MOBILIZED

Alexei Ratmansky responds to the war in Ukraine.

- JENNIFER HOMANS

According to a running tally compiled by UNESCO, the war in Ukraine had, by early this month, damaged thirty-seven historic buildings, thirteen museums, eighty-six religious sites, eighteen monuments, ten libraries, and thirty-seven other cultural buildings. What about dances? This is harder to calculate, because dance is essentially stored in bodies. When Oleksandr Shapoval, a longtime dancer for the National Opera of Ukraine, died in combat, in September, the Russians killed both the man and the dances he contained. I couldn't help thinking that Alexei Ratmansky had something like this in mind when he made "Wartime Elegy,” which recently had its premiére at Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle. It is the first dance he has made since the Russian invasion, and he has dedicated it to the people of Ukraine. During the opening-night bows, Ratmansky unfurled a Ukrainian flag and held it high over his head.

Ratmansky is both Russian and Ukrainian. Born in Leningrad, in 1968, to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Russian mother, he grew up in Kyiv, where much of his family still lives. He moved to Moscow to train at the Bolshoi, but he returned after graduating, in 1986, and began dancing with the Kyiv Ballet, where he met his wife, a Ukrainian dancer named Tatiana Kilivniuk. After the Soviet Union imploded, Ratmansky came to the West: he danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet, and since 2009 he has been the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre. But, in the past two decades, he has had a parallel career in Russia, including a stint, from 2004 to 2008, directing the Bolshoi Ballet. In a way that would have been unthinkable for artists a generation older, he did not have to choose between Russia and the West.