. With his and his wife’s families still in Ukraine, in the path of Russia’s advance, he left Moscow at once, telling The New York Times that he doubted he would return “if Putin is still president.” He also told both the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg to suspend performances of his ballets. Instead both companies simply removed his name from them while continuing to perform them and list them in their repertoires—celebrated works such as Anna Karenina and The Little Humpbacked Horse, based on a Russian folktale.

At home in New York, he felt cut off from the Russian themes and history of some of his earlier creations, including the one that first made him famous, The Bright Stream. Irony and artistic curiosity about the Soviet past held no value for him now. “I consider myself Ukrainian,” he tells Harss. “This war has given me a sense of belonging, and it’s something very new to me. I feel it is my duty to support Ukrainian culture.”

Ratmansky’s life changed radically just as Harss completed her book. Since 2022 his focus has been on Ukraine and speaking out against the war on social media; the ballets he’s created around the US and in Europe channel his activism. In the summer of 2022 he unveiled a new version of Giselle for exiled dancers from the national theaters of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, and elsewhere in Ukraine who had made their way to The Hague.

The dancers toured his production in Europe and, in February 2023, brought it to the Kennedy Center for its only American performances. I was fortunate enough to see it, and it was one of the most meaningful artistic experiences I’ve had. Its all-inclusive ensemble looked and felt like a real community. Then there was the heightened relevance of the ballet’s story, which deals with betrayal of the innocent, a callous ruling class, and the supernatural ability of one victim to pour out love from her fatally broken heart. I’ve seen this repertory staple more times than I can count, but Ratmansky’s production moved me to tears. Yet its lack of sentimentality left the audience alone to sort out its feelings. This—Ratmansky’s familiar light touch—was the masterstroke.

Of course, Ratmansky is far from the first artist out of Russia or the former Soviet Union to be sickened by the country’s brutality. His self-exile from Russia and his erasure by the ballet establishment there have mirrored the fates of forebears who defected long ago, including Balanchine as well as the dancers Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. More recently the Bolshoi ballerina Olga Smirnova publicly assailed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and left for the Dutch National Ballet.

Ratmansky’s story makes me wonder if the Russian artist, or one who thought of himself as Russian, is fated to bear an aura of tragedy—and to struggle for artistic and personal integrity, much as Russian politics seem fated to interfere. One of Ratmansky’s most recent works—his first as New York City Ballet’s artist in residence—directly addresses this moral agony and more than hints at the spiritual cost of reassembling his sense of himself in the face of Putin’s war.

Solitude premiered in February 2024. Ratmansky dedicated it to “the children of Ukraine, victims of the war.” It memorializes one of them, a thirteen-year-old killed by a Russian air strike at a bus stop in Kharkiv. Dancers recreate a photograph of the dead boy and his father, kneeling beside him and clutching his hand. In the course of the ballet, as Gustav Mahler’s music weeps and whispers, Ratmansky expands upon that image in ways that suggest his own experience as the father of a son, as a Ukrainian, and as a scarred but innately driven artist. At one point, the character of the father, isolated in his anguish, spins one way and then another, unbalanced, almost falling. He stays upright only through restless, unending motion.