Ballet Archaeology

On "The Boy from Kyiv" by Marina Harss

This article was originally published in the June 2024 print edition of The New Criterion.

Alexei Ratmansky had only just appeared on the New York dance scene in 2010 when the historian Jennifer Homans contended that ballet was a dying art form—with no one to take the mantle from the long-deceased icons George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor. In The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, the dance critic Marina Harss now makes a strong case that Ratmansky has breathed fresh life into ballet—by channeling forgotten voices of the past and infusing new accents into a familiar dance vocabulary.

In an incisive and swiftly flowing biography, Harss describes the varied influences that have shaped Ratmansky into one of the foremost classical-ballet choreographers working today. Born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union to Ukrainian parents, Ratmansky left home at age ten to join the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow. Harss stresses how, as a boy from the provinces, he was an outsider from the beginning. Training as a dancer in the vaunted catacombs of tradition that is the Bolshoi, Ratmansky felt something lacking in the school’s house style of overwrought emotion and pyrotechnic displays of virtuosity. He returned to Kyiv to dance but was ultimately inspired by the movement quality of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet to move west.

Harss paints a picture of how Ratmansky fused together ballet’s contrasting traditions. First, at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he explored the precise dancing and sensitive musicality of Balanchine. At the Royal Danish Ballet, he immersed himself in the Bournonville style, where fleet footwork contrasted with the Bolshoi’s preference for fireworks. As a budding choreographer, he never let his work fall into one category, and he never lost his fascination for Russian poetry, music, and history. When the Mariinsky Ballet commissioned him to choreograph a new Cinderella in 2002, Ratmansky mined the whimsy, brooding irony, and drama from Sergei Prokofiev’s famed score. In that work he embodied the Balanchine mantra “see the music, hear the dance.” A major choreographer was born.

While the Bolshoi never did hire Ratmansky as a dancer, it christened him artistic director in 2004, and there he worked to expand his repertoire with fresh ideas. Ratmansky sought to unearth forgotten ballets from Russia’s past and renewed a 1930s Soviet-era farcical ballet, The Bright Stream, with a frothy yet subversive score by Dmitri Shostakovich. According to Harss, without hiding the Soviet origins of this “tractor ballet,” Ratmansky elevated the irony and ambiguity within Shostakovich’s rich composition while grappling with the implications of whitewashing the history of forced collectivization, famine, and the deaths of millions of people. Yet 2003 was somewhat of a holiday from history in Russia: Harss notes that, over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ratmansky felt that forgotten Soviet works could be looked at anew. Curiously, The Bright Stream made a huge splash with American balletomanes when the Bolshoi performed it on tour in New York.

Harss also takes us through Ratmansky’s problems at the Bolshoi, which eventually led to his soft “defection” to the United States in 2008. Principal dancers and their ballet masters resisted Ratmansky’s efforts to pollute the Bolshoi repertoire with work by Western choreographers such as Balanchine and Leonide Massine. And, ever the outsider, Ratmansky lacked the stature—and the political skills—to surmount his opposition.

Ratmansky accepted a post with American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 2008 that allowed him to focus on creating ballets and afforded him the flexibility to freelance. Ratmansky drew on his Russian background in his more abstract Shostakovich Trilogy, a new version of Firebird, and in other works, often marrying his own cultural origins with the sophisticated dynamics of American ballet. But even as he left his mark on a generation of ABT dancers, the old guard proved less receptive to his fusion of styles and particular dance idiom, especially as he increasingly challenged the traditions of the classical repertoire.

Through the following decade Ratmansky dedicated himself to reconstructing Marius Petipa’s original choreography. Paquita, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, and Harlequinade had come to the West in their Soviet versions, with a more sanitized style and slower tempi to allow for bigger jumps and turns, and these are the versions Western audiences came to know. To discover Petipa’s original intentions, Ratmansky and his wife Tatiana taught themselves the now-defunct Stepanov notation—essentially the dance equivalent of an outmoded musical notation—and immersed themselves in the collection of archival notes and pictures at Harvard University, which had been made during Petipa’s lifetime. The practice was game-changing for an art form defined by its ephemeral nature and a reliance on oral tradition. Ratmansky’s antiquarian efforts have attracted attention from both ballet purists and avant-gardists. Harss posits that reconstructing ballets is more of an art than a science but asserts that the results of such reconstructions far outweigh the drawbacks. By demanding absolute fidelity to the style conveyed by the original notations, Ratmansky heightened the dynamics and added complexity to the footwork, while instructing dancers to soften and bend their lines and unlearn many of their rigid habits. Ballet connoisseurs and dancers alike were taken aback by the differences these reconstructions yielded; Harss argues that, just as he had done with The Bright Stream, Ratmansky had uncovered a “suppressed Russian past” and imbued familiar classics with new, expressive qualities.

Ratmansky’s flights to the past turned out to be more radical than expected, but for some critics Ratmansky is never radical enough. Some fault him for working within the traditions of idiom and trafficking in frivolity instead of “relevancy.” Harss responds that, for Ratmansky, “an understanding of ballet’s past could be freeing rather than constricting.” His artistry lies in infusing a familiar dance vocabulary with inventive accents, colors, and dynamics—gleaned from sensibilities he has explored throughout his career. For Ratmansky, Harss writes, “ballet does not compete with philosophy or literature or religion,” but, at its best, it does produce “a sense of wonder and delight, born of the relationship between movement, music, and the beauty the human body is capable of projecting.”

Harss might have done more to bring out parallels with Balanchine, who, like Ratmansky, saw the beauty of music and dance to be its own justification. Ratmansky makes even the most common of dances—such as the Nutcracker Grand pas de deux—into a poetic meditation on coming-of-age romance, prioritizing partnering that builds connection and literally rises and falls with the music in expressive and unexpected ways.

In contrast, stagers such as Phil Chan are attempting their own reconstructions of choreography to remove what some see as more culturally insensitive elements. This sanitization can take ballets out of their historical context; Ratmansky instead sets ballets as they were meant to be performed—not to keep them in the past, as his critics accuse, but to create a more vibrant, expressive classicism that brings out the voices of the past.

In late 2023, Ratmansky arrived at his original goal and joined New York City Ballet, where his work continues to evolve. Considering the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Russian influence on his life and work, and his Ukrainian family background, one would expect Ratmansky to feel torn. After recently returning back to the United States from an engagement at the Bolshoi, he requested that the Bolshoi no longer perform his work. In turn, the Bolshoi has now purged his name—but not his choreography—from its repertory. His work, previously defined by indulgence in humor and whimsy, has since taken on a more socially conscious tone. After Harss’s book came out, Ratmansky premiered the first ballet of his residency with New York City Ballet, Solitude, dedicated to the victims of the Russian invasion.

Harss has written an engaging and passionate biography of an artist always in flux, always curious, and always driven by the complexities in personality that come from being a perennial outsider. Most of all, she helps us realize how Ratmansky has worked to revive classical ballet and its storytelling possibilities by introducing a sensitivity to mime and musicality that had been lost after decades of Soviet-induced censure. Harss unfortunately stops short of exploring how Ratmansky’s own optimism about the capabilities of ballet indicates a possible way forward for the art form. It is not by reinventing dance technique or overlaying works with political relevance that Ratmansky is saving ballet from the fate Homans warned about in 2010, but rather through a historical awareness that aims to fulfill the promise of classical ballet.

Robert Steven Mack is a Southern California-based writer who recently graduated with a Master of Public Affairs from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and a BA in History from Indiana University Bloomington. A professional ballet dancer and alumnus of the Jacobs School of Music, he has also contributed to American Purpose, Arts Fuse and Law and Liberty.