Alexei Ratmansky had only just appeared on the New York dance scene in 2010 when the historian Jennifer Homans contended that ballet was a dying art form—with no one to take the mantle from the long-deceased icons George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor. In The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, the dance critic Marina Harss now makes a strong case that Ratmansky has breathed fresh life into ballet—by channeling forgotten voices of the past and infusing new accents into a familiar dance vocabulary.

In an incisive and swiftly flowing biography, Harss describes the varied influences that have shaped Ratmansky into one of the foremost classical-ballet choreographers working today. Born in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union to Ukrainian parents, Ratmansky left home at age ten to join the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow. Harss stresses how, as a boy from the provinces, he was an outsider from the beginning. Training as a dancer in the vaunted catacombs of tradition that is the Bolshoi, Ratmansky felt something lacking in the school’s house style of overwrought emotion and pyrotechnic displays of virtuosity. He returned to Kyiv to dance but was ultimately inspired by the movement quality of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet to move west.

Harss paints a picture of how Ratmansky fused together ballet’s contrasting traditions. First, at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he explored the precise dancing and sensitive musicality of Balanchine. At the Royal Danish Ballet, he immersed himself in