“If we could scream against the war, we would. But we’re dancers. So we dance.”
–RBT Producer Gulya Hartwick
McALLEN — If RBT’s performance of Swan Lake at the McAllen Performing Arts Center last week wasn’t a miracle, it was likely as close as you could get to one in the Rio Grande Valley on a Wednesday night.
It seemed a minor miracle every time a ballerina jumped impossibly high into the air and landed lightly on her toes, and every time she scissored her feet back and forth in midair.
It seemed impossible anyone could do it, with such grace, again and again for two hours without spraining an ankle.
It certainly seemed implausible that the ballet’s jester could twirl around so many times without puking on his motley.
The blue blaze of light that shone out blindingly at the audience while the curtains rose on the ballet’s final scene was awe-inspiring enough that, when their eyes adjusted and saw the white-clad dancers arrayed on the stage, about half a dozen people in the audience were compelled to pull out their phones and risk an usher chastising them for an illicit video of the finale.
All that seemed miraculous, though technically it wasn’t. It was the result of dozens of dancers and crew who’d practiced and performed for countless hours, moving like a poetically well-oiled machine.
What did seem an authentic miracle was, after two years of a dreadful pestilence and two weeks of an increasingly devastating war, that something as delicate and elegant and graceful as RBT’s Swan Lake.
The war in Ukraine was not so far away from the ballerina’s stage in McAllen on Wednesday night.
RBT, formerly Russian Ballet Theatre, changed its name a couple of weeks ago, signaling its solidarity with Ukraine and its disagreement with the Russian government, which it is not affiliated with.
“We dance for peace,” a message projected on the curtain read before the show.
The show’s multi-national troupe of dancers — many of them Eastern European, some Ukrainian — certainly have a vested interest in peace.
While ballerinas leapt and touched down on the stage Wednesday with light thuds, Russian shelling pounded their homeland.
While a thousand-odd spectators strode into the auditorium in McAllen, tens of thousands of refugees made a ragged trek toward the Polish border.
Some of RBT’s dancers, producer Gulya Hartwick said, see news reports about attacks in their hometowns and call parents who decided not to evacuate, trying to get an answer before showtime.
“You’re thinking, of course, the worst, but just praying it isn’t so,” Hartwick said.
The man who plays Rothbart, Swan Lake’s villain, is a Belorussian married to a Ukrainian, Hartwick said. His children were in Kyiv when the war started and have evacuated to Poland. Now he’s trying to figure out how to get there too.
“There are a lot of personal and tragic stories that is behind the curtain,” Hartwick said. “It’s very tragic what’s happening.”
Why ballet in the face of all that? Why put on tutus and tights with two horsemen of the apocalypse champing at the bit?
Ballet, Hartwick said, is her performers’ poetry, and it’s the best expression against war they have.
“If we could scream against the war, we would,” she said. “But we’re dancers. So we dance.”
Perhaps the troupe is dancing for peace; many of its dancers, Hartwick said, are dancing for peace of mind.
“It’s an outlet,” she said. “A possibility to escape all of the emotion.”
Wednesday’s performance was also an escape for the Valley residents who attended the show.
There were couples in their 20s on dates Wednesday, Winter Texans out of their RV parks, girls in gowns lining up for a picture with an authentic ballerina and would-be socialites wanting to socialize.
Those people laughed at the fool. They swooned for the prince. They gave the dancers a standing ovation at the end of the performance.
“We got a lot of really, really positive feedback after,” Yajaira Flores of the performing arts center said. “People saying it was mesmerizing, people saying it was amazing. I think that with everything that’s happening it was a very emotional ballet.”
Flores says the pandemic largely illustrated the value of arts. Wednesday’s show did the same thing, especially in the face of international discord.
“Art unites us,” she said. “They’re all dancing on the same stage. I think that’s something special in these times.”
