A Wonderland without Wonder: Alexei Ratmansky's Wunderland Premieres at the Hamburg Ballet
- 28 minutes ago
- 8 min read
On 20 June, the Hamburg Ballet gave the premiere of Alexei Ratmansky's two-act Wunderland. Shown as part of Hamburg's Tanztriennale, the production opened the 51st edition of the celebrated Hamburger Ballett-Tage (Hamburg Ballet Days), the festival founded by John Neumeier in 1975.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
When the Hamburg Ballet announced Wunderland as the headline premiere of its 2025/26 season, committed balletomanes could hardly suppress a question: why? In 2011 Christopher Wheeldon created his own Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet, endowing each character with vivid variations and a movement language of their own — think of the Mad Hatter's tap dance, or the comic parody of the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty performed by a Queen of Hearts no longer young and no longer so supple. The production astonished with its video effects, which conveyed the metamorphoses of Alice's body, and with Joby Talbot's original score — the kind you cannot forget once you have heard it. The success surpassed every expectation: fifteen years on, Alice has never left the repertoire — you can still see it at La Scala, Bayerisches Staatsballett and the Royal Ballet in London. It has been filmed several times for cinema and streaming, so audiences the world over have had the chance to come to know it.
Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | photo by Nicholas MacKay
Yet Alexei Ratmansky had no reason to fear such comparisons. His staging of Romeo and Juliet was once the third the Bolshoi Theatre had seen, and audiences and critics alike measured his reading against the already classic — and, for many, "great" — versions by Lavrovsky and Grigorovich. Beyond that, over more than thirty years of choreographic work Ratmansky has established himself not only as one of the foremost choreographers of our time, but as a subtle master of narrative ballet. His Anna Karenina, Cinderella, Lost Illusions and Romeo and Juliet are not merely well made; they possess a deep dramaturgy and a fine authorial view of their stories. The same was to be expected of Wunderland. But something went wrong…
The ballet is divided into two acts following Lewis Carroll's books: the first is given over to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the second to Through the Looking-Glass. At first this dramaturgical choice seemed promising — and already distinct from Christopher Wheeldon's version, which is confined to the first book alone.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The second part, with its paradoxes — running in place, time flowing backwards — handed the ballet a ready-made language: mirroring, contrast, movement in reverse. Yet in the end neither tale was brought to life: dozens of characters flashed across the stage without ever acquiring character or weight. The looking-glass logic never became a dramaturgical language, and Wonderland itself was stripped of its absurdity.
There is little point in describing in detail the scenes that unfolded on stage. Instead of a searching meditation, or an engaging dialogue with the audience about the difficulty of growing up, the absurdity of the adult world, the limits of the imagination and the other weighty themes in which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glassabound, the Hamburg Ballet stage offered a series of comic revues. Every episode from Carroll's two books was staged literally, illustratively, reduced to its outward embodiment.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The Cheshire Cat, in a plush costume that might have come from a Halloween party or a carnival, crawls about the stage on all fours. Humpty Dumpty, true to his name, totters from side to side like a tumbler doll, drawing laughter from the house. The flowers spin in diagonals of chaînés and "open" into sous-sus, just as flowers have done since the days of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. But the Cheshire Cat's musings on universal madness, Humpty Dumpty's doubts about the meaning of words, the haughtiness and body-shaming of the flowers — all this, and the other meanings that in fact lie behind these bright and preposterous figures, were lost. And in this same vein Ratmansky presented every one of Wunderland's many-sided characters.
Of course, a choreographer is under no obligation to ponder lofty matters and has every right to make a light, cheerful ballet — perhaps even one for children. And perhaps, had some young choreographer come up with nothing better than to hand the dancers plush flamingos and hedgehogs for a game of croquet, we would have forgiven it as inexperience. But Ratmansky operates on another level.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The way certain characters were realised on the stage of the world-renowned Hamburg Ballet left one bewildered, so out of place did it seem. Wunderland would be better suited to a music hall, where so straightforward and jokey reading of the characters would look entirely at home. And a joke such as the blow between the legs of Tweedledum and Tweedledee (which, incidentally, brought the house down) looked vulgar and ridiculous on this stage, yet would have come across quite differently in a cabaret.
What astonishes most is that Ratmansky knows perfectly well how to make funny ballets. His The Bright Stream is a benchmark of the comic ballet, in which the irony directed at its characters, their weaknesses and their vices is constructed with filigree precision — and through dance itself. How many of the Bolshoi's pretentious, gallant princes Ratmansky has exposed and made laugh at themselves! The same thunderous laughter can be drawn by a scene in which a classical danseur, dressed up in pointe shoes and a Romantic tutu, angularly and clumsily impersonates a classical ballerina.
But the laughter springs not from jokes below the belt, but from the ballet's coherent comic architecture, from irony and from allusions to La Sylphide. It is no accident that Wheeldon, too, in his Alice reaches for the same device as Ratmansky: his parody of the Rose Adagio amuses not through pratfalls and prods, but through a delicate play with a recognisable canon.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The production's design also raises serious questions. In the first act the principal set is a multitude of arches that conjure the image of a rabbit hole. During Alice's fall, these arches lend the descent a handsome three-dimensional depth. But as the action proceeds, the same device comes to resemble a pipe into which Wunderland and all its characters have, for some reason, been stuffed. The looking-glass world is handled through screen-like panels with arched openings that travel across the stage, redrawing zones and propelling the action. The chess game, meanwhile, was reflected only in one of the early scenes, by a chessboard pattern projected in light onto the floor.
During the production process the theatre was forced to cut the design budget. This may explain why some scenes in the first act boast accomplished video graphics (Alice's serpentine neck, for example), while others (the backdrop of the royal garden) look as though they were generated by artificial intelligence. The second act is left without any video graphics at all.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The musical accompaniment, too, proved less than wholly successful. The scenes change to a collage of thirty-seven musical works — from Bach and Schubert to John Cage — together with original pieces by Vasyl Ratmansky, the choreographer's son, all assembled and orchestrated by Philip Feeney. These fragments sit poorly together: the stylistic seams are audible to the naked ear. At several points the music even veered into the cosmic — better suited to a science-fiction adventure like the Soviet cartoon The Mystery of the Third Planet than to Alice's imagination.
Dance critics and musicologists regularly take choreographers to task for such potpourris. True, not every company, and not for every production, can commission an original score from a composer. And where, after all, is one to find so much varied yet coherent musical material to portray every character in Carroll's world? But these, and a great many other questions, are precisely what a theatre's leadership ought to be asking when it commissions a new ballet.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
The ballet did have its felicitous touches — for instance, two allusions to the work of the Hamburg Ballet's founding father, John Neumeier. At the start of the first act, Alice's sister came on stage and sat down to read a book, paying no attention to the audience still noisily taking their seats. The conceit continued when Alice herself ran on. However hard the girl tried to win her sister's attention, the elder one — as befits a grown-up — ignored the child, just as she ignored the audience. And in the second act a large mirror stood on stage, copied exactly from Neumeier's The Lady of the Camellias.
As for the dancers, the whole company performed cleanly and within the bounds of the roles assigned to them. Olivia Betteridge looked entirely at ease as a naïve, guileless Alice, never once stepping outside that reading for the length of the evening. Aleix Martínez leapt about with brio, capturing the manner of the Rabbit. And the most high-flying, most danced-out episode of the ballet — the one that drew the warmest applause — belonged to Francesco Cortese and Louis Musin as the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
And although the company carried the premiere off with apparent ease, Wunderland nonetheless came across as raw and unfinished. Some narrative threads were simply lost. The Red King, for example, was shown several times with no subtext whatsoever — merely asleep upon the set — and the thread led nowhere thereafter. Yet the central riddle of Through the Looking-Glass — who is dreaming whom, Alice the King or the King Alice — was never addressed at all.
It is hard to say what went wrong, and when, in the making of Wunderland. Perhaps the blame lies with the tight deadlines and Ratmansky's crowded schedule, which left no time to work the ballet's dramaturgy and choreography through with care — though the production team does list Kyle Davis as choreographic assistant and Vivien Arnold for scenario and dramaturgy. Perhaps the design cuts are to blame. Either way, Wunderland was the company's first narrative ballet since 2019, and was meant to open a new chapter in its history after John Neumeier stepped down as artistic director of the Hamburg Ballet in July 2024.
photo by Kiran West | Hamburg Ballet
Will Wunderland hold its place in the repertoire as long as Neumeier's legendary dramatic ballets? Does this premiere mark a way out of the crisis into which the Hamburg Ballet fell after Neumeier's departure? Or does Wunderland merely register the impasse in which companies built around a single figure inevitably find themselves once they lose their leader?
Time will answer this, and many other questions — as will each spectator, for themselves. After all, the premiere drew a standing ovation, and the audience received the piece warmly — most warmly of all the older generation of theatregoers, to whom, judging by the response, this kind of theatre came closest.
In closing, I would add this: there comes a time when grown-ups cease to believe in wonder and see in children's tales nothing but fiction. Perhaps Alexei Ratmansky, who in recent years has borne the war between Russia and Ukraine with great difficulty, has lost — for a time — the capacity to fantasise. His mind is consumed by the horrors of war; that subject moves him far more deeply than Lewis Carroll's metaphors. And this is wholly understandable when one considers how closely his life is bound up with both Russia and Ukraine: he came of age as an artist in both countries, and the war runs straight through his own biography.
This becomes all the clearer if you watch his ballet Solitude, created in 2024 for New York City Ballet. The work goes back to a photograph in which a father kneels beside the body of his thirteen-year-old son, killed by a Russian airstrike near a bus stop in Kharkiv during the first year of the war. The ballet is built around the father's stillness as he sits for a long while beside the boy, who wears a jacket just like the one in the photograph. When the father rises, he dances a long, almost endless solo, then repeats it as a duet with his son.
Solitude, Nationale Opera & Ballet | photo by Altin Kaftira
Which raises the question: in 2026, is there any point in staging fairy tales at all?
We wish the Hamburg Ballet a new voice, as vivid as the one it once had. We wish Alexei Ratmansky more ballets on the themes that keep him awake and will not let him go. And to those who genuinely love Lewis Carroll, we wish a chance to see Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
As for Wunderland, you can see it — and form your own opinion, which may well differ from that of a dance critic — on 23, 26 June and 2 July, and again next season.
Text: Margarita Makhrina
Comments