Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and New York City Ballet dancers after the world premiere of his piece Solitude, February 2024. Photo: Courtesy Nina Westervelt/NYC Ballet.As told to Marina Harss /
December 13, 2024
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has been on the move practically since birth. Born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, he was raised in Kyiv during the latter days of the Soviet Union. At 10 he left home to study ballet in Moscow. So began a peripatetic life that took him back to Ukraine, then to Canada, Denmark, and again to Russia, where he became the director of the Bolshoi Ballet from 2004 to 2008. Meanwhile, he burnished a reputation for creating works that were both innovative and deeply human — and often very funny.
Finally, in 2009, Ratmansky was lured to New York City by an offer to become artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre. The city has been his home base ever since. “Before now, I had this pattern of moving every seven to 10 years. But since coming to New York, the pattern has been broken. Maybe I’ve found the right place,” he says.
Ratmansky spent 13 years at ABT, where he created nearly 20 ballets while also working with myriad other companies, including New York City Ballet, the Paris Opéra, La Scala, the Australian Ballet, and the Dutch National Ballet. He has choreographed everything from virtuosic showpieces (Concerto DSCH) to philosophical meditations (Serenade After Plato’s Symposium) and large-scale ballets (Shostakovich Trilogy; Whipped Cream), embracing comedy, abstraction, drama, lyricism, bravura, and poetry. His range is as impressive as his ability to bring out extraordinarily layered performances from the dancers he works with.
In 2023 Ratmansky became an artist-in-residence at New York City Ballet, but he is seldom in one place for long. Over just the past 12 months, he has made or revived works for ballet companies in Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, and Milan, in addition to New York. His life revolves around hotels and ballet studios. It is always a relief when he is able to spend a few weeks at home in his apartment, with its view of Lincoln Center, whose plaza, he says, is his favorite place in the city: “It reminds me of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome,” he says. “I love to gaze down at it through my window in the morning.”
It was in Russia that Ratmansky first made his reputation as a choreographer, but his relationship with Russian companies came to a definitive end with the invasion of Ukraine. With his parents and sister still living in Kyiv, he has been a vocal supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty and a critic of Putin, and has said he will never return to Russia while Putin is still in power.
His refuge is the ballet studio. Earlier this year, Ratmansky created a powerful meditation on the war for New York City Ballet, entitled Solitude, which will return to the stage in May 2025. The coming year will see several Ratmansky premieres, including a suite of dances from the 19th century ballet Paquita (February 6–9) for New York City Ballet, as well as a revival of his Pictures at an Exhibition at Miami City Ballet (March 28–April 13). In the fall, he will make a new ballet for the Royal Danish Ballet (dates TBA). And his warm, witty Nutcracker, created in 2010 for American Ballet Theater, is at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County through December 22.
Recently, upon his return from staging a ballet in Salt Lake City, Ratmansky shared with Further his thoughts on the places that have impacted his life and career.
Ratmansky and his wife, Tatiana, on their wedding day outside the Kyiv Opera House, 1994. Photo: Courtesy Alexei Ratmansky.Kyiv is home. It represents my life before ballet. I grew up with my parents and my sister in an area full of trees, very green and very quiet. I had a very happy childhood there. And then, after I returned from ballet school in Moscow, Kyiv was the place where I had my first performances as a professional dancer, and where I choreographed my first ballets. I vividly remember the walk from home to the Kyiv Opera House where I worked, the steep descent followed by a steep climb up to the theater. Up and down, up and down, for seven years. And I remember the stage at the opera house, with its steep incline, one of the steepest in the world. It was great when you were trying to jump downstage, but if you needed to jump upstage it was like climbing a mountain.
Ratmansky at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 2007, when he was the company’s artistic director. Photo: James Hill/Redux.Moscow is where I studied ballet and took my first steps as a dancer. As a dance student, the Bolshoi was the theater of my dreams. But now, to me, as a Ukrainian, Moscow and the Bolshoi signify only war, betrayal, death, blood. I’ve had to block all the dear memories that I had there. Sometimes it still feels like it must be a dream, that it can’t be true.
Ratmansky and Elizabeth Olds in Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, 1995. Photo: Paul Martens/Courtesy of Robert Greskovic.Winnipeg was my first experience of living abroad. I remember it as the coldest place on earth — sometimes the temperature would reach minus 30 in the winter. I was dancing at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet [one of Canada’s top companies, with a robust touring schedule]. I was acquiring a lot of new information, learning the ballets of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, testing myself in contemporary choreography, finding a new way to dance the old ballets. It was exhausting. After a full day of rehearsals, I would come home and have to lie down for an hour before I was able to move. Maybe have a drink of vodka. My muscles were tired, but so was my brain.
Ratmansky at the theater in the ancient Greek city of Priene, in Turkey. Photo: Courtesy Alexei Ratmansky.I’ve been to Greece a lot over the years, as well as Turkey and southern Italy. I can say I have become obsessed with Ancient Greek art. I especially love Delphi — it makes you feel so small, because you are in the presence of something greater than you. To me, it represents timeless beauty, the ideas and proportions discovered by the ancients, still relevant today and so important for ballet. Ballet was inspired by these classical ratios in movement and plastique and proportions. Greek art makes you feel elevated, drawn upward to this higher plane.
Ratmansky with fellow Royal Danish Ballet dancer Gudrun Bojesen in 2000. Photo: Courtesy Søren Hartvig Nielsen/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.I loved living in this very sophisticated, European city, with a beautiful old theater, the Royal Danish Theatre. The studios were full of portraits of former dancers. We lived in a beautiful apartment on a lake, with swans floating by. And that is where Tatiana, my wife, and I had our son, Vasily. I remember his kindergarten, where the kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted — it was so different from our Soviet childhood. But they also learned important lessons about treating each other with respect, a very democratic idea.
Ratmansky’s Solitude, a meditation on the Russia-Ukraine War, staged at the New York City Ballet, February 2024. Photo: Courtesy Erin Baiano/NYC Ballet.My first day at the American Ballet Theater Studios, in 2009, I remember thinking, OK, here I am again, starting from zero. It was a little daunting. But this city is so inspiring. It represents the whole world. You see people from every corner of the earth, and hear every language. And, of course, it is the city of George Balanchine and the company he created, the New York City Ballet, where I am now working. To me Balanchine represents music and choreography of the highest quality, elevating ballet to the pinnacle of the arts. 
Marina Harss is a dance writer based in New York City. She contributes to the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Dance Magazine, and other publications. In 2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Alexei Ratmansky’s biography — and her first book — The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet.
Link copied!