The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky's Life in Ballet
(By Marina Harss)
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| Author | Marina Harss |
Alexei Ratmansky is “the most sought-after man in ballet” (The New Yorker). At just thirty-five years of age, he was the youngest person to hold the position of artistic director at Moscow’s famed Bolshoi Ballet. He went on to be appointed the resident choreographer at the American Ballet Theatre in New York, a post he holds to this day. He has created magnificent new works for just about every major national ballet that can afford him, breathing fresh, exquisite new life into the allegedly moribund art of classical ballet.
In The Boy from Kyiv, the celebrated dance critic Marina Harss charts Ratmansky’s exceptional life: his modest upbringing in St. Petersburg and Kyiv, his early years training at the Bolshoi Academy and sneaking into the company’s performances at night, and his dance career spent in Ukraine, Canada, and Denmark. Through these wide-ranging experiences, he developed a singular creative style by fusing Russian and Western sensibilities, which put him on the path to becoming the most influential choreographer at work today. Ratmansky has created more than fifty original ballets for companies across the globe and is renowned above all for having revitalized the “story ballet,” eschewing the cool abstraction that dominated twentieth-century ballet in favor of narratively expansive, emotionally vibrant works. Of late, he has also found himself in an unexpected new role as perhaps the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin in the quintessentially Russian ballet world; Ratmansky has vowed to never work in Russia again so long as Putin remains in power and now leads a newly formed company of Ukrainian refugees in the Hague.
Harss has spent the better part of two decades following Ratmansky’s illustrious—and still ascending—career. In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this major artist, she delivers a riveting, deeply human account of the collisions of identities, cultures, and traditions that paved the way for Ratmansky’s miraculous ascent to the peaks of artistic excellence.”
