Sharing stories about the wartime dance life in Ukraine

It’s not conversations that turn strangers into friends—it’s shared experiences that bring people together. Real-life challenges forge bonds more deeply than a concert we’ve attended together, a debate on stage, or the rush of a cinematic moment.

Here we’d like to spread important stories over the challenging dance life in Ukraine during the Russian full-scale aggression, being told through the tanz.dance magazine.

What unites people is the fear that pulses through our bodies, the way we rely on each other when things get tense, the way confidence in one increases confidence in another…something deeply human that cannot exist virtually. Surviving reality together, huddled in a theater basement as air raid sirens scream overhead: in Odesa, artistry and audience are welded together.

This is the story of two journalists: photographer Caroline Gutman and reporter Anna Nemtsova. Neither is a dance expert. They were researching a story in Odesa, Ukraine’s largest port city on the Black Sea, and found themselves exploring the city’s most fragile treasure: its culture

The opera house is not just a glamorous behemoth at the city’s center, a luxurious accessory for a wealthy minority to enjoy opulent ballets. It is a place where the senselessness of killing—or elsewhere, the senselessness of alienation and consumerism—craves answers to questions that a community must ask together in a very immediate and physical way.

Gutman and Nemtsova looked behind the scenes, attended a dance rehearsal, and enjoyed Hans Christian Andersen’s ballet “The Snow Queen.” They met dancers who are fighting to preserve culture amid war—because culture is not a luxury; it is essential. These dancers are shedding the Soviet legacy, painfully disentangling themselves from socialist traditions that long dominated their stage. Together with their audience, they are fighting for the self-image of culture. This is not about defending a repertoire, a dance technique, or a tradition, nor is it about branding, image, or self-legitimation. It is about culture as such. Not about “homeland.” Not about “culture for all.” Rather, it is about the culture of all.

That is the mission of theater—not just in this time of war, but always. In Odesa, within sight of the front lines, the ballet hall becomes, as it were, the nutshell of a shared fight, unburdened by heavy thoughts, precisely because it is taking place at this very moment.

This way to Odessa