I An old theory has it that the most important architects of classical ballet have all been émigrés. In the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, when ballet became primarily an art of the French courts and acquired some of its enduring characteristics, it was shaped by dancing-masters and composers from Italy. The most influential choreographer and theorist of the second half of the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-Georges Noverre, the foremost proponent of ballet as an art of dramatic expression, was French but had his greatest successes in Stuttgart and London. In Russia, in the late nineteenth century, Marius Petipa, whose choreography did much to bring ballet to a new peak, came from France. Much of the most vital work in twentieth-century ballet was achieved by Russians who came along in Petipa’s wake — Mikhail Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Leonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, George Balanchine — and came West with the art that they had learned in the fatherland. London’s Royal Ballet, which became the most internationally acclaimed of Western companies for decades after the Second World War, was the creation of Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton: de Valois was an Irishwoman who adopted a French name but always spoke of “the English style,” Ashton an Englishman who had been born in South America (where he first saw ballet and became a convert) and told generations of dancers, “Stop being so stiff and English.” Let’s not turn this migration theory into a formula, though. Several great choreographers have stayed in the land of their birth; many bad ones have swapped countries. Yet today Alexei Ratmansky — a choreographer who has held Ukrainian, Russian, and American passports — is a case study for any theory about classicism and migration. His life and career have been startlingly interlocked with major chapters of modern history. I mean history of several kinds: international politics, cultural revisionism, scholarly research, imaginative reconstruction, as well as the evolution of ballet itself. As the world has changed, so have his life, his choreography, his research into the past. As the history of dance has changed, so he has shown himself keen to add to it — opening new directions but also rediscovering or restoring what is in danger of being lost. Ratmansky’s name began to register on such dance cities as New York and London in 2005 and 2006, when he was artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. It was widely assumed then that he was Russian, but no. Born in 1968 in St Petersburg in the era of the Soviet Union, he is largely of Ukrainian family, with a Ukrainian passport; his parents and other relatives are in Ukraine now. His father is Jewish. (Dance-history nerds will enjoy being reminded that the first known dancing master of the Italian Renaissance was Jewish, Guglielmo Ebreo.) He, Ratmansky, trained in Moscow at the Bolshoi Ballet School; he began his professional career as a dancer with the Ukrainian National Ballet. In the era of glasnost and perestroika, he began to dance in both the Soviet Union and the West. As a professional dancer, he reached principal level with the Ukrainian National Ballet, with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and with the Royal Ballet of Denmark. He danced lead roles in the nineteenth-century classics (not last Albrecht, the conflicted hero of Giselle), and Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, and a wide selection of Balanchine ballets. His earliest creations as a choreographer, in the late 1990s, were for companies spaced between Moscow and Winnipeg. Soon he won commissions from Russia’s two most prestigious companies, the Kirov (or Mariinsky Ballet) of St Petersburg and the Bolshoi of Moscow. In 2003, when he made the two-act Shostakovich comedy The Bright Stream for the Bolshoi, it both helped to restore Shostakovich’s reputation as a ballet composer (displeasing Stalin and his lackeys, though already under repair in Russia in the 1980s) and catapulted Ratmansky to the forefront of the world’s ballet choreographers. More than that, The Bright Stream immediately made Ratmansky appear the most gifted Russian choreographer to have emerged since Balanchine (who left Russia in 1924). It helped to win him the artistic directorate of the Bolshoi Ballet; he was in his mid-thirties. It wasn’t without controversy: Shostakovich’s ballet depicted fun and games on a Soviet collective farm, and some New York observers voiced concern that Ratmansky was ignoring the awful realities of those Soviet rural institutions. Ratmansky is not one to make any verbal reply to his critics, but he probably knew more of the Soviet realities than his American detractors; their strictures may have prompted the darker edges shown by his subsequent Shostakovich creations. For many ballet people, no more prestigious job can be imagined than to run the Bolshoi. Ratmansky ran the old company as if opening windows everywhere, releasing energies, reviving various threads of Russian ballet tradition, introducing Western ballets by Balanchine, Twyla Tharp, and Christopher Wheeldon. The Bolshoi had been better known for making transcendent vitality from such choreographically thin warhorses and harmless trash as Don Quixote and Spartacus rather than as a home of important creativity — but, thanks to his energy and openness, it took its place at last on the map of the world’s major choreographic capitals. He himself also made time to choreograph a new ballet for New York City Ballet, Russian Seasons, in 2006, to new music by the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov: this was immediately greeted as another sign of the Ratmansky gift for important dance poetry. Yet in 2008, before his fortieth birthday, Ratmansky chose not to renew his contract with the Bolshoi. He did so without scandal. He, his wife Tatiana (also a former dancer and a close colleague to him in many of his productions), and their son moved to New York, but he maintained good relations with both the Maryinsky and Bolshoi companies, often returning to Russia to create new work and stage old ballets. Only gradually did it emerge that Ratmansky and his wife Tatiana had grown seriously critical of Putin’s Russia.
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