Alexei Ratmansky

Alexei Ratmansky (born August 27, 1968, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) is a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer known for his exceptional musicality, seemingly limitless energy, and stylistic versatility. As artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet (2004–08), he rescued the company from a financial and artistic quagmire, largely by diversifying its repertoire.

Ratmansky grew up in an intellectual household in Kyiv, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.; his mother was a psychiatrist and his father an aeronautical engineer as well as a former champion gymnast. At age 10 he enrolled in the school of the Bolshoi Ballet (now the Moscow State Academy of Choreography), from which he graduated in 1986. He then returned to his hometown to join the Kyiv Ballet, with which he danced many major roles of the classical repertoire before accepting an invitation to join the Royal Winnipeg (Manitoba) Ballet in 1992. During the following three years, Ratmansky expanded his repertoire to include works by such contemporary choreographers as George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Twyla Tharp, and he created a number of small-scale choreographies of his own.

In 1995 Ratmansky returned to Kyiv, where he danced and choreographed independently until he moved to Copenhagen in 1997 to join the Royal Danish Ballet. In Denmark his choreographic abilities began to attract attention, particularly after he created several works for a small company led by Bolshoi ballerina Nina Ananiashvili that toured internationally. Among those works was the highly acclaimed Dreams of Japan (1998), performed to a percussive score featuring Japanese taiko drumming.

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By the early 21st century, Ratmansky had been promoted to principal dancer of the Royal Danish and had also created new works for a number of major dance companies, including his own Royal Danish Ballet (Turandot’s Dream, 2000); Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Ballet (The Firebird, 2002); St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet (Cinderella, 2002); the Bolshoi Ballet (The Bright Stream, 2003); and the San Francisco Ballet (The Carnival of the Animals, 2003). The positive reception of The Bright Stream earned him in 2004 an appointment as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, which had been struggling since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the next four years, Ratmansky returned the company to international prominence, primarily by expanding its repertoire to include modern works from diverse sources alongside the traditional classical ballets of the Soviet era. He also brought in dancers from abroad to coach members of the Bolshoi. Meanwhile, he continued to choreograph new full-length works—notably Anna Karenina (2004) for the Royal Danish Ballet, The Bolt (2005) for the Bolshoi, and Russian Seasons (2006) for New York City Ballet (NYCB).

Ratmansky left the Bolshoi in 2008 to focus on choreography. After declining an offer from NYCB to become its resident choreographer, he joined American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 2009 as the company’s first artist in residence. His first full-length work for ABT, On the Dnieper, premiered that year. In 2010 he created the humorous pastiche Namouna, with music by 19th-century French composer Édouard Lalo, for NYCB’s Architecture of Dance festival. Ratmansky’s later notable dances included Whipped Cream (2017), about a candy store that comes to life; Harlequinade (2018), a reworking of Russian choreographer Marius Petipa’s Les Millions d’Arlequin (1900; “Harlequin’s Millions”); The Seasons (2019); Of Love and Rage (2020); and Bernstein in a Bubble (2021). In 2022 Ratmansky was working in Moscow on ballets for the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky when Russia invaded Ukraine, where Ratmansky still had family. He immediately stopped work and returned to the United States.

Ratmansky was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2013.