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The New York Public Library, along with the Center for Ballet and the Arts, hosted a conversation between Alexei Ratmansky and Paul Holdengräber. You may have missed it; it’s marvelous and available online. In the interview, Ratmansky speaks extensively about classes with Pyotr Pestov, his teacher at the Bolshoi Ballet School; his upbringing in Russia; Soviet style and Spartacus (“I don’t think I like it”) and what musicality means to him (the music and the movement “has got to be connected” and if it is not, it looks like a “blurry picture on the TV”). The choreographer’s glorious Pictures at an Exhibition just wrapped up performances this season at New York City Ballet; his Seven Sonatas will be performed as part of American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the Koch Theater, which begins October 22. If you’d like to skip the introduction by Jennifer Homans, the director of the center and author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of the Ballet, jump ahead to the 9:30 mark; still, her audacity is unbelievable. Is ballet dead or not? Does Ratmansky get on her nerves or not? As she wrote in a New Republic essay “Perhaps Ratmansky really believes that it is enough for ballets to be entertaining divertissements of pastiche and kitsch. Perhaps he is just a good vaudevillian, and we should be content with his gaiety and his fun.”
No matter. Ratmansky isn’t going anywhere. As is tradition in the interview series, Live from the NYPL, Holdengräber asks his guests to provide a biography of themselves in seven words. This is Ratmansky’s: “Serving Terpsichore non stop—and loving it.” Here's the excellent conversation.