Solitude, Alexei Ratmansky’s seventh work for New York City Ballet and first as its artist in residence, was the centerpiece of the “Masters at Work” program in the company’s winter season. For a choreographer whose “natural habitat” is “humor, playfulness, irony, and complexity,” as Marina Harss writes in her recent biography The Boy from Kyiv, his latest subject is unusually dark. Neither narrative nor abstract—Ratmansky is comfortable working in between, using “narrative colors as ingredients in an abstract whole,” as he once described his process for another ballet—Solitude reveals the horrors of war through a single broken relationship between a father and his dead child.
Rarely in ballet are characters based on real individuals, let alone contemporary ones. In an interview with Harss before its premiere, Ratmansky confirmed that Solitude was inspired by a photograph from July 2022 of a Ukrainian father kneeling beside the body of his thirteen-year-old son, who had just been killed in a Russian airstrike near a bus stop in Kharkiv. According to news reports, the father refused to leave the boy’s side for hours, holding his hand and praying.
In Solitude, the parent’s grief is expressed initially by stillness. For the entire first section, the father character, danced by the angular Adrian Danchig-Waring (alternating with Joseph Gordon), dressed in simple street clothing, sits on his heels and stares ahead, taking visibly deep breaths beside a child (Felix Valedon, a School of American Ballet student), who lays beside him wearing a blue jacket like the child’s in the photograph. The pair, holding hands, remain in place in the front-left corner of the stage (returning there at the end) as the remaining cast of six men and seven women dance to a funeral march, the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.
Fitting the tragic subject, the music is full of “horrible irony,” as Mahler described it, featuring a variation on the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” played slowly in a haunting minor key. The ensemble, stacked with the company’s soloists and principals, gradually progresses in diagonally toward the left of the stage, the women falling to the floor and the men helping them return to position, while at other moments the dancers flinch their arms in awkward, contorted shapes and perform lifts with the women’s knees bent high in the air. Later in the movement, when the music abruptly transitions to a jolly klezmer section, we see the boy and four other dancers stand in the center of a moving circle and flop their heads from side to side like rag dolls, as if to communicate the senselessness and absurdity of a child’s death.
The set contains none of the ironic texture of the music and steps, and is disappointingly one-note: a backdrop of Rothko-like blocks of dark colors that gradually shift to reveal a lifeless, moonlike wasteland on the horizon, its bombed-out details heavily obscured by the dim lighting. But the piece as a whole does not descend into nihilism, emphasizing above all the father’s love for his child. Around halfway through, Danchig-Waring dances a remarkable mourning solo to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, in which he performs long jumping sequences ending in deep pliés and held arabesques, and repeatedly tilts to the side with his hands and arms outstretched below his shoulders, as if in resignation. Later, the son tries to mirror his father as they repeat this pose together, with the father at one point lifting his son in arabesque.
Of the remaining cast, Mira Nadon and Sara Mearns were standouts. Ratmansky makes good use of Nadon’s majestic extensions with high kicks and lunges, at one point tossing her perilously through the air. Mearns frequently dances in sync with Nadon, with sweeping turns in attitude and extensions to the side, and offers a serene and motherly presence, sometimes putting her hands on the boy’s shoulders and gently moving him around the stage. The aforementioned interview called her character a kind of angel of mercy, a description that faintly echoes the “Dark Angel” figure in Balanchine’s Serenade, a similarly enigmatic yet powerful force who is generally seen as an embodiment of fate.
While grieving widows and mothers are common artistic subjects—seen across centuries of religious and wartime visual art, in dances such as Martha Graham’s 1930 solo Lamentations or, more recently, Arthur Pita’s macabre 2019 ballet The Mother—the image of a father mourning a child is much rarer, making Ratmansky’s depiction of self-restrained grief particularly powerful. In the end, much is left to the audience. Is the man completely alone, as the title hints, and are other dancers an expression of his emotions and memories? Or are they spirits and messengers, escorting his son to the next realm?
Preceding Solitude was Opus 19/The Dreamer, choreographed by Jerome Robbins in 1979 to Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, featuring Joseph Gordon in the titular role and Tiler Peck as his love interest. An inspired pairing with Solitude, it too centers around a lonely man lost in thought and leaves open the question of how much of what we see is “real” or “imagined.” In Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, a large-cast leotard ballet from 1972 set to music by Stravinsky that concluded the triple bill, Taylor Stanley and Ashley Laracy were the high point, dancing the ballet’s central duet, a complex section requiring the pair to form a variety of angular shapes, with mesmerizing precision.