Olga Preobrajenska

During the war, eager to have my mother's approval--she always talked with adoration of Anna Pavlova and Nijinsky--I started taking ballet classes once a week at Madame Preobrajenska's. I was then eleven. Years later I realized that I was working in the very room where Zelda Fitzgerald had studied and used to change in the dressing room described in her book Save Me the Waltz. The building--the historic Studio Wacker--was permeated with the acrid smell of years of sweating bodies. The whole place thumped and creaked--discordant bars of Chopin and Schumann and sometimes Tchaikovsky were heard, overlapping a bad soprano's vocal exercises. The floor was gray and uneven. Madam sprayed the oak floorboards with a little watering can to settle the dust before doing the "middle".

Olga Preobrajenska was a legendary figure, a prima ballerina at the Maryinsky Theater who had escaped the Russian revolution with her prince. (Every Russian ballet dancer seemed to have fled accompanied by a prince.) She was very small indeed--probably no more than five feet high--and wore a little kerchief around her neck to hide the wrinkles. She demonstrated the steps mainly with her hands, but sometimes she jumped and twirled like a young girl. She liked the boys best and did not hesitate to touch them to redress a faulty posture. The greatest dancers in France came to this class and did incredible turns and leaps, even though the room was not large and the ceiling was low compared to those in modern rehearsal rooms. A few mothers clustered around the piano, but my mother seldom came. I took the Metro alone or went by bicycle. My teacher was good, and it was up to me to get on with it. I progressed slowly.

Thank Heaven. . . My Autobiography by Leslie Caron. 2009. Page 42.