The Old and the New in Contemporary Ukrainian Ballet: Performances, Trends, and Prospects

Abstract

The article by the experts of the Fifth Ukrainian Theater Festival and Award GRA (2023) analyzes six dance performances by theaters in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Kryvyi Rih that premiered in 2019–2022, either before or shortly after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. Four of these performances were longlisted for the festival in the special category for Best Dance and Physical Theater Performance, and one was longlisted for Best Performance for Young Audiences. Among them are full-length works that continue the traditions of classical ballet at a new stage. At the opposite pole are plastic performances that experiment with music and theater formats. Between these poles, contemporary Ukrainian ballet is trying to rethink its past and find a relevant voice in the polyphony of contemporary Ukrainian culture. The study of these performances has shown that at the present stage in Ukrainian dance theater, the following are of particular importance: 1) the return to the theater repertoire of scores by Ukrainian composers of the twentieth century; 2) the updating of the ballet repertoire of Ukrainian opera houses by commissioning new scores; 3) dance experiments in which the plastic “story” comes to the fore, and the music compilation plays a secondary role; 4) the search for new ways of integration of movement and sound in performances where traditional dance expressiveness is muted as much as possible in favor of artistic synthesis; 5) the dominance of the plastic component in contemporary innovative music and drama performances.