National Ballet of Ukraine visits Atlanta in a time of war

Sukhorukov is one of 24 select dancers from the National Ballet of Ukraine, that country’s only officially sanctioned ballet company currently on tour. The company will perform Sunday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre as part of a 16-city diplomatic tour of the eastern United States — its first U.S. tour since Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Plans to tour the Midwest and western United States are in the works for 2025. Proceeds from the tour will go to war relief efforts.

Credit: Photo by Oleksandra Zlunitsyna

Credit: Photo by Oleksandra Zlunitsyna

Also on Sunday evening’s bill are vibrant, theatrically staged folk dances performed by 20 members of the Ukrainian Shumka Dancers, a classically trained folk dance troupe based in Canada. A state-of-the-art, three-dimensional LED-projection screen will create an immersive effect.

Like his fellow artists in Kyiv, Sukhorukov is deeply committed to preserving the National Ballet’s tradition, a symbol of Ukrainian cultural identity. It is uniquely beautiful and powerfully expressive, but it is at risk of being lost.

On a foundation of exquisite Vaganova training, dancers exude an openness, a genuine warmth and ebullience onstage that’s distinct from either the Russian Bolshoi or Mariinsky ballet companies. The dancers’ artistry belies their circumstances, living in a city under siege during a war that’s gone on for more than two and a half years, causing mass displacement of people and loss of human lives, communities and cultural treasures.

It’s not the first time this country, spanning roughly between Poland on the west and Russia on the east and northeast, has been a battleground subject to outside rule and cultural influences, including Russia. But a lineage of Ukrainian choreographers, composers and poets have fostered a distinctly Ukrainian identity through its arts traditions.

Credit: @Tverkhovinets

Credit: @Tverkhovinets

They have integrated their country’s national folk dances into ballet and opera forms — among those on Sunday’s program is the exuberant “Hopak” from the opera “Taras Bulba.” And the 1946 “Forest Song” — created by a Ukrainian choreographer and composer, with a story from that country’s literature — suggests that even under Stalin this company held on to its cultural identity.

Sunday’s program has only one work by a Russian choreographer. “The Dying Swan,” by Russian emigre Michel Fokine (whose mother was German), reflects a two-year period (1915 to 1917) when Bronislava Nijinska and her husband, Aleksandr Kochetovsky, staged more modern works from Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Kyiv.

The National Ballet no longer performs works to music by Russian composers, so standard repertoire such as “Swan Lake” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” with music by Tchaikovsky, are off the bill. Sunday’s program will feature several pas de deux from Ukrainian versions of such classics as “Giselle,” “Don Quixote” and “La Bayadrre,” all with scores by Western European composers.

Programming also features a dance from Victor Lytvynov’s humorous “Chasing Two Hares” and recent creations that include Vadim Fedotov’s “Prayer for the Fallen,” set in front of images of a bombed city to Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” from the Requiem in D Minor.

Sukhorukov, 34, embodies much of what makes this company unique. Tall and trim with harmonious body proportions, his love of the art form clearly informs his stage presence. He attends to his partner with precision and care and breezes through intricate turns and soaring leaps, sharing his pleasure with his audience and fellow dancers.

Off stage, Sukhorukov has grown used to a new normal. Missile and drone attacks fall on Kyiv several times a day.

Credit: Volodymyr Melnyk

Credit: Volodymyr Melnyk

“It’s like rules of some crazy game,” he said. He has to arrive home after performances by midnight due to a 12-5 a.m. curfew. For a period of time, his apartment had no electricity.

But Sukhorukov considers himself lucky. While many theaters in Ukraine remain closed — some destroyed — the National Ballet performs eight or nine times per month. Audiences for the 1,304-seat opera house are capped at about 450, the number of guests who can fit comfortably in the basement bomb shelter during air raids.

Normally numbering 150, the company has lost about 60 artists since the Russian invasion. Dancers from companies near the Russian border have arrived, bringing the total to about 100. But nuances of choreography and style are passed down through the dancers who embody them. “We’re trying to do our best,” Sukhorukov said, “to preserve the repertory that we’ve got.” If everyone is intent on leaving, he said, then “we’ve lost everything.”

Credit: Photo by Andrew Nynka, The Ukrainian Weekly

Credit: Photo by Andrew Nynka, The Ukrainian Weekly

The company’s unique style and excellence are key assets that are helping to secure funds that could save countless lives, said Jeremy Courtney, founder and CEO of Humanite Peace Collective, an organization that’s working to meet the diverse challenges the war has inflicted on Ukraine’s citizens. Out of proceeds, Humanite plans to build bomb shelters and underground classrooms for nearly 1 million Ukrainian children who cannot safely study in person with their peers.

While the world’s attention has moved to conflicts in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Ukraine’s situation is far from resolved. The media often shows the devastation and suffering, even comparing atrocities. Instead, Courtney said, “We’re inviting audiences into a celebration of all that is good and beautiful and true about the people of Ukraine, to celebrate the freedom that we all want for ourselves and to celebrate our shared future.”

The logistics of touring a large-scale production are complicated by the task of moving people in and out of war zones, Courtney said, but the biggest hurdles are the emotional burdens cast members carry. “Everything from the constant fear that our friends live through daily, that the next air raid siren might be the one,” he said.

“Those never-ending emotional struggles are at once a huge burden on the ballet corps,” Courtney said about the Ukrainian dancers on the tour. “They also form the fuel in the tank for why they must continue to be ambassadors for the Ukrainian people and Ukraine’s future.”

That future is bright as long as Kyiv doesn’t fall under Russian control. For years, the company has had limited access to Western ballet repertory, but that’s changing. Since the war began, Sukhorukov said the company has been gifted Hans van Manen’s “Five Tangos” and John Neumeier’s “Spring and Fall.” Plans to produce Frederick Ashton’s “La fille mal gardee” and a Balanchine ballet are in the works.

Last May, the company debuted Alexei Ratmansky’s “Wartime Elegy,” created for Pacific Northwest Ballet in response to the war. Sukhorukov danced in Ratmansky’s piece.

Before the premiere, dancers asked Ratmansky for advice on dancing in a work about a war they had lived and experienced. Sukhorukov recalled the choreographer’s response: “Show what you are feeling in the last two and a half years — your experience, in every move. Find your own story. I don’t have to hear it. I want to see it.”

On Sunday, Sukhorukov is slated to dance in “Melody in A Minor,” a duet he choreographed last year to music by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk. “If you can imagine a small, beautiful Ukrainian village in the middle of nowhere,” he said, “and an absolute calm feeling, no matter what’s going on around. Just a very peaceful place.”

National Ballet of Ukraine

8 p.m. Sunday, at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, $30-$101 (pricing subject to change). 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. 770-916-2852, ticketmaster.com.

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Cynthia Bond Perry has covered dance for ArtsATL since the website was founded in 2009. One of the most respected dance writers in the Southeast, she also contributes to Dance Magazine, Dance International and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She has an MFA in narrative media writing from the University of Georgia.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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