Valery Panov meets Vladimir Vasiliev in 1973

Of the people who continued to see us now, those with no connection to the dissident or emigration movements had a special courage. They were not crusading to change anything in Russia and didn't dream of leaving it. They simply refused to abandon friends, no matter how many times they were interrogated and intimidated.

It came as no surprise that the one dancer who felt for us was from Moscow. This was my old Bolshoi friend Vladimir Vasiliev, now dancing more spectacularly than ever. When I bumped into him, he had won every prize going and was a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He suggested a walk.

"In your position, aren't you scared to be seen with me?" I asked.

"You're damm right I'm scared, who isn't?"

But he went on to say what he thought of our treatment. On trips abroad, while others were calling me "an unknown, third-rate hack, an invention of the Western press," his remarks to Western journalists required real bravery.

To Dance by Valery Panov. 1978. Page 360.

Relationship of critics and dancers

The asymmetry of the relationship between critics and dancers, where critics de facto have more power, is thus quite obvious. Dancers are vulnerable, since critics review them in public and have an impact on their professional identities and careers, but not the other way around (unlike what happens with academics and writers who review each other).

. . . .

Dancers often felt called upon to state, firstly, that 'critics don't understand how much power they have' and, secondly, that 'critics don't know anything about ballet'. Dancers' knowledge is an absorbing, bodily one, the knowledge of an insider. Many dancers have performed various roles in certain productions over a long period of time. Critics know other things: they tend, for example, to be more versed in dance history than dancers. Many critics have moreover seen a larger number of companies in different productions that the dancers have. After all, since the latter have to concentrate on their own dancing all the time, they do not have very much time to go to other performances in their city or abroad. Those critics who used to dance on one level of course remember what it was like, but are now involved in a different kind of career project.

It is the discrepancy between doing ballet and watching ballet that is at work again.

Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers by Helena Wulff. 1998. Page 134, 135.

Doing versus watching ballet

A central dichotomy in the ballet world is the one separating the act of doing ballet from watching ballet: 'You have to do it in order to understand what it's like.' It seems primarily to be the physical exertion of dancing that makes dancers distinguish themselves from the audience in general, and from critics in particular. The vulnerability is another important feature of the stage experience. A leading woman dancer explained to me: 'You're completely naked out there. They see what you have inside!' There is also a subtle boundary between dancers who have danced a particular role and dancers who have not. All this goes into a scepticism of translations of dance to other symbolic modes - be it text, photographs, video or film. Something inevitably gets lost on the way. This elusive quality is, however, still a part of the experience of ballet art - in fact often the heart of it. Watching themselves on video, dancers note that the dancing does not look from the outside like it feels from the inside when doing it.

Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers by Helena Wulff. 1998. Page 8-9.

Villella on partnering

For over three years I worked--struggled--to become a good partner. In the beginning, I thought about it all the time. I tried every tactic possible to improve. And when I began to show progress and felt that I had mastered the basics, I concentrated on the subtleties and began to attend to those. One day I just stopped thinking about it, stopped trying so hard, and because I was thinking about it less often, my fears about it began to diminish. I became comfortable. I was able to place my ballerina on pointe in an arabesque at arm's length with one hand during a performance and feel relaxed. One evening after a performance I said to myself, well, you got through that ballet without thinking about it. You weren't terrified. It just came together. And then I realized, I know how to partner! It was remarkable. I never thought it would happen. This problem that had plagued me for over three years now seemed like my best friend. I suddenly loved it.

. . . .

Some dancers don't like partnering, don't like performing a service to the ballerina. But I grew to like being a cavalier. Looking after a woman onstage, projecting the sense of caring, of giving something to a woman, is a wonderful, masculine feeling, and it became one of the great sensations of my life.

Prodigal Son: Dancing for Balanchine in a World of Pain and Magic by Edward Villella. 1992. Page 70, 71.

Edward Villella on preparing for Prodigal Son

It was also important for me to check the stage, especially the areas where I had to move on a diagonal or cross from one end to the other. Because there are such abrupt movements in the ballet, I really had to have a very secure sense of the floor. During a performance the stage can become a slick. I didn't want to push off and have my foot slip and slide and twist in the opposite direction.

By now "Places, please" was being called, but a part of me would still resist. There was always one more thing I wanted to do. Making a last-minute check of the stage, I'd remove the towel and the robe, but not my leg warmers. I'd wear them until about twenty seconds to curtain. By then I'd be in my place onstage behind the tent waiting to make my entrance. I tried to get the time I stood behind the tent down to a matter of seconds. But in those remaining seconds I'd eliminate everything but the performance from my mind. I'd be scheming, calculating, preparing all day for this moment, and now I'd narrow my concentration into a simple straight line focused solely on my physicality. I'd feel very alone and revel in the solitude. It wasn't a meditative or spiritual moment; it was just that I could stand there and, no matter who was around me, feel calm. I'd wait for the curtain to rise and the music to start, and I'd burst out onstage. Sometimes I had to go into overdrive and call on an extra reserve of energy to propel the performance because I was fatigued mentally and physically, or because I'd be dancing through a sprained ankle, a bruised toe, an intense backache, a stiff neck, or an inflamed elbow. But usually I had energy to spare now no matter how tired I was.

I love leaping into the air while simultaneously exerting the most precise control possible over my body. Onstage I get an exhilarating sense of abandon and freedom when I move. The sensation of piercing the air, of the air passing my ears as I jump, always thrills me. And I love the fact that the audience is watching me. Stepping out onstage, I would feel more alive than I had during the entire day. This is how it was.

Prodigal Son: Dancing for Balanchine in a World of Pain and Magic by Edward Villella. 1992. Page 201-2.

Vaentin Zeglovsky

This reminds me of a really genuine mishap I had when dancing at a small cinema in Riga with Tania Raievska, Liev Fokine's wife. We were appearing in duets and solos. I had only been at the Opera school a few months. The small stage had a decided rake and as I took enormous preparation for a pirouette I didn't realise I was so close to the orchestra pit. In the middle of the pirouette I seemed to feel myself getting nearer and nearer the footlights, so I took a tremendous leap right over the orchestra into the front stalls! I was extremely lucky not to hit anything or anybody, and the applause was thunderous. The manager offered my double salary to repeat the leap every night, but I wasn't keen on risking my neck in this way. Soon all the Opera knew about the famous leap, and my friends swore I had done it as a trick to get applause.

Ballet Crusade by Valentin Zeglovsky. 1944. Page 57.

Lydia Lopokova and Maynard Keynes

A great part of Lydia's charm for Maynard, as we have seen, was her extremely individual use of the English language, or what Keynes called 'Lydiaspeak'. Her emphases, pronunciation and unerring choice of words and phrases were a constant joy. Her friend Sokolova recalls a toast she once gave to Florrie Grenfell: 'And let us not forget dear Florrie's mother who compiled her.' After attending a wedding party she spoke of 'Jesus fomenting wine out of water at Cannes.' Having seen a hostess's famous collection of birds, she reported, 'I had tea with Lady Grey. She has an ovary which she likes to show every one.'

John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937 by Robert Skidelsky. 1992. Page 211.

Fonteyn on characterization

I used to pore over photographs of Karsavina and Pavlova, trying to learn from them what Ashton meant about the importance of eyes, and how characterization is embodied in the angle at which the head is held.

Autobiography by Margot Fonteyn. 1989. Page 49.

Ashton on eyes

Ashton's tutelage is imprinted everywhere: in the low, Pavlova-inspired arabesques, and in the animation of her fingers, wrists, shoulders and, especially her [Fonteyn's] eyes. 'Dancers today don't understand what eyes are for,' he would complain. 'with your eyes properly used, you can distract everybody from your technique. You draw the public to you through your eyes' . . . .

Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton by Julie Kavanagh. 1996. Page 437.

The role of the pianist

The pianist's contribution to the dance lesson is all too frequently taken for granted, and its importance not always fully realized by either the teacher of dance or the pianist himself. An awareness of the importance of his contribution and at the same time of his consequent responsibilities is therefore one of the pianist's first requirements. It is no exaggeration to say that the success of a lesson may often depend just as much on the pianist as on the teacher. Just as a poor teacher can be 'carried along' by a good pianist, so a poor pianist can limit or even ruin the work of the best teacher. Page 9.

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It is highly desirable that a pianist's knowledge of dance should not be confined to the mere observation of movement, but that he should have some experience of the music and movement relationship through actual participation in dance himself. Certain aspects of this relationship can only be fully appreciated through movement. Page 15.

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Second, the pianist who has had some experience of movement observation is in a better position to satisfy the particular demands made of him. He will be better able to judge a suitable tempo for his playing, and to see where the strongest point of a movement occurs or where one phrase of movement ends and another begins. He will be better able to recognise the qualities of movements, whether they be strong or light, sudden or sustained, direct or flexible, whether they flow evenly or unevenly, whether they are large or small, high or low, rising or falling. Above all, his experience of movement observation will enable him to feel the rhythm of the movements he is watching. Just as the dancer might be said to feel music with her body, so the dance pianist hears music with his eyes; that is, he instinctively translates the movement he observes into sound. Page 43.

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Second, it will be evident that merely keeping in time with music is only one aspect of rhythmical movement to music. A factor of supreme importance is that of control of weight. In dancing a waltz an unrhythmical dancer may put equal stress (i.e., equal weight) upon each of the three beats (just as a poor pianist might), whereas a rhythmical dancer would vary the weight element, usually giving more weight to the first beat. Page 43.

Playing for Dance by R M Thackray. 1963.

Edward Gorey on The Nutcracker

Tell me how anyone can sit through thirty-nine Nutcrackers in one season. Convince me.

At first I thought, my God, this is the most boring ballet in the history of the world. Then I began to go more and more. People say, oh nothing much happens in the first act, but the second act is lovely. For me it's the first act that's so marvelous. It's an aspect of Balanchine's genius that nobody has paid much attention to. That party is one of the most enchanting things ever set on the stage. The relations between the children and the adults, everything--are breathtaking. It's a Platonic party, the essence of every family party--the way it should be and never is, the party that no one has ever attended. Every year it gets a little bit better.

Naturally, on of the reasons for going to Nutcracker is to watch the mice carry on--somebody's doing something crazy and new and different every night--and the tree grow, and the bed whiz around. And these days Shaun O'Brien, as Drosselmeir, gives a performance that holds the whole thing together; the instant he comes on you're riveted. The choreography for the Snowflakes is heaven. No one notices it because it's so pretty and they're busy watching the snow come down. And set back in time the way it is, it's nostalgic in a lost-world-that-never-really-existed way. Of course it's a very ambiguous ballet--frightening and funny and strange and beautiful--like most of George's work.

Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gory on Edward Gory edited by Karen Wilkin. 2001. Page 19-20.

Earnings of Russian dancers 1973

Plisetskaya's ruble income is now handsome indeed. Her basic salary is the equal of a high government official's, and, as a People's Artist, is supplemented by a system of bonuses for every performance over four each month. Her average monthly earnings equal those of six or more highly skilled engineers -- but not much more than, say, an American college professor's. It is their opportunity to earn not rubles but foreign currency that makes a small clique of Russian writers and performers fantastically rich by their own country's standards. But these earnings too are a fraction of their counterparts' in Europe and America. What reduces this part of their income is not the Russian standard of living in general or the ruble's minuscule purchasing power, but confiscatory government policy.

Although the Soviet booking agency, StateConcert, demands standard fees for the Bolshoi's Western appearances, it pays Plisetskaya no more than fifty per cent, and often as little as ten per cent, of what similar artists would command for similar work. I did not determine the precise percentage on any specific tour, for although Plisetskaya talks about money with her usual candour -- no qualms about asking the price of this or announcing what she paid for that -- she declined even to hear out a question about her foreign earnings. Once again, this was a reluctance to involve herself in delicate political subjects: as in the case of her own family history, she is not free to comment on the state's disposal of her earnings.

Despite Plisetskaya's silence, however, it is known, if never mentioned in print, that when the Bolshoi is on tour in America members of the corps de ballet are paid five dollars per performance* -- substantially less than the Metropolitan's cleaning ladies employed for those four-odd hours. Leading soloists can earn four or five times as much, and it is said that Plisetskaya commands double the fee of the next highest dancer -- but still under one hundred dollars a performance. Since Margot Fonteyn's fee is roughly $2,500 per performance, StateConcert's profit on Plisetskaya can be imagined: not the ten per cent agent's commission usual in the West, but over ninety-five per cent.

Plisetskaya's case is not unusual: State Concert pays Sviatislav Richter, for example, roughly two hundred dollars from the fee it demands for his foreign appearances.

*This is in addition to their hotel room and one meal a day -- a huge one, when the company is touring under contract to the Hurok Agency. While touring abroad Bolshoi personnel continue to receive their ruble salaries in Moscow, but this too is astonishingly low in most cases: new members of the corps receive some 120 rubles a month, just above a bare minimum urban wage.

Russia close-up by George Feifer. 1973. Page 73-4.

Bruhn's response to music

Commenting on his very particular response to music, Bruhn says it is a response that must be felt individually. "You've got to hear the music for the first time every time you dance to it. If you hear the same thing every time, then you never feel the need to go back for more. The idea is that if you hear more, then you find more of yourself in the music. For me, music is a constant rediscovery. Once I know a role technically and know the outline of the character, then I always go back to the music, because that's my guide. That's when I know how much I can stretch a certain set of steps within so many bars. Of course, you must begin and finish in time with the music, but within that span you must literally 'walk' on the music. You must breathe it and live it and make it a part of your very being. Without that, all is lost!"


Erik Bruhn, Danseur Noble by John Gruen. 1979. Page 25-6.

Erik Bruhn on musical phrasing

Also, I had a facility for musical phrasing. Dancers who are just 'square' will never squeeze the dynamics out of the music and build up to any sort of climax. My fun in having survived the same daily classes for ten years at the school was that I could play with the phrasing of any given step.

. . . . Later on I had a vocabulary I could choose from when doing a certain role. I would experiment with the musical phrasing and, in that way, I could color the steps as well as the character I was portraying. I could actually make the steps fit the character.

Erik Bruhn, Danseur Noble by John Gruen. 1979. Page 24.