Ukrainian Dancers from The National Ballet of Ukraine
and the Ukrainian Shumka Dancers of Edmonton, Canada
October 16, 2024
New York City Center Theater
Mindy Aloff
On this first of two evenings at City Center, the ballet and the folk dancers gave an intense and moving program that turned out to be a fundraiser for the Ukrainian cause in the war with invading Russia. In a mid-program speech from the stage, Jeremy Courtney — the CEO of the Humanite Peace Collective (described in the program as “a nonprofit collective with longstanding experience meeting the needs of people in conflict zones and rebuilding efforts”) – explained that it had been his idea, in this third year of the war, to show audiences in Europe and the U.S. something of the historic culture, via dance, that the Ukrainians are fighting to preserve and for which they are pleading for donations. The addition of the well-known Shumka folk company to the North American tour not only completes the dance identity of the enterprise (Ratmansky, too, included folk dances in the recent work he made in homage to Ukraine for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and which, performed by dancers from the National Ballet of Ukraine, opened this year’s Fall for Dance Festival), but also adds North American authority to the fundraising.
Ukrainian Dancers from The National Ballet of Ukraine
Photo by Oleksandra Zlunitsyna
When the performances were first announced, some New York balletomanes were disappointed that the classical company had not planned to bring a single full-length ballet, particularly Giselle, as Alexei Ratmansky had staged it for both the Bolshoi and the United Ukrainian Ballet (a different Ukrainian company), which had performed it at the Kennedy Center in 2022. Instead, the program consisted largely of morsels from nineteenth-century legacy ballets, along with several dances by Ukrainian choreographers and the ebullient Shumka repertory. (In the program notes, one did find meticulous lists of the choreographers who, over decades, had contributed to the ballet’s legacy pieces.)
Ukrainian Dancers from The National Ballet of Ukraine,
featuring Anastasiia Shevchenko and Ivan Avdijevsky,
in an excerpt from “La Bayadère”
Many of the dances used, as sets, an ingenious system of 3-d projections, requiring special glasses that were distributed to the audience. By the end of the evening, the technology became wearing to this viewer, as it made the dancing seem coldly disconnected from the surrounding space of the stage. However, the images on the projections were sometimes lovely, and one appreciated the effort to provide a visual surround for so many excerpts from story ballets.
The full National Ballet of Ukraine consists of 150 dancers; the company brought to City Center twenty-four dancers in total: twelve principals and twelve corps de ballet. They brought what they could reliably perform and the number of dancers required to do so, and the performances were mostly wonderful, painstakingly specific, dignified, and highly energized.
Ukrainian Shumka Dancers of Edmonton, Canada
Photo by Ryan Parker Photography
Furthermore, the principals – men and women – are beautifully made for ballet. Their extraordinary bodies “speak” a highly educated classical style. In comparison with other ballet companies of the twenty-first century, theirs is a somewhat old-fashioned style – Vaganova training of the 1960s, gently virtuosic, is how it looked to this observer. But what a pleasure it was to see the perfect landings from leaps and the marvelously precise turnout and orientation of the upper body. This was classicism with gravitas. (Vaganova herself “worked and taught at the Kyiv State Ballet College,” the program reads.)
Tetiana Lozova and Yaroslav Tkachuk
of the National Ballet of Ukraine
Photo by Oleksandra Zlunitsyna
(marketing image)
Several of the performances were world-class: The mellifluous Act II pas de deux from Giselle, danced by Natalia Matsak and Sergii Kryvokon; the magisterial pas de deux from La Bayadère‘s vision scene, danced by Olga Golytsia and Mykyta Sukhorukov; the huge personality given the pas de deux from Harlequinade, danced by Tetiana Lozova and Yaroslav Tkachuk; the ancien regime delicacy accorded the pas de deux from Le Talisman, danced by Kateryna Kurchenko and Daniil Silkin.
The Vaganova technique had so many nuances. I was reminded that classical ballet’s “nationalities” are not defined by geographic borders but rather by the way classicism is articulated in different traditions. There is the country of Christian Johansson and Nicolas Legat; the country of Enrico Cecchetti; the country of August Bournonville; the region of Bournonville as revised by Vera Volkova; the country of the Royal Academy of Dancing; the continent of George Balanchine.
It was something of a shock to realize that while Ukraine and Russia are at war, they are deeply married in the bodies of the Ukrainian Ballet.
Ukrainian Shumka Dancers of Edmonton, Canada
Photo by Ryan Parker Photography
The handsome eighteen dancers of Shumka were exciting and delightfully well-rehearsed. They did not make me forget the breathtaking virtuosity and exactitude of the Pavlo Virsky Ukrainian National Folk Dance Ensemble, which used to visit New York, with their red-booted precision and jaw-dropping men’s variations in the Hopak. Yet the Canadians held their own at City Center, and their high-flung Hopak ending the program brought the crowd to roar with joy
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