Kharkiv ballet performs defiantly amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

‘Giselle’ underground: Kharkiv’s ballet keeps dancing as war grinds on

KHARKIV, Ukraine — In a city battered by missiles and winter blackouts, the Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre has found its stage a few floors below ground. The company’s last performance in its grand auditorium above street level took place on Feb. 23, 2022. Hours later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and tried to seize Kharkiv.

What followed remade the life of one of Ukraine’s leading ballet companies: shattered glass, broken routines, a frantic search for safer space — and then the quiet decision to keep dancing anyway. Rehearsals and performances moved into the building’s subterranean halls. At times, the dancers also performed in the city’s metro, where civilians sheltered from bombardment. “Those metro performances were a way to cheer people up,” the theater’s director, Ihor Touluzov, told RTÉ News. “The first months were difficult. The city was under constant shelling.”

From red velvet to concrete

The theater was badly damaged in early 2022; more than 2,000 square meters of glass blew out in the blasts that shook central Kharkiv. As the city fought off attempts to encircle it, the company’s artists learned new muscle memory: how to hold an arabesque while listening for sirens; how to turn a concrete room into a rehearsal studio; how to keep art alive when the present feels perilous and the future unknown.

When RTÉ News visited recently, the company was preparing the French ballet “Giselle” — the same work they danced on that last night above ground. The choice is freighted with symbolism: a story about love and loss, devotion and resilience, returning to the spotlight in a city that has lived all of those themes since the war began.

“It’s very important to keep performing because people need a chance for a miracle, a fairytale,” said lead soloist Antonina Radievskaya. Soldiers often slip into their audiences now, she added, and the spell of a pas de deux can offer “a chance to be distracted from the horror that is happening in our country.”

A company thinned but unbowed

Before the invasion, more than 90 ballerinas and danseurs performed with the Kharkiv company. Now, the regular roster stands at about 35, supported by a chamber orchestra of local musicians. Many former colleagues have scattered across Europe, keeping careers afloat on touring contracts and short-term engagements — a painful diaspora mirrored across Ukraine’s cultural institutions.

Those who stayed built a routine in the undercroft: six days of rehearsal each week, a training rhythm that would test even peacetime athletes. Electric heaters push a little warmth into the rehearsal rooms. In winter, rolling power cuts can darken the mirrors and silence the speakers; the dancers wait, stretch, and then begin again when the lights flicker back.

“We show with our spirit that no matter what, we will continue doing our job for the audience, for the city, generally for the arts,” said ballerina Olga Sharikova. “We all hope that it will not be permanent and that at some point there will be a peaceful time and we will come back to our big stage.”

Art as frontline morale

Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city, less than 30 miles from the Russian border — has endured near-daily strikes since 2022. Winter has compounded the hardship: frequent attacks have knocked out electricity and heating across the city and wider region. In that landscape, a ticket to ballet is not just an evening out. For some, it is proof that normal life can still be claimed, that community can still gather in the dark and applaud.

That has been the quiet point of the underground performances, Touluzov suggested: to build a room where danger yields, briefly, to grace. The dancers’ work has become its own kind of service, a morale mission intertwined with the city’s survival. When soldiers attend, they often arrive in small clusters and sit together in the dim light; the curtain rises on “Giselle” or a mixed bill, and the room exhales as one.

Keeping the canon alive

The dancers’ discipline is visible in the details — the calibrated lift of an arm, the hold on a balance as a partner circles close. In the rehearsal rooms below ground, where the ceiling feels near and the sound is soft, the familiar grammar of classical ballet takes on new textures. Pointe shoes whisper over linoleum instead of sprung wood. Marks of tape stand in for wings. Choreography adapts to the space, but the essential lines remain intact, lovingly preserved by muscle memory and trust.

That work has practical stakes. For a company pressed to its limits, maintaining repertoire — and performing it to standard — means preserving an artistic identity that predates the war and will outlast it. It also sustains an ecosystem of costumers, musicians and stagehands across the city, many of whom now split their days between cultural work and volunteer networks that support families displaced by fighting.

Resilience, rehearsed daily

On a recent day, after five hours of runs and corrections, the troupe climbed the stairs back toward the light. The winter sun had already begun to thin. As the dancers reached the street, an air raid siren sounded — one more wail in a city where alarms punctuate the hours. People paused, scanned the sky and phones, then moved briskly toward shelter.

The artists of Kharkiv’s ballet did what they have learned to do: they gathered their bags and coats, kept close, and headed down again. The next rehearsal would begin on time.

“We will continue,” Radievskaya said earlier. In Kharkiv, where glass once shattered like ice across a grand lobby and a city’s heart was tested, the vow now reads like a mission statement — defiant, necessary, true.

By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.