The Spy Who Loves Me (I hope)

A recent whim led me to check out my page-view statistics for this blog and I was totally surprised to find that people whom I don’t actually know must be reading it, at least from time to time. This constitutes a big change from six months ago when I was the only one who read it, ever. How do I ascertain that some of you are strangers to me? By the simple fact that some page views come from Russia, and so far as I know, nobody I know directly lives in Russia.

The Bright Stream... one of the original "tractor ballets" now in revival.

This is all a little intimidating. Not only am I a child of the Cold War, for whom the ceaseless barrage of media-borne Russophobia of the 70s and 80s was a formative factor in my psychic development, but I am also presuming to write about ballet, which, while hardly born on Russian soil, is so clearly and definitely Russian in so many ways. Let’s add to this that my maternal grandmother’s family fled a Russian pogrom of Kiev in 1881. And what with the violent character of recent developments in the Russian ballet world (namely the acid attack on Sergei Filin of the Bolshoi), one does tend to get a little edgy.

Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, was the most terrifying bogeyman of my childhood. I know this will sound totally clichéd, but when I was young, I lived in dire fear of total nuclear war. I grew up in Seattle, and the flight paths for SeaTac airport sometimes went right over our house; at night, I would lie in bed and listen to the jets, very certain that someday soon one of them would not be a plane at all, but a big ICBM coming to kill us all in the interest of wiping out the nuclear submarine base on Puget Sound. I had seen, in Life Magazine photo books in the school library, the horrific images of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those were the visions of sugarplums that danced in my head. 

Yeehaw! Mutual Assured Destruction!

At the same time I was aware of another Russia, the Russia that produced the divinely beautiful Misha and my heroine Natalia Makarova, the Russia of The Firebird, and the Russia of The Children of Theater Street. That Russia fascinated me and seemed a dream country. Russian literature, I understood from Woody Allen, was both heavier and more easily lampooned than western European literature (oh, how I still love Love and Death, which I laughed at long before I ever picked up a novel by Tolstoy or read a short story by Chekov: "Your skin is so soft!" "Yes, and it covers my whole body."). Russian women, I knew from James Bond films, were more beautiful and sinister than American women. 

I even had real-world evidence for this last point. A girl who went to my middle school, Lara, was Russian – her family had defected, not all that long ago. It was a very romantic story, though I don’t recall the details. Lara was absolutely gorgeous, with one of those cut-yourself-on-my-cheekbones faces, thick hair the color of actual, real gold, and the most stunning blue-green eyes. She was also very physically developed and I remember all the boys panting around after her like, well, like lust-crazed thirteen year old boys.

Plus, her name was Lara.

Lara, aka Julie Christie. Not Russian.

I had one of those music-box jewelry boxes that were popular at the time; some kind of printed vinyl paper exterior, flocked pink velvet lining, and a little plastic ballerina with a tutu made of real tulle who rotated slowly while the music played. It had the theme music from Dr. Zhivago. I used to dance around in my room to it, because I thought it was actually Russian ballet music. Years later, in high school, when my Italian friend Elisa, a film buff, dragged me to a showing of Dr. Zhivago at the Neptune, I was shocked to discover that in fact Tchaikovsky had nothing to do with it. Really, there’s nothing very Russian about it all: Julie Christie, who played Lara in the film, was born in Assam, India to English tea-planters; the composer, Maurice Jarre was French; the MGM Studio Orchestra, which played the soundtrack music was not particularly Russian, though the balalaikas on the soundtrack were evidently played by musicians from the Russian Orthodox churches around L.A.

Pussy Riot in action, 2012, Red Square

To my youthful imagination, Russia was at once this menacing beast that threatened to eat us all alive, a hotbed of sinister spies, an exciting foreign place where people rolled their R’s, wore fur coats, and ate caviar on rye toast in their dachas, and the font of all that was truly inspired in classical dance.  Now having grown up and living in a world where Russia figures very differently in the geopolitical game, I have (I hope) acquired a more subtle and complex understanding of “Russia.” I’ve read more of the great Russian books (even without Woody Allen, there’s quite a lot of humor there), forced myself to sit through some of the more bloated classics of Russian cinema (is there a medal for watching all of Andre Rubelev with sporadic Italian subtitles?), followed the unraveling of what looked like an impulse toward a more open society in the early 1990s, worried about the long-term consequences of Putin’s policies in Chechnya and elsewhere, and shuddered at the excesses of the criminal aristocracy (plus ca change?) and the murderous persecution of artists and journalists. 

Still, my “Russia” is a Russia of the imagination; I’ve never been there, and I have few contacts with Russians (aside from a few friends and colleagues, who belong to that subset of Russians who are also

Features Madame Snezhnevskaya,
ballerina and royal mistress

Jews, and thus have a particular view of things that is probably not all that similar to the “ethnic” Russian view). My Russia is made up of news items, film clips, Boris Akunin thrillers, the strains of Russian music, and ballet, as filtered through non-Russian companies and performers.

I have never seen the Bolshoi or the Kirov live on stage. I’ve never seen any of the current crop of Russian born or Russian trained stars. I’ve seen Baryshnikov, yes, but dancing José Limon’s choreography, nothing Russian. I watch a lot of Russian ballet on YouTube, but really, we all know that’s not the same. So let’s call this a disclaimer; I am a serious ballet lover who lacks any stamp of Russian authenticity. 

A serf ballerina, ca. 1800

Whoever you are reading this, out there in the fatherland of ballet, I salute you and I honor the great tradition of classical dance in Russia as it is today, as it was under the Soviet Union, and back in the old days, when noblemen kept serf ballerinas in their Petersburg town-homes and pet foreign ballet masters at their beck and call. May you live long and attend many performances at the Mariinski.

Dasvidaniya!

Summer and Survival

At our little ballet school in the mountains, summer classes for teens and adults are wildly popular, despite the heat (often in the 100s during the day) and the lack of reasonable cooling in the historic building where the school has its home. This really cheers me; people love to dance, and love the rigor of classical ballet, and are willing to put up with a lot just to get some into their lives. 

This photo, which went the Facebook rounds recently, perhaps testifies to the degree to which ballet at least in  part an art of survival, and of survivors (I don't know how staged it was). That these young women and their teacher were living amid the most wretched conditions of war, poverty, homelessness, and starvation, and still driving themselves to practice and to teach is absolutely stunning to me (if indeed they were... again, we're talking USSR so propaganda is not to be ruled out). So often ballet is perceived as or presented as an effete, elite art form, too dainty for the real world, cultivating fragile personalities, and promoting a kind of frailty both physical and emotional through its aesthetics and its narratives. 

And it’s true, as I’ve complained here before, that one does occasionally wish there were not quite so many wilting damsels waiting (usually without hope) for a prince to rescue them in the classical story ballets. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that Giselle,

Giselle, Het Nationale Ballet

the original wilting damsel, gets her own back in Act II. She may be dead, but she’s tough as nails, compassionate, and more human than any of the living characters; she stands up to Mean Old Myrtha, rescues the pusillanimous Albrecht, and restores the audience’s faith in the human capacity for love. Lots of heroines who return from the grave get to act out the fantasy of “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” but to my mind only Giselle really gets to rise above that. Pretty good for a fairy zombie.

Ballet itself is something of a survivor. Like opera and classical music and a few other art forms that are resolutely rooted in the deep past, it seems like it keeps coming back from premature diagnoses of morbidity. There is always talk about how the audiences for these art forms are aging and a crisis is coming, but strangely, there always also seem to be new “older” people discovering and falling in love with them. Not to say there aren’t challenges, but I think one thing that is frequently overlooked in the critical press is that ballet is happening in all sorts of venues away from, say, the Koch Theater or Covent Garden; your local amateur company’s productions may not be pushing the envelope of the art form or showcasing the next Nijinsky, but they are encouraging young people and their families to care deeply about ballet, and to engage with it. The recent death and reinvention of the Omaha Ballet as Ballet Nebraska demonstrates, I think, the incredible tenacity of ballet dancers and their audiences in the face of fiscal challenges and waning governmental support for the arts. These people are heroes!

Recently, reading a book about human evolution since the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, I came across the theory, developed by some paleoanthropologists, that human speech evolved from bodily gestures (this is not a universally held view). If this were the case, then dance would be somehow more fundamentally human, or more primordially human anyway, than verbal language. And maybe that’s why ballet, despite it’s old-fashioned vocabulary and its oblique way of conveying meaning, persists. Even in a sweltering studio in the Utah summer.

Sweaty Swan