✦ Who He Is ✦
Alexei Ratmansky trained at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow before dancing with the Ukrainian National Ballet in Kyiv, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and the Royal Danish Ballet, absorbing a wider range of companies and repertoire than most dancers of his Soviet training typically encountered. He returned to Russia to lead the Bolshoi Ballet, appointed the company's artistic director in 2004, a post he held until 2008, using it to bring new commissions and a more international outlook to a historically insular institution. He later became artist in residence at American Ballet Theatre from 2009 to 2023 and, since then, has held the same position at New York City Ballet, working alongside resident choreographers such as Justin Peck and Christopher Wheeldon.
Alongside his own choreography, Ratmansky has built a parallel career reconstructing 19th-century ballets from the Stepanov notation held in Harvard's Sergeyev Collection, stripping away decades of accumulated Soviet-era revision to recover earlier staging, mime, and phrasing. His reconstructions of works including The Sleeping Beauty, Paquita, and Swan Lake have made him as much a historian of ballet's lost performance practice as an author of new work.
Signature Works
Concerto DSCH (2008)
Created for New York City Ballet to Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, this exuberant, fast-footed ensemble work is widely regarded as one of the finest new ballets made for the company since Balanchine.
Pictures at an Exhibition (2014)
Set to Mussorgsky's suite, this New York City Ballet work translates the score's gallery-walk structure into shifting group and solo vignettes with a painterly, associative logic. Read the full profile →
The Sleeping Beauty (2015)
Staged for American Ballet Theatre using the Sergeyev notation records, this reconstruction reinstated period mime, staging, and choreographic detail largely absent from 20th-century productions.
Whipped Cream (2017)
A fantastical, candy-colored full-length ballet for American Ballet Theatre set to Richard Strauss, built around surreal designs by artist Mark Ryden and a child's-eye sense of wonder and menace.
Style & Method
Ratmansky's choreography is defined above all by its relationship to music: he builds phrases that seem to think alongside a score rather than merely illustrate it, favoring intricate rhythmic counterpoint and quick, witty ensemble interplay over broad spectacle. That musical precision coexists with a deep, scholarly interest in ballet's own history — his reconstructions are not nostalgic exercises but active research, informing the vocabulary and dramatic logic of his new works. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013 in recognition of both strands of his practice, and his ballets are danced by companies across Europe, Russia, and North America.
2022: Leaving Russia
Ratmansky was in Moscow developing a new work for the Bolshoi Ballet when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Given his own family ties to Ukraine and his years training and dancing in Kyiv early in his career, he left the country in protest, canceling the premiere and ending his working relationship with the Bolshoi. He has not returned to create in Russia since, and the move accelerated his transition to New York City Ballet, where he took up the artist-in-residence position formerly anchored at American Ballet Theatre.
Legacy
Few living choreographers are staged as widely or as often as Ratmansky, and few have done as much to make ballet's own performance history a living, arguable subject rather than a settled record. His residencies at two of America's flagship companies have placed him at the center of ongoing debates about how classical repertoire should be preserved, revised, or replaced — debates his own reconstructions have helped sharpen considerably.