NVN Monday: THE BALLET DANCERS OF UKRAINE
by Suzanne Morris
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–after Alexei Ratmansky’s staging of “Giselle,”
a romantic ballet in two acts
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They fled from all over Ukraine screaming sirens the new dance master from towering wings of concert halls to air raid shelters’ indifferent walls emerging, resolute En avant! for the performance of their lifetimes: operatic defense of a a venerated Art now threatened with extinction. Some took their positions à la barre in the Hague, others journeyed farther into the arms of Ratmansky’s Giselle at Washington’s Kennedy Center: Ghostly figures from the 18th century swathed in clouds of transparent tulle float in an ethereal pas de bourrée returning to a place that they once knew, but now is no more than an apparition like the beautiful peasant girl beloved of one forbidden to woo her pursued by another jealous to own her lost in a Potemkin village where pantomime and pirouettes fuse in Act One’s show-stopping conclusion: Giselle’s tragic death from heartbreak. When the curtain ascends the maid is mourned flowers laid at her grave, her spirit torn between heaven and hell’s treacherous pas de deux ...and yet au fil du temps... the story’s hopeful end, Ratmansky’s wish come true the audience releasing a long-held breath then rising to their feet, Bravo!m What will become of the soul of Ukraine when Russia’s dance to the death concludes and the grinding thud of invaders’ boots is but a ghostly echo? Will her steps be mired evermore in a Wilis encore of revenge? Or, will her soul like the peasant girl’s leave hate in the grave, and forgive? Au fil du temps…
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Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet. Her poems have appeared in The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, Emblazoned Soul Review, and other journals and anthologies.