Editorial: Welcome to Chicago, Kyiv City Ballet

This weekend, the Kyiv City Ballet is performing at Chicago’s historic Auditorium Theatre. It’s part of a short U.S. tour by the company of courageous Ukrainian dancers, who somehow found a way to make this happen.

Their artistic director, Ivan Kozlov, told us that performing is far from easy as Vladimir Putin’s war rages on.

“We are living for the day,” he said. “All the time, somebody is getting bad news from home, or good news from home. All the time, somebody needs to be cheered up.”

We can only imagine. So how do the 35 dancers and five crew members, almost all Ukrainian, carry on with their work?

“It’s much easier to go through hard stuff when you are doing things you are used to doing,” Kozlov said. “This is the same for artists. We create new things. We try and focus. And the dancers try and send money home to their families.”

Not, then, your run-of-the-mill ballet tour but a celebration of resistance and defiance in the face of Putin’s unconscionable aggression, the antithesis of artistic endeavor.

So welcome to Chicago, Ukrainian friends. We hope you enjoy your time in our beautiful city and get the support you so richly deserve.

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