Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, “Solitude,” which recently premièred at New York City Ballet, begins with a devastating image: a father holding his dead son’s hand. The dance is dedicated to “the children of Ukraine, victims of war,” and Ratmansky has said that this image comes from a photograph of a father in Kharkiv sitting on the ground at a bus stop with his child, killed in a Russian air strike. This is Ratmansky’s second dance alluding to the war, but there is nothing outwardly political about it. The dancing is abstract and classically based, with no narrative and few outward signs of violence and death. Ratmansky’s canvas is not war but the human mind, and what he has managed to stage, with fourteen dancers and one child, is the disorienting experience of grief.
The opening tableau, sculptural in composition, brings to mind the war-scarred art of Käthe Kollwitz. The man kneels silently in a corner of an empty stage, eyes blankly staring into semidarkness. The lifeless boy whose hand he holds lies on his back in a bright-blue T-shirt, his face turned away from us, toward the father. We see everything; they see nothing. No one moves. The figures are presented without anything that might suggest their whereabouts or their lives. We could be them, and the sight is etched into our minds before the music begins and the lights rise.
この記事は The New Yorker の March 11, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The New Yorker の March 11, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.