MIAMI, FLA.- “Imagine you’ve been rushing through the forest for hours,” choreographer Alexei Ratmansky called out to Stanislav Olshanskyi as he ran across an airy ballet studio in Miami Beach. Olshanskyi, playing a prince, was searching for the woman he has been duped into betraying. “You are just now realizing the consequences of what you’ve done,” Ratmansky said. “How does it feel?”

Outside, visible through large windows, people passed by, dressed for the beach. Inside, the willowy, delicate-featured Olshanskyi — a prince out of a fairy tale — gathered his thoughts and tried his entrance again, this time conveying the requisite urgency, verging on panic.

It was a week before the opening of Miami City Ballet’s “Swan Lake,” which the company performs in a critically acclaimed production by Ratmansky that draws on historical sources, and is rich in choreographic and dramatic detail. Ratmansky, artist in residence at New York City Ballet, was in town overseeing rehearsals for the ballet, which runs through May 12.

Olshanskyi, who grew up in Kremenets, in western Ukraine and trained in Kyiv, is just one of many artists displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The idea of ending up in Miami, where he joined the company in 2022, would never have crossed his mind had it not been for the war. So much so that when Lourdes Lopez, the director of Miami City Ballet, reached out to him, eager to help a Ukrainian dancer at loose ends, he hesitated. “I was not sure,” he said. “Miami is so far from Ukraine, from Europe.”

But even so far from home, thoughts of war are never distant. “The war is always present,” Olshanskyi said after rehearsal. “When you’re not thinking about it, suddenly something will remind you.”

The move also meant adjusting to a new way of dancing. The Miami troupe specializes in the ballets and technique of Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine: quick, light and constantly in motion. Olshanskyi was trained in the slower, more grounded and stately technique of the Russian and Ukrainian school.

“Stas is one of the best Ukrainian dancers of his generation,” Ratmansky, who grew up in Kyiv and began his career there before the fall of the Soviet Union, said after the rehearsal. “I hope that the infusion of the Balanchine speed and attack will help him to refine his coordination like it helped me when I was first introduced to it.”

Adapting to this performance style was a challenge for Olshanskyi, who was already in his late 20s and an accomplished dancer when he joined. (He recently turned 30.)

“I didn’t have the stamina for Balanchine,” he said. “When you’re onstage, you’re dancing all the time. The first time I danced ‘Square Dance’” — a 1957 Balanchine ballet — “I was dying. I couldn’t breathe.”

Lopez, who first saw him dance at a benefit performance in London in 2022, has observed this evolution. “I could see him making the connection,” she said, “between the way we work in class, with different rhythms and speed and syncopation, and the way it allows him to move in Balanchine’s ballets.”

“At first you fight it in your head,” Olshanskyi said, “but I can see it now. I can move faster now and I am actually jumping even a little bit higher.” A turning point was dancing “Agon,” one of Balanchine’s most modernist, stylized and rhythmically complex works, set to Igor Stravinsky. “I love ‘Agon,’” he said, eyes widening. “There are so many ways to dance it, so many ways to show the steps.”

When the war began, Olshanskyi, then a principal dancer at the National Ballet of Ukraine, was on tour in the Netherlands with a Dutch dancer and his Ukrainian colleague Oleksii Tiutiunnyk. Olshanskyi and Tiutiunnyk decided to stay there, performing at benefit galas to raise funds for the war effort and then assisting in the creation of the United Ukrainian Ballet, a pickup company of Ukrainian dancers stranded abroad by the Russian invasion.

It was in The Hague that Olshanskyi met Ratmansky, when the Ukrainian Ballet was rehearsing his “Giselle” in the summer of 2022. The company toured widely — the Netherlands, Britain, Australia and the United States — though support eventually faded, and the troupe disbanded in January. Some dancers returned to Ukraine; others joined ensembles abroad. A few who remained in The Hague are attempting to create a smaller version of the group.

Facing challenges at home, or family separation, even some dancers who at first remained in Ukraine have left. Oleksii Potiomkin, a member of the National Ballet who became an army medic at the start of the war, went to join his wife and son in Italy, where he dances freelance. “The guys from my military unit told me, ‘You should go back onstage; that is your front line,’” he said in an interview. “I want to represent Ukrainian art on a good level.”

Olshanskyi left The Hague in the fall of 2022. “I needed a company, a schedule, daily class,” he said. When he arrived in Miami, he knew almost nothing about the company or the city. “I had seen rehearsals of American companies on Instagram, and I thought, ‘this is so different, so interesting.’”

At first the transition seemed unproblematic, if somewhat surreal. “I am a very positive, easy person,” Olshanskyi said. “I’m living on Miami Beach? Are you kidding me? I mean, I’m from a small town in Ukraine.”

Gradually, the enormity of the change, and of the distance that separated him from almost everything and everyone he knew, began to sink in. Olshanskyi realized he had been living as if he were planning to stay for just a few months, as if, he said, “the war was going to stop any minute.”

And then in the fall, he got depressed for the first time in his life, he said. After rehearsals he would go back to his apartment nearby and cry for hours, alone. “I was missing home, missing my mom, missing everything in general,” he said. “I was trying to hide from the war, put up a wall, but you can’t do that.” He pushed through with the help of a small circle of friends, including his regular dance partner, Dawn Atkins, and Brazilian dancer Rui Cruz, he explained.

When he feels the need to talk to a fellow Ukrainian, he has Yuliia Moskalenko, who joined the company just before he did. The two have known each other since they were children in ballet school in Kyiv. “It’s important to have someone here with whom you can share your emotions, and who understands,” said Moskalenko, who plays Olshanskyi’s mother, the queen, in “Swan Lake.”

Besides Balanchine, Olshanskyi has danced other works he might never have been exposed to, including Twyla Tharp’s hyperathletic “In the Upper Room.” Initially, he wasn’t sure he liked the choreography and found it almost impossible to dance — “my head hurt from the exhaustion!” By the end of the process, he was hooked. “There is so much joy,” he said.

“Swan Lake” is a return to a repertory he is more familiar with. At the recent rehearsal, he looked relaxed and fully in his element. During breaks, he and Atkins worked through a couple of partnering glitches. Atkins said later, “We have so much trust between us, and can almost predict what the other one will do,” adding that, “because we know each other so well, we know it’s going to be fine.”

Before coming to the United States, Olshanskyi said, he was sick of “Swan Lake.” But “this one feels different,” he said, adding of Ratmansky, “he’s so expressive, and so clear.”

“But also, honestly, it’s because this is a new chapter in my life. I feel it very much, and I care more.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.