Alexei Ratmansky’s newest work for New York City Ballet – his second in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – is extraordinarily moving and also unsettling, partly because ballet today (unlike opera) seldom addresses current events. As far back as 1936, Martha Graham took on fascism, and today it’s not uncommon for contemporary dance works to be created around subjects like homelessness, border policing and refugee crises. But the language of ballet is more often used to create fresh takes on the classics and on balletic re-imaginings of novels and movies; maybe Ratmansky’s new work will move the needle, spurring other choreographers to illuminate modern conflicts. Not that every new ballet has to be about war, but fewer enchanted birds would likely go unnoticed.
Until the war, “I was thinking art is outside of politics, or could be,” Ratmansky said in an interview with the Guardian last August, “But the invasion opened my eyes.” A former artistic director of the Bolshoi, Ratmansky is St Petersburg-born and Kyiv-bred: with his parents and in-laws still in Ukraine, and his identity and artistic inspirations intertwined between the two countries, he has since taken an activist stance against Putin’s aggressions, using social media and his widely respected artistic platform to rally support for the resistance.
The inspiration for this new piece, titled Solitude, was identified in advance publicity as a news photograph of a man kneeling next to his 13-year-old son who had been killed during a Russian airstrike on Kharkiv. The father had remained holding the boy’s hand for hours.
When the curtain rises – and later when it falls – that image is reproduced by Joseph Gordon, kneeling beside young Theo Rochios (from the School of American Ballet.) Program notes tell us the piece is dedicated “to the children of Ukraine, victims of the war.” The ballet does not otherwise signpost Ukraine or Russia; unlike the score for Ratmansky’s 2022 Wartime Elegy, set on Pacific Northwest Ballet, the composer is Mahler, not Ukrainian, and the elegant muted costuming, beyond the occasional military drab green accent, doesn’t give it away.
It is in the accretion of details over the next 20 minutes that we come to understand what is taking place on stage and appreciate its power – making this a ballet that is ill-served by heavy preview publicity.
The opening funeral march from Mahler’s First Symphony contains multitudes, including an arrangement of the children’s nursery rhyme Frère Jacques in an elegiac minor key. This turns surreal when interwoven with the cheeky oompah of klezmer and sublime quotes from Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer.
For the first ten minutes or so, Gordon and Rochios remain motionless while a six-couple ensemble surges onstage. Each couple maintains a combative single-handed grip – pulling toward, then away from one another, the tension sometimes causing one partner to pitch forward dangerously, or launch into the air. It’s as if they're testing each other’s strength and nerve. Movements are abrupt, turns stop on a dime, legs and arms sharply angled, lyricism sabotaged. A line of women drop onto their sides one by one, as if felled by machine gun fire, their partners stricken in a side bend, one arm extended like the barrel of a rifle. A half-cartwheel catapults the women onto the men’s shoulders; with the women stretched out stiffly, the men appear to stalk an unseen enemy, deploying a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon.
The dance scrambles time, the way death can seem to. Rochios is helped to his feet by a vigilant, solemn Sara Mearns in a diaphanous black surcoat and a thrill-seeking, extension-whacking Mira Nadon in black velvet leotard and bare legs that go on forever. One of them I imagined to be an angel of death, the other an angel of vengeance. (The New York Times told us, in a lengthy preview, that Mearns plays “a kind of angel of mercy” – the kind of advance detail that can hijack audience perception.) In a subtle but heart-rending moment, Rochios wanders upstage to look through the amorphous pile of debris upstage in which – thanks to the too-dim lighting that practically necessitates night vision devices – one can barely make out an overturned shopping cart, suitcases, a duffel bag, and a broken umbrella.
KJ Takahashi, also in black velvet, may be a companion angel of death, his powerful leg muscles gleaming in the crepuscular gloom as he traces a path for Gordon’s solo. To the trancelike Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, Gordon dances his grief – surely one of the finest male solos in ballet, one that echoes the solo in Norman Walker’s 1973 Songs of a Wayfarer. The magnificent Gordon springs soundlessly into the air, blown in one direction then another, bewildered but not broken, searching for answers.
Solitude was wedged between Jerome Robbins’ Opus 19/ The Dreamer and Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements.
The Dreamer role was Baryshnikov’s in 1979, a mere five years after his defection, the vibe restless, inquisitive, lonely yet fiercely independent. The superb Taylor Stanley makes it his own.
Symphony in Three Movements was danced with somewhat less urgency than Stravinsky’s turbulent ‘war symphony’ demands. Into it the composer had poured impressions from documentaries of Japanese scorched earth tactics in World War II, goose-stepping German soldiers, and Allied advances on the German war machine. The speed-demon pony-tailed corps in their crisp diagonals and audacious whirling spirals make or break the piece but were not helped by the colourless performances of Ashley Laracey (filling in for Tiler Peck) and Erica Pereira in two of the lead roles. The pas de deux between Laracey and Adrian Danchig-Waring lost much of its weird, hypnotic charm notwithstanding his compelling dramatic presence. It was left to Isabella LaFreniere, firing on all cylinders, to galvanise the proceedings. Everyone brought their A-game to the white-hot finale, staring down the audience while erecting a barricade of arms and legs.
