The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky's Life in Ballet

The Boy from Kyiv is the life story of Alexei Ratmansky, the most celebrated ballet choreographer of our time.

Alexei Ratmansky is "the most sought-after man in ballet" (The New Yorker). At just thirty-five years of age, he was named artistic director at Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet. He went on to be appointed the resident choreographer at the American Ballet Theatre in New York, a post he held for 13 years, and is set to join the New York City Ballet as Artist in Residence in Fall of 2023. He has created magnificent new works for the world's most revered ballet companies, breathing fresh, exquisite new life into this allegedly moribund art form.

In The Boy from Kyiv, the celebrated dance critic Marina Harss charts Ratmansky's exceptional life: his modest upbringing in Kyiv, his early years training at the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow and sneaking into the company's performances at night, and his dance career spent in Ukraine, Canada, and Denmark. Through these wide-ranging experiences, he developed a singular creative style by fusing Russian and Western sensibilities and filtering them through his own eclectic imagination and varied interests in music, literature, art, and film--putting him on the path to becoming the most respected, admired, and in-demand ballet choreographer at work today. Ratmansky has created more than fifty original ballets for companies across the globe and is renowned above all for having revitalized storytelling in ballet, eschewing the cool abstraction that dominated twentieth-century choreography in favor of narratively suggestive, emotionally vibrant, and uniquely demanding works. Just as radically, he has applied archival research to the restaging of nineteenth-century ballets, working like an art restorer, in the process revealing new choreographic detail and expressive colors that had been lost to time and performance tradition.

Of late, Ratmansky, who is of mixed Ukrainian and Russian descent, has also found himself in an unexpected new role as perhaps the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin in the quintessentially Russian ballet world; Ratmansky, whose name has been removed from his works in Russia, has vowed to never work in Russia again so long as Putin remains in power and much of his recent work has been dedicated to championing the cause of the Ukrainian people.

Harss has spent the better part of two decades following Ratmansky's illustrious―and still ascending―career. In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this major artist, she delivers a riveting, deeply human account of the collisions of identities, cultures, and traditions that paved the way for Ratmansky's miraculous rise to the peaks of artistic excellence.