Marina Harss

Boy from Kyiv

Alexei Ratmansky is “the most sought-after man in ballet” (The New Yorker). A former artistic director at the Bolshoi Ballet and the resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre, and now the incoming artist in residence at New York City Ballet, Ratmansky has created magnificent works for the world’s most revered ballet companies, breathing exquisite new life into this age-old art. In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this major artist, the celebrated dance critic Marina Harss recounts the exceptional life that has made Ratmansky the most respected choreographer at work today. An artist of singular vision, he is renowned above all for radically revitalising the craft of storytelling in ballet, and for daringly restaging great nineteenth-century ballets lost to time. And of late, the Ukrainian-Russian choreographer has found himself in an unexpected new role as perhaps the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin in the quintessentially Russian ballet world. Ratmansky has vowed never to work there again so long as Putin remains in power, and much of his recent work has championed the cause of the Ukrainian people. Harss has spent the better part of two decades following Ratmansky’s illustrious and still ascending career. With The Boy from Kyiv, she delivers a riveting, deeply personal account of this miraculous rise to the peaks of artistic excellence.