Resilience seems to be a key word these days, popping up frequently here after our 2024 hurricane season. It’s a word that applies to two related events in January: the reopening of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, after flooding destruction caused by Hurricane Milton paused the fall season; and the appearance of the company that will present the first performance of the winter season at the hall: Grand Kyiv Ballet’s production of the ballet Snow Queen.

The one-night-only performance of the ballet, set to music by Vivaldi, Grieg, Massenet and Mozart, is a rental of the hall by the Grand Kyiv Ballet, founded by artistic director Oleksandr Stoianov; both he and his wife, Kateryna Kukhar, are principal dancers with the company. The ballet tells the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of close friends Kai and Gerda, who grew up together side by side. But one day, splinters of a troll’s mirror get into Kai’s heart and eye, turning him cold and vulnerable to the spell of the wicked Snow Queen. It’s up to Gerda to rescue him and return him home. (Any resemblance to Disney’s hit film Frozen is, well, loose.)

There’s lots of magic at work in the story, but in real life the story of founder Stoianov, who goes by the first name Alex, is full of its own complications. He, his wife, and their two young children were forced to flee Ukraine after the Russians invaded in 2022. But that was not his first sudden departure from a homeland.

“I am originally from Crimea,” Stoianov says, “and before 2014, a lot of Ukrainian dancers had joined the Moscow Ballet and other Russian companies, traveling around the world. When Russia occupied Crimea, my home, I moved to Kyiv and created the Grand Kyiv Ballet.”

Stoianov adds that, “Before this, not a lot of people knew about Ukrainian ballet. We started to collect the best dancers from Odessa, Lyiv, Kyiv, and started to make tours, beginning in 2014 in France. Year by year, we have since danced on four continents, and have more than 120 dancers.”

But the company’s burgeoning success was interrupted with the occupation of Ukraine. “One week before the war started, I flew to France for a tour,” Stoianov says. “My wife and her students were flying to Germany for a ballet competition. One day before the war, we met in France, spoke with our children by phone, had flight tickets home to Kyiv. But when the next day started, we received a phone call at 5 a.m. from our babysitter, crying and in panic, because bombs had started falling. My wife started crying, trembling. We tried to take a car and drive to Kyiv, but it was impossible. So we started to call friends who could pick up our daughter, and I found someone who gave us 30 minutes to deliver our daughter and sitter to another location, ready to drive from Kyiv to Poland.

“People were in panic, a lot of roads closed, some occupied by Russian troops. They drove 10 hours the first day and only made 70 miles, and they slept in an abandoned house. Finally, we met our daughter and the sitter on the Polish border, and after another six or eight hours, we met our son at another border, with Hungary, with his godfather.”

For a while, the reunited family could think of nothing but being together, but in time they began to do charity projects with groups like the Red Cross, raising funds for dancers from Ukraine to find new homes and safety, often in the United States. They were fortunate enough to receive sanctuary in the States, too, through the help of International Ballet Academy founder Vera Altunina, finding a home, a car, and schools for their children.

Now based in Seattle, the couple continue to support ballet students and schools in Ukraine with a portion of the proceeds they make from their tours, such as with the Snow Queen performance here. (Company members also help to support their families still in Ukraine.) It is, Stoianov says, “a neoclassical ballet, with costumes and decorations created in Ukraine by our best designers. And, of course, this is a ballet for the whole family, for Christmastime.”

For tickets to Snow Queen, at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 2 at the Van Wezel, stop by the now reopened box office, call (941) 263-6799, or go to vanwezel.org.