The Most Influential People in Dance Today: Alexei Ratmansky

In the last five years, Alexei Ratmansky has made seventeen ballets for nine different companies in five countries. These include an abstract ballet set to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, an interpretation of Plato’s Symposium set to Leonard Bernstein, reconstructions of three Petipa ballets based early twentieth-century notations, a re-imagined Baiser de la Fée, and an exploration of Soviet themes set to Shostakovich. Not all have been successful (his version of The Tempest was a bit of a flop), but there’s no question that he is the most prolific ballet choreographer, and possibly the most wide-ranging one, working today.

Ratmansky has made danced storytelling, and mime, feel vibrant again. He is as comfortable with farce and pastiche as he as he is with deep subjects, as conversant in irony as he is in sincerity. He has made us reconsider our assumptions about ballets we thought we knew, like Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. He has reinvigorated classical technique, pushing for a fuller and more articulate use of the body. Perhaps most remarkable of all has been his effect on dancers; he teases new qualities out of them them, making them more interesting, complex performers. As the Miami City Ballet dancer Renan Cerdero recently put it: “he changes people.”

Read the rest of Dance Magazine‘s list of the most influential people in dance today.