Behind the curtain

By Simon Crofts

Ukraine is one of the world’s great exporters of star dancers. The Royal Ballet’s Alina Cojocaru, Ivan Putrov and Sergei Polunin were all trained in Kiev, although the poetry of their dancing is pure St Petersburg. “It’s our cradle,” says Sergei Najenko, principal dancer and choreographer with the Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Lviv. “We are all, all, all children of the Russian ballet.”

In Lviv, regarded as Ukraine’s most independent and pro-Western city, an effusive admission of a debt to Russia comes as a surprise. (Lviv’s name in Russian—Lvov—is still resented by some as a reminder of Soviet rule.) But Simon Crofts, who took the photographs on these pages, found that attitudes to both Russia and Europe had relaxed in the past few years. “Before, when I was taking photographs in Ukraine, most people—even my friends—assumed that I was some kind of spy. It was a legacy from Soviet days. People are much more open now and seem to have lost that traditional paranoia towards foreigners.”

A ballet company, incorporating different nationalities and styles, has to rise above xenophobia. Lviv gathers its dancers from all over Ukraine and Russia. It has its own school—“our kitchen, so to speak,” says Najenko—but not the resources of the famous vocational academies in Kiev or St Petersburg. “There isn’t the chance to grow our own real stars, so we wait until talented students come from outside and then we develop them. Very many move on to bigger cities and bigger theatres.”

Crofts, who was an Oxford-educated lawyer before he turned to photography, has a passion for Ukraine. He made it his mission to observe the dancers at work and to follow their lives outside the theatre. “It was the people not the performance that interested me,” says Crofts. “And although they were a little reluctant at first to be photographed at home, they soon began to tune in to what I wanted.” The result is a beguiling portfolio capturing the lumpishness of swans on dry land alongside flashes of kingfisher-wing transcendence. Like ballet itself, the pictures combine earthbound reality with a glimpse of heaven. ~ JULIE KAVANAGH