\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t have the stamina for Balanchine,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re onstage, you\u2019re dancing all the time. The first time I danced \u2018Square Dance\u2019\u201d \u2014 a 1957 Balanchine ballet \u2014 \u201cI was dying. I couldn\u2019t breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lopez, who first saw him dance at a benefit performance in London in 2022, has observed this evolution. \u201cI could see him making the connection,\u201d she said, \u201cbetween the way we work in class, with different rhythms and speed and syncopation, and the way it allows him to move in Balanchine\u2019s ballets.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first you fight it in your head,\u201d Olshanskyi said, \u201cbut I can see it now. I can move faster now and I am actually jumping even a little bit higher.\u201d A turning point was dancing \u201cAgon,\u201d one of Balanchine\u2019s most modernist, stylized and rhythmically complex works, set to Stravinsky. \u201cI love \u2018Agon,\u2019\u201d he said, eyes widening. \u201cThere are so many ways to dance it, so many ways to show the steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the war began, Olshanskyi, then a principal dancer at the National Ballet of Ukraine, was on tour in the Netherlands with a Dutch dancer and his Ukrainian colleague Oleksii Tiutiunnyk. Olshanskyi and Tiutiunnyk decided to stay there, performing at benefit galas to raise funds for the war effort and then assisting in the creation of the United Ukrainian Ballet, a pickup company of Ukrainian dancers stranded abroad by the Russian invasion<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was in The Hague that Olshanskyi met Ratmansky, when the Ukrainian Ballet was rehearsing his \u201cGiselle\u201d in the summer of 2022. The company toured widely \u2014 the Netherlands, Britain, Australia and the United States \u2014 though support eventually faded, and the troupe disbanded in January. Some dancers returned to Ukraine; others joined ensembles abroad. A few who remained in The Hague are attempting to create a smaller version of the group.<\/p>\n Facing challenges at home, or family separation, even some dancers who at first remained in Ukraine have left. Oleksii Potiomkin, a member of the National Ballet who became an army medic at the start of the war, went to join his wife and son in Italy, where he dances freelance. \u201cThe guys from my military unit told me, \u2018You should go back onstage; that is your front line,\u2019\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI want to represent Ukrainian art on a good level.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n