Stephan Alessi for The New York Times

A moving portrait of a shattered Ukraine

Alexei Ratmansky’s new dance for New York City Ballet, “Solitude,” is a reaction to the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

Ratmansky grew up in Kyiv, and his piece offers a chilling view of the war while avoiding sentimentality. It was inspired by a photograph of a father kneeling next to the body of his 13-year-old son after he was killed by a Russian airstrike at a bus stop in Kharkiv. That grief, our critic wrote in February, is apparent from the start in this “heartbreaking” work. Watch a section of it, performed by Joseph Gordon.