WAR AND PIECES

Two outstanding premières at City Ballet.

- JENNIFER HOMANS

Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, “Solitude,” which recently premièred at New York City Ballet, begins with a devastating image: a father holding his dead son’s hand. The dance is dedicated to “the children of Ukraine, victims of war,” and Ratmansky has said that this image comes from a photograph of a father in Kharkiv sitting on the ground at a bus stop with his child, killed in a Russian air strike. This is Ratmansky’s second dance alluding to the war, but there is nothing outwardly political about it. The dancing is abstract and classically based, with no narrative and few outward signs of violence and death. Ratmansky’s canvas is not war but the human mind, and what he has managed to stage, with fourteen dancers and one child, is the disorienting experience of grief.

The opening tableau, sculptural in composition, brings to mind the war-scarred art of Käthe Kollwitz. The man kneels silently in a corner of an empty stage, eyes blankly staring into semidarkness. The lifeless boy whose hand he holds lies on his back in a bright-blue T-shirt, his face turned away from us, toward the father. We see everything; they see nothing. No one moves. The figures are presented without anything that might suggest their whereabouts or their lives. We could be them, and the sight is etched into our minds before the music begins and the lights rise.