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.
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Denne historien er fra March 11, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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The Dark Time. - On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging. The point of contact between NATO and Russia's nuclear stronghold is the small town of Kirkenes. For years, Russia has treated the area as a laboratory, testing intelligence and influence operations before replicating them across Europe.
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.