High emotion inevitably surrounded this production of Giselle by Alexei Ratmansky, once artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet and now resident in New York, but raised in Kyiv, a Ukrainian passport holder and a powerful advocate against the horror of the Ukrainian war.
It’s performed by a company of Ukrainian dancers now based at the Hague, some of whom have fled their homeland, all of whom have friends and family still there. The sharp reality of events was made brutally clear by the fact that on the eve of the London premiere, the Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Oleksandr Shapoval was killed during combat in the Donetsk region.
