"The dancers had been at it for hours. They looked sallow, too tired even to sweat, but Ratmansky was not yet satisfied with what he saw. He asked the rehearsal pianist to play a passage from the score, took a moment to think, then blurted out two phrases of choreography for the dancers. He showed the steps, and they repeated them back. Then he showed them again, illuminating this or that nuance, and they did it again."
"He studied ballet in Moscow and served as director of the city's Bolshoi Ballet for five years in the early 2000s, after dancing in Ukraine, Canada, and Denmark. Today he is an artist in residence at both New York City Ballet (he has lived primarily in New York since 2009) and the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, and he continues to create new ballets,"
A rainy afternoon in Copenhagen found four exhausted ballet dancers rehearsing on the fourth floor of the Royal Danish Theatre while Alexei Ratmansky paced the studio. An assistant held a score of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Ratmansky asked the rehearsal pianist to play, improvised choreography phrases, demonstrated steps, and refined nuances until a clear phrase emerged a week before the premiere. Ratmansky was born in St. Petersburg, raised in Kyiv, studied ballet in Moscow, and directed the Bolshoi Ballet. He holds residencies at New York City Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet and travels frequently to mount premieres worldwide. He took on Bach's unfinished, cerebral score.
Read at The New York Review of Books
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