Ballet Documentaries Part II

Earlier I wrote about two recent ballet documentaries that focused on young dancers striving in the current system of international ballet competitions. For me, First Position and Only When I Dance were really eye-opening, because that is a system that has developed fairly recently and with which I was not at all familiar. Watching those films rekindled old memories, and sent me back to my mental archive where I dug up another pair of documentaries that gave me insight into the “real” world of ballet when I was a young ballet student. Both The Children of Theater Street (a film and a book) and A Very Young Dancer (a photo essay book) contributed to my appreciation for ballet as an art and to my understanding of what it takes to make a dancer. I won’t say they “inspired” me exactly – what I saw in them was the distance between even my own fairly rigorous RAD training and the all-consuming commitment of the future professional. However, now that I’m a grownup and enjoying dance recreationally rather than with any ambition to make a career of it, I think that I can fairly say that for me, both of these old documentaries are part of why I dance, and why I love dance.

Sometime in the mid-seventies, I remember going to see The Children of Theater Street (directors Robert Dornhem and Earle Mack, thank you IMDB) and being blown away by the images of those little Soviet children stripping down to their underwear before a panel of pinch-bunned women and craggy men who proceeded to manipulate their bodies in all kinds of somewhat painful-looking ways in order to determine whether they were worthy. The bare-bones living conditions, the intensity of the training regimen, and the smouldering, tamped down, but white hot desire of those Angelinas and Galinas and Konstantins made me realize what it really meant to be a dancer (and that I probably wasn’t going to ever be a star with the Bolshoi or the Kirov). The immense gulf between my late-1970s American childhood life and the stark, spare lives of those artists (hard to call them kids) deepened and humanized my perception of the very different Cold War worlds of my country and theirs. My mother gave me the book based on the film that year for my birthday, and sometimes still I get it out and gaze at those mournful, beautiful black-and-white film stills; it’s romantic nonsense to claim that Russians, more than others, are soulful folk, but in the case of the protagonists of that film I think it is fair to say that the hardships of their lives made them particularly stoic and melancholy in a way that middle-class American children just are not.

The other influential ballet narrative of my early years was the lovely, haunting photojournalistic book A Very Young Dancer, by Jill Krementz, from the previous year (1976), also given to me as a birthday gift. It follows a year in the life of a girl at the School of American Ballet, culminating in her performance as Clara in the Nutcracker. A recent article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/arts/dance/a-very-young-dancer-and-the-life-that-followed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) in the New York times tracked down the young protagonist of the book and revealed the rather sad story of her life after ballet (she left dance not long after the year featured in the book); by contrast, the young Soviets who featured in Children of Theater Street were all mentored through the grueling process and most of them became dance professionals (I tracked them down on Google using the list of names from IMDB – that’s the extent of my research). 

In all likelihood the very different outcomes for the Soviets versus the American have more to do with individual circumstances, character, ability, and motivation but the systems themselves also play an important role. As alien and severe as the Soviet system may have looked, the documentary made clear that the teachers really cared for and loved their pupils, and gave their lives to developing them as artists, though their methods were often very harsh in appearance. Likewise, I am sure that the teachers at SAB devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the children and their development, and often used similarly tough strategies to push them towards success. However, there are profound differences; because of the value placed on individualism, the capitalist framework for ballet education, the lesser degree of nationalistic/patriotic investment in dance as an expression of our cultural identity, the association of ballet with elites and effetes, and the less rigid and regimented direction of society by centralized, governmental authority, the young American dancer faced a series of choices and challenges quite apart from those encountered by her Soviet peers; for them, the choice wasn’t really between a “normal” childhood and the rigors of being a ballet dancer, but between an economically straitened and limited life and a life of constrained but definite opportunity.

Inspired by my search for the Children of The Children of Theater Street, I decided to see if I could track down any of my peers from Cornish in the mid-eighties and see if any of them had professional careers as dancers. Using an old program from our December, 1983 performance of The Snow Maiden, I discovered some interesting facts. At least one of our cohort became a principal dancer with a regional contemporary ballet company and now teaches in the LA area (I wish I had known – I would have taken a class from him). One became a showgirl, dancing in New York (Rockettes!), Paris (Folies Bergeres), and Las Vegas. Another is on the board of a major urban ballet company, suggesting that she probably retained links to ballet even if she didn't actually dance professionally (though she was among the best of us), and several more are listed as ballet teachers or owners of ballet studios. What, if anything does this prove? I don’t know. Just that it gets under your skin and once it’s there it’s hard to escape, whether you’re a skinny kid in her underpants in Leningrad in 1975 or an American kid cast as Marousha (in a babushka) in 1983.