NEW YORK, NY.- The scene is surprisingly ordinary. A dancer is speaking in a pleasant office at an opera house in a European city as sounds of a performance stream in from the stage. A window opens onto trees whose leaves rustle in a slight breeze. It could be Zurich or Nantes, France, but it’s not. It’s Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, a city that in the last few months has been subjected, like much the country, to a steady barrage of Russian missile and drone attacks that have injured and killed scores and left many without electricity for several hours a day.

Still, the National Ballet of Ukraine, based in the stately Kyiv Opera House, performs twice a week — before the war it was four times — as does the opera company, for reduced audiences of about 450 (down from about 1,300). That way if there is an attack, everyone can fit into the shelter below. After these interruptions, performers and viewers return to their places and the performance picks up where it left off.

“That’s life on the stage,” Mykyta Sukhorukov, a principal dancer in the company, said in a recent video call from that pleasant office at the opera house. “We try our best. After 2 1/2 years, unfortunately, it feels almost normal.”

At least the opera house has not been damaged or destroyed, unlike those in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol. The electricity supply in recent months has also been steady; not so in the dancers’ apartments.

The company has been able to perform not only at home, but also abroad on tours to Europe and Asia. And this fall, for the first time since Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, company dancers will perform in New York. A group will appear Sept. 18-19 at the Fall for Dance festival at City Center. And then, Oct. 15-16, a larger contingent will dance alongside Canadian-Ukrainian folk troupe Shumka, also at New York City Center, as part of a three-week East Coast tour.

Tours provide relief from the constant stress and noise of incoming fire, principal dancer Nataliia Matsak said in a video interview. “Even though we’re working very hard, it’s like taking a break,” she said, “because we can finally sleep.”

Matsak and her husband, Sergii Kryvokon, are two of eight dancers who will appear at Fall for Dance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Wartime Elegy.” Ratmansky, currently artist in residence at New York City Ballet, was raised in Kyiv, where his parents and sister still live, and was a member of the National Ballet of Ukraine in the 1980s and ’90s, as was his wife, Tatiana, who also worked with the dancers in rehearsals of “Wartime Elegy.” It was in Kyiv that Ratmansky made his first choreographic experiments.

Both Nobuhiro Terada, the company’s director, and Tetiana Beletska, the ballet mistress in charge of rehearsals of “Wartime Elegy,” overlapped with the Ratmanskys when they were young dancers in Kyiv. Beletska even danced in some of those early experiments.

“She is one of the people who taught me how to partner,” Ratmansky said in an interview. “Most of the people I worked with at the theater are still there. We have had such different experiences in our lives, but at the same time, there is some deeper connection that is easy to recapture.”

Many dancers and teachers left Ukraine in the days after the Russian invasion, but a significant number have returned, including Sukhorukov, despite the danger and the possibility of being drafted. “This is my home and I never truly thought about moving away,” Sukhorukov said.

Oleksandr Shapoval, a dancer in the company who had recently become a teacher at the Kyiv ballet academy, joined the armed forces after the invasion. He was killed in the early months of the war.

The troupe, which used to have 160 dancers, is now down to about 100, Terada said; they include dancers from other theaters, especially those near the Russian border, that have been unable to function.

The dancers, a generation younger than Ratmansky, don’t have memories of him as a performer or budding choreographer. But all have heard of him, less, perhaps, for his ballet work than for his vocal support of Ukraine since the war began. “He understands what is happening here in his heart,” Sukhorukov said. “He feels the pain inside, and you can feel that in his choreography.”

“Wartime Elegy” was created for Pacific Northwest Ballet in September 2022, seven months into the war. It is set to mournful music for piano and strings by the Ukrainian classical composer Valentin Sylvestrov, alternating with recordings of folk music — some sound surprisingly like American bluegrass — played by village orchestras.

The mood of the piece alternates too, between loss, a haunting fragmentation and hope, and a kind of flippant, tongue-in-cheek playfulness. Its evocations of folk dance are an occasion for silliness, almost as if the dancers were thumbing their noses at tragedy, as well as for bravura: speedy footwork, flips, airy leaps, mad chases and a macabre acrobatic move in which the bodies of the dancers rise and fall, an image that suggests death and resurrection as part of a continuous loop.

The dancers understand this pairing of darkness and humor. “It’s very organic to Ukrainian culture,” said dancer Olga Golytsia on a video call from Kyiv. “Even in the darkest times, we don’t lose our humor in life. In the bomb shelters, you see someone singing, someone talking, kids laughing.”

The rehearsals, which took place in Amsterdam in May, were not easy logistically. Because there are no flights into or out of Ukraine, the dancers had to travel first to Warsaw, a 16-hour trip by bus, before flying to Amsterdam.

The Ratmanskys were waiting for them in Amsterdam, where Alexei was rehearsing two dances with the Dutch National Ballet. For five days, after a full slate of rehearsals with the Dutch troupe, Ratmansky rehearsed “Wartime Elegy” in the evening with the Ukrainian dancers. Additional rehearsals were held on Zoom once the dancers returned home.

The hardest thing, several dancers said, was finding a way to dance their own experiences of the war. “Alexei said, ‘This is your life and I want to see it on the stage. You understand all of this more deeply than I do,’” Matsak said of the process. At first “it was very difficult to understand how to express what I feel,” she said. “Now, I think, I understand, it’s my performance, my story.”

Only after their final rehearsal in Amsterdam were they able to sit down together and talk about their lives. “We went to a bar across the street and sat for a few hours,” Ratmansky recalled. “I listened to their stories, and we were just talking, talking, talking. But of course it wasn’t enough.”

“Wartime Elegy” was first performed in Kyiv in June, to tears and standing ovations. “You have everything in this performance,” Sukhorukov said, “true happiness, true sadness. And afterward, the audience feels hope about the future.”

Its inclusion in the National Ballet of Ukraine’s repertory is part of an attempt by Terada to bring new works to help the dancers grow. The company, whose dancing style reflects the training typical of the Soviet period, is no longer performing ballets with scores by Russian composers, including “Swan Lake,” “Spartacus” and “Romeo and Juliet.” (“La Bayadère,” despite being choreographed in Russia, gets a pass because Ludwig Minkus, its composer, was born in Vienna.)

The company continues to perform works by Ukrainian choreographers, like the comic “Chasing Two Hares” and the folk-inspired “Forest Song,” excerpts from which will be included in the U.S. tour. Terada has also invited stagers from abroad to set works like John Neumeier’s “Spring and Fall” and Hans van Manen’s “Five Tangos.” Next year, if all goes well, Terada said, the company will dance a work by George Balanchine, for the first time in its history.

It is all part of what Ratmansky considers a long overdue renewal of the repertory. “For too long, they were cut off,” he said. “Now they have to rethink their connection to the Russian, Soviet school they grew up in and enrich their repertory with works from abroad, from Europe, from America. I am hopeful.”

“Wartime Elegy,” too, ends on a note of hope, one that several of the dancers said they struggle to feel in their own life, after 2 1/2 years of war. “Things are really bad right now,” Golytsia said. “But you cannot live without hope.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.