Ballerinas perform “Les Sylphides” at the Odessa National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet on Dec. 16. Dozens of Ukrainian artists have been killed in action fighting against Russia’s invasion. (Ed Ram)
ODESSA, Ukraine — If the air raid sirens blared, the theater manager warned, everyone would have to shelter — cast, crew and spectators. It didn’t matter if the dance had already started.
Still Oleksandra Vorobiova twirled, a blur of dark tracksuit and loose hair, as she practiced without an audience. For a moment, she forgot about the sign propped on a music stand, a red arrow pointing to the basement bomb shelter. She forgot about the 113 days that the National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet had closed after Russia invaded, how half the company’s dancers fled abroad, how others enlisted to serve in a war they wouldn’t survive.
She forgot about her beloved friend, Rostislav Yanchishen, who traded his ballet slippers for combat boots in February 2022 and became one of dozens of artists slaughtered in a war that will soon drag into its third year.
She forgot. But only for a moment.
Vorobiova, 42, finished her pirouette. The main stage lights flicked on, sweeping away the shadows. It was mid-December, less than an hour before the start of “Les Sylphides” — yet another performance without him.
On her last visit to his hometown, Yanchishen had confided in Vorobiova — a principal dancer at the opera — that he only wanted fresh flowers at his funeral. She remembered that he once starred in a ballet about a dying soldier.
“Ideas materialize,” she’d scolded him. “Don’t get yourself killed.”
He died in April, a month shy of his 32nd birthday.
There were so many like him. While the exact number is unverified, PEN Ukraine — a freedom-of-expression advocacy group — says at least 79 “people of culture” have been killed so far, each death tearing at the country’s cultural fabric and advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to deny Ukraine’s identity and future.
“Every artist is doing something which nobody else can do,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, the president of PEN Ukraine. “Every killed artist makes Ukrainian culture less rich, more poor.”
There was the writer found in a mass grave in the woods, his war diary dug from beneath a cherry tree in his garden by another writer, who later died of injuries from a Russian missile attack on a pizza restaurant.
There was the filmmaker who chose his profession as his military call sign and died of a shrapnel wound to the head. There was the nature photographer who documented the changing seasons of a heart-shaped island near his home — pale with snow in winter, green come spring — killed rescuing a colleague.
The sculptor turned rifleman. The ballet soloist turned grenade launcher. The conductor turned front-line soldier.
Vorobiova stepped into the wings, where another ballerina was grinding her pointe shoes in rosin, ribbons trailing in the powder. A worker mopped the stage in slow circles.
Act I: ‘What will we be left with?’
The actor returned to his beloved theater in a casket.