Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, which premiered in Copenhagen this past fall, is an interpretation of Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a piece the composer left unfinished at the time of his death in 1750. As Marina Harss writes in our March 12, 2026, issue, the ballet shares the composition’s disrupted quality: “In Copenhagen Ratmansky was returning to a project that had been painfully interrupted when Russia invaded Ukraine.” So Harss traveled to Denmark, not only for the performance but also to spend time with Ratmansky and the dancers as they rehearsed before opening night.

Harss has a particular affinity for Ratmansky’s work and for Ratmansky—she is his biographer. The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet was published in 2023. As a critic, she writes on dance regularly and opera occasionally for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Hudson Review, among other publications. She has also translated books from the Italian and French, including The Mirador, Élisabeth Gille’s memoir of her mother, Irène Némirovsky; and Poem Strip, a graphic novel by Dino Buzzati.

I emailed Harss recently to ask her about—what else—the ballet.

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Lauren Kane: Do, or did, you ever practice dance? If not, would you ever want to? How did you become interested in dance as a critic?

Marina Harss: Like so many kids I studied ballet, along with various other things, for a brief time. I was all wrong for it: inflexible, not turned out, not particularly coordinated. But I was musical and knew a little bit about music because my parents cared about music, so I liked to pipe up with ideas for pieces to use in our recitals. Then I switched to piano, which I studied pretty seriously through college. My way into dance was through music, particularly the musicality of George Balanchine’s choreography and that of other dance styles like flamenco, where the music and the movement are almost indistinguishable. 

I find that the meeting of movement and music stimulates my brain in a way nothing else does. It makes me analyze and think; it fills me with impressions and opinions, which is the starting point for wanting to become a dance critic. Also, reading the criticism of Joan Acocella and Arlene Croce. So much insight, so much intelligence. Dance was a question of life and death for them.

In addition to being a critic, you are also a translator. Are there any similarities in those disciplines? If not, what are the major ways they are different to you as literary arts?

I am more of a former translator—I haven’t really done a translation since Cristina de Stefano’s biography of the journalist Oriana Fallaci. I think my favorite translation project was the stories of Pasolini. But I do think there is a through line, as there is a through line to my musical background. Writing about dance is, for me, a kind of translation, from one language—the language of choreography and of its relation to ideas and to music—to another, the language of words and literature and journalism. I take the job of transmitting dance’s inner story very seriously.

How did you come to Alexei Ratmansky as a subject? What was the most challenging thing about writing his biography? 

When Ratmansky was the director of the Bolshoi Ballet in the early 2000s, the company toured to New York with his 2003 ballet The Bright Stream, a comic work set on a collective farm in Russia in the 1930s with a score by Shostakovich. Can you imagine? And it was a total revelation. Funny, vivid, and extraordinarily sophisticated and musical. It changed what I thought ballet could be and could do. Silly and brilliant. I immediately started following Ratmansky’s work very closely.

In 2006 he started making ballets for American companies. The ballets were all very different from one another, but they all had that same power and immediacy, as well as an interesting relation to storytelling and history. Some were sort of abstract, but there was always a hint of character and situation. Then I interviewed him and found that he was both enigmatic and straightforward—a very intriguing combination. At some point I realized he was, to my eye, the most interesting ballet choreographer working today. And, as Joan Acocella has said about the urge to write a book, the desire to understand his work created a feeling of urgency in me—I felt I had to write a book about him in order to get to the bottom of who he is as an artist. The hardest thing about the process, and the most interesting, was how far-flung his career has been, with chapters in Kyiv, Moscow, Winnipeg, Copenhagen, New York City, and elsewhere. There were a lot of strands to follow and tie together.

What is the most difficult thing about being a biographer?

Finding the right kind of relationship with the person you’re writing about. It’s a funny, odd sort of relationship. You are not exactly friends, and yet you know more about the person than you do about most of the people you are close to. There is an artistic sympathy that clearly led you to that subject. You meet the most important people in their life. You ask them thousands of questions, and they open up to you. You spend hundreds of hours talking to that person about the subject that matters most to them—their work. You try to understand whatever they don’t fully understand. You have to pry, and at the same time there is a kind of reticence, a mutual respect that needs to be observed and conserved. Also, you have to accept that no one is truly knowable. You can probe and explore and learn, but every person is a mystery.

Dance criticism, like all criticism today, has lately been mourned for being in a state of decline or crisis. But what about dance itself? What is the future of the form? What is the state of dance today?

I’ve had impeccable timing! I started writing about dance just as professional dance criticism started to disappear. The situation is truly dismal, though there are wonderful publications, like The New York Review, that still care about criticism and the arts. In one sense dance is thriving. Not economically—the economics of dance have always been bad, and dancers are chronically taken advantage of. Even the old model of a company led by a choreographer, like Merce Cunningham or Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, is in peril; it’s too expensive to keep a permanent ensemble going. But there are still incredible dancers out there, and a dizzying variety of styles and techniques and choreographers. In another sense, nothing has changed: truly great and transformative choreographers are vanishingly rare.

Are there any notable performances you’ve seen lately or would recommend? Ballets you’d love to see staged but haven’t had the chance?

Ratmansky’s The Art of the Fugue, the subject of this piece, is one of the most moving and beautiful ballets I’ve ever seen. It is so spartan in a way, devoid of story or melodiousness. It’s uncompromising. That’s what makes it so thrilling. It was remarkable to feel the reaction of the audience in Copenhagen. Rapt attention, followed by a kind of collective gathering of breath, followed by long ovations. I heard people went back to see it multiple times over the course of the next several weeks. They were awestruck. 

Besides that, I try not to miss any debut by Mira Nadon, a young principal at New York City Ballet who dances with a freedom and breadth that takes my breath away and makes me think she may be the freest woman alive. It’s deeply exciting. She infuses new life into ballets you’ve seen countless times. Just recently in Serenade, Balanchine’s great masterpiece, which is still in the repertory at New York City Ballet, she made a moment register in a way I had never noticed before. It is a really simple moment, toward the end of the ballet, where she falls to her knees in front of a fellow dancer, looking into her eyes as if imploring her for some comfort and direction. Every dancer in that role does it, but with Nadon the moment became so dramatic, while remaining so natural, so utterly unaffected, that time almost stopped. It lifted the whole ballet.

A ballet I’d really like to see is Ratmansky’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland, premiering in Hamburg this June.

What is your favorite thing about the ballet?

I’m struck by ballet’s ability to create something extraordinarily beautiful out of something so difficult and so taxing on the brain and body. The way dance illuminates musical texture and structure, adding layers of meaning and humanity. The fact that it is an art with a strong history, a history that is constantly present in the steps and technique, but which is also in constant evolution. The universality of ballet technique—these steps that have been around for centuries, repeated again and again by generation upon generation of dancers. And the fact that there are still “schools” of ballet associated with different national companies and the choreographers who have worked there. I love the specificity of that, and the care that is shown in preserving the differences.

The Danish romanticism of August Bournonville, a nineteenth-century choreographer from Denmark, is nothing like the nineteenth-century classicism of Marius Petipa, the Frenchman who worked in St. Petersburg for decades and made canonical works like Swan Lake and La Bayadère. And Frederick Ashton’s approach to ballet in the twentieth century is in many ways the opposite of that of his contemporary George Balanchine. All are great and fascinating in different ways. I love exploring and understanding those differences and trying to trace where they come from. Upbringing? Ashton was a child of the British middle class; Balanchine was practically abandoned at ballet school as a child and had to suffer his way through the Bolshevik Revolution and the years after, half starved. National character, artistic influences, temperament, architecture, culture, history—all this and more leave their marks on choreographic style. Balanchine wouldn’t have made the ballets he made if he hadn’t landed in New York. There is a direct line between the Chrysler Building and a ballet like Agon.