New York City Ballet is not known for producing ballets that tell a story, much less a story that directly relates to what’s happening in the real world. The last new narrative ballet to premiere at the company was Justin Peck’s “The Most Incredible Thing,” based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, in 2016. But this week, the company unveils a new narrative work, Alexei Ratmansky’s one-act, “The Naked King,” also inspired by an Andersen’s fairy tale: “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Andersen’s story, about a monarch whose vanity is so great that he is easily duped into appearing in public in the buff, is a satire of the self-deception of power, and the groveling nature of sycophants. Ratmansky’s ballet, which premieres at City Ballet on Feb. 5, pushes that satire into the realm of farce. It’s populated by over-the-top characters: conspiring tailors, sniveling advisers and a haughty queen who rejects her husband’s touch.
The most cartoonish character of all is the King, an irascible figure who stomps around, expecting complete subservience from those in his entourage. They carry him around and clap at his utterances.
Ratmansky, City Ballet’s artist in residence, is “telling a tale, a moral tale, that responds to the current time,” Wendy Whelan, the company’s associate artistic director, said in a phone interview. “It’s big, and times are big right now.”
The idea, Ratmansky said in an interview, came to him during a “No Kings” protest, in which people expressed disapproval at what they see as anti-democratic policies by President Trump. Until recently, Ratmansky wasn’t known for commenting on current events in his work. But the full-scale 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, where he grew up and where his family still lives, has changed that, he said.
In 2024, for City Ballet, he made “Solitude,” a work inspired by a photograph taken in Kharkiv of a father kneeling next to his dead son during the first year of the war in Ukraine. “I’ve been dealing with what I’ve been experiencing in life and in the news with different kinds of responses,” he said.
In an interview after a rehearsal of “The Naked King,” Ratmansky talked about the ballet, using humor as protest and making art at a time of political unrest. The interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Do you think ballet is good at telling stories lifted from everyday life?
I think it can do less than contemporary dance in terms of being relevant and of today. There is something escapist about ballet, it’s so stylized, so refined, and its instinct is to go away from reality, toward lightness, harmony, geometry. But still, it can say a lot of things, even in ballets that don’t have a story. Here, of course, I use a little bit of mime. It helps to tell the story.
Does this ballet have a clear message?
I think so. The message is that we don’t need kings. What we focus on here, and what I tried to say in my ballet, is that they’re just so ridiculous. And the people around them are even worse. Because they lie and pretend. At the same time, I’m a bit of a slave to the music and the musical structure. [The score, by Jean Françaix, was composed for a 1936 “Emperor’s New Clothes” ballet at the Paris Opera.] I did think about making the ballet more dramatic, but the music doesn’t support that. But the main idea is that the king is worthless, he’s nothing.
How does “The Naked King” fit with the ballets you’ve made since the pandemic, and, especially, since the invasion of Ukraine?
It just feels like, at least in my lifetime, the world has never been in such a bad place. It feels like everything is collapsing. To make another ballet to beautiful music with beautiful movements would feel a little strange, a little forced. But this ballet, this story does not feel forced.
For the past few years, since the full-scale war began in Ukraine, I’ve been dealing with what I’ve been experiencing in life and in the news with different kinds of responses. The ballets I’ve made have all been different: There was “Wartime Elegy” and “Solitude,” and just recently in Denmark, I made an abstract ballet set to Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue.” They all reflect different moments, different feelings.
I ask myself, is it OK to just continue making your little art? What does it mean to just bring joy? At the same time, bringing joy is also important, and also relevant.
There is something cathartic about seeing this hapless figure of the king, in a giant fat suit, surrounded by these four men who throw themselves on the floor for his approval.
I don’t know how much people want to see what they see on the news on the ballet stage, but of course it’s wrapped up in an innocent children’s story that everybody knows.
There is a long tradition of using humor as a form of protest.
Yes, and I think that laughter is actually a strong weapon. At these No Kings protests you can see people, older people, retirees, like babushkas, holding signs that are so sharp and creative and spot on. And they’re not afraid, because they’re surrounded by people who think like them.
Both of the men who play the king in your ballet are retired dancers who are now repertory directors in the company: Craig Salstein and Andrew Veyette. Why did you decide to use them rather than dancers who are currently in the company?
They’re experienced. They look older. And that way I could hold myself back from giving them virtuoso steps. The king shouldn’t do too much. But I ended up giving him a solo anyway, I couldn’t help it.
You’ve said that you left Russia in 2008, after five years as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, in part because you felt discomfort at the way Putin was consolidating power, and came here, to the United States. And now you find yourself here, a naturalized American citizen, in a time of political turmoil. What is that like for you?
Some things we understood about Russia only in hindsight, after we left. People were “canceled,” people were killed, protests were shut down. But the tragic, fatal mistake in Russia is that people just ignored what was happening. There was so much disinformation and propaganda. Here I do sense that more and more people are coming together and that this downward slide will be stopped at some point. I do feel that. The problem we have here is that each person chooses the information they want to hear, and because of that I’m not 100 percent sure that what I feel is representative. But I’m very awake. And woke, actually. Both.
You recently collected ballet shoes to send to ballet companies and schools in Ukraine. How did that initiative get started?
I began by asking people at New York City Ballet, and then the word started to spread to other companies. In the end, something like 20 companies and individual dancers participated, and we got together about 3,000 pairs, half of them pointe shoes, the other half ballet slippers. The Ukrainian dancers sent back little films of them unpacking the shoes. The companies there are still performing, whenever they can because now there are days where there is no electricity.
What do you feel is your greatest challenge right now as an artist?
It’s always the same. Whenever I’m preparing a new ballet, I go through phases of excitement and inspiration and then disappointment and fearing disaster and the sense that I don’t know how to do things and that the ballet won’t work. Every time. There is a pattern. I love it, and I fear it.
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