National Ballet of Ukraine looks to the future with wartime creation The Snow Queen — review

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When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, ballet rapidly emerged as a source of soft diplomacy for the embattled country. Artists in exile staged galas and formed impromptu companies; taking a leaf from Russia’s own cold war playbook, they pled the case for their culture in tutus and tights all over the world.

But as the war approaches the three-year mark, some of these efforts have waned. Last winter, the United Ukrainian Ballet, a high-profile touring ensemble, was forced to disband due to insufficient funds.

One state company has kept going on all fronts, however: the National Ballet of Ukraine, which resumed performances in Kyiv a few months into the war. Now, for the holiday season, 40 of its dancers have made the journey to Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with a production of The Snow Queen, even as the rest of the 100-strong troupe performs the same ballet at home.

Incredibly, it is a wartime creation, choreographed in 2022 by Aniko Rekhviashvili, former artistic director of the company. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, rather than the Disneyfied version, her Snow Queen is a curious offering: a two-act show structured almost entirely in the style of 19th-century ballets.

The plot frequently takes a back seat to conventional set pieces. Kai, a young boy, is struck by a shard of the Snow Queen’s mirror. Yet when his friend Gerda goes on a quest to save him, she keeps bumping into characters straight from the historical ballet repertoire.

First there is a “magical garden” in which a fairy reunites her with Kai in a dream, a trick from The Sleeping Beauty. Then a prince and princess greet Gerda (the tireless, endearing Tetiana Lozova) with a courtly grand pas, complete with corps de ballet, solo variations and coda. For her prowess on pointe, Gerda gets a fur coat, which bandits promptly steal — a pointless yet exhilarating digression designed to showcase the Ukrainian men’s superb character dancing.

This Snow Queen feels like a throwback to another era, given today’s trend for more realistic storytelling, especially among western ballet choreographers. Yet in the Ukrainian context, it serves a clear purpose. When the invasion started, Ukraine’s national opera house made the swift decision to stop performing works by Russian composers.

For ballet, that meant no more bread-and-butter Tchaikovsky classics, such as The Nutcracker or Swan Lake. With this Snow Queen, set to a patchwork of musical numbers by Massenet, Offenbach and Strauss, among others, the National Ballet of Ukraine has produced a replacement of sorts — a festive ballet that showcases the country’s longstanding classical school of ballet.

Its representatives aren’t too concerned, at present, with the finer details of footwork, but they bring a boldness of purpose to bravura moments. As Kai, Yaroslav Tkachuk bounds through jumps and turns with flair, while Iryna Borysova brings upper-body authority to her frosty Queen.

The overall result may be somewhat wonky, but as a recent film by Bertrand Normand for the French-German channel Arte, Wartime Elegy, captured, the company is working in dire circumstances, with rehearsals continuing even as sirens ring around them. With The Snow Queen, the National Ballet of Ukraine is investing in its own future — the most hopeful of moves.

★★★☆☆

To January 5, theatrechampselysees.fr