Being New In the Berlin Ballet

Being the new person in a German Opera House can be intimidating. Especially if your culture is vastly different and your experience of ballet as an expression of who you are (deep in your heart) has been the way that you learned the techniques and tools of the trade of ballet.
At the beginning in the Berlin Ballet … I often just tried to blend into the background and watch to figure out what were the patterns in the space, the hierarchy, the rules, and to figure out how to merge with them.
I know that many probably thought me a bundle of energy and that I had a Texas sized smile and boisterous attitude as well. But honestly at the beginning I was just trying to cope. And I was trying to not be the problem child, and that meant to fit in to the best of my ability.
I did not want to act like I did not have a clue as to what they wanted from me. Which I didn’t. So my intention was to quickly do whatever they asked, exactly how they asked it.
But that was complicated by the fact that in Berlin, everything was foreign and difficult.
I did not know the language. And the Berlin Ballet was filled with dancers from all over the world. The multitude of languages that were happening in every rehearsal was overwhelming even though they tried to keep it to two languages, German and English.
Add to that, all the words in ballet are French in origin so that allowed for 3 languages running at all times. It was a lot for a brain to process. It was more than my brain had ever been asked to attempt to navigate and manage to understand, follow directions, respond appropriately and communicate with others.
From the beginning, I thought that the style shift from Balanchine to the heavy Russian training was going to break me.
What I didn’t see was that, it was going to strengthen me in ways that I needed and in ways that would allow me to grow regardless of my internal resistance and feigned arrogance.

I say “feigned arrogance” because inside I was feeling deeply insecure. Here I was, in my mind, just another baby ballerina bunhead. And I was with seasoned dancers who were wildly talented and some that were wildly famous.
It was intimidating.

Add to that, we are in a country that has been through two world wars and the German dancers at the beginning were not very warm because they had lived through the rebuilding and the breaking apart of their country by the Allied Forces.
Berlin itself was broken into 4 pieces of a pie. The British, French, and American sectors and then of course, the East Block of Berlin which was controlled and paralyzed by the Russians.
The feeling and mood of Berlin at that time was gloomy, dark, dangerous, divided, and defensive.
And why wouldn’t it be?
Being raised an American from the Big State of Texas, I had blinders on to the long term continued suffering that the Europeans had weathered. Until I got there, I was ridiculously naïve to what war had done. Not just to the land but the people themselves.

I learned quickly that there were many in the theater who made the choice to cross into West Berlin as the wall was being created by the Russians and that they had never gone back. That meant that most left their families and belongings over there.
Many would go back and forth to visit family and friends and they routinely experienced the terrible conditions in the Eastern part of Berlin while working and living a much better life in West Berlin.
Berlin always held a serious tone about it for obvious reasons and it seemed to never completely shake that feeling while I was there.

I have since gone back to Berlin, (for a Reunion with the dancers) and with the wall down and Berlin unified, it has become a lovely city, much more filled with joy and laugher and it has moved from the darker Cold War energy to a much more modern and integrated Germany once again.
And for that … I am grateful. It is an inspiration to the heart of the German people that they have managed to come through two world wars and the division of their country where it was … “to the winners go the spoils.” Then, somehow, they managed to tear down the wall, demand that we unify their own country, and somehow move to become whole once again.
It is a great show of the power of the human spirit and freedom.

Berlin was so difficult for me the first year and a half that I compare any difficult event in my life to it. My mind says things like, “Well at least that was not as difficult as that first year in Berlin!”

Why was it so difficult you ask?
It was personal as well as professionally difficult.
Personally, I was alone for the first time in my life. I was in a city that the sun only shined for about 6 days a year fully. And I am a Texas sunflower girl!
Berlin was surrounded by a wall, and everyone could feel it. We might be free, but we were surrounded and in a type of prison. It was a city under siege in many ways. Berlin was separate … but not equal.
It was a huge city compared to most. Housing was difficult at best and being a foreigner in the space and an American put much suspicion on me.
Professionally, I had never experienced the huge artistic machine that is a German Opera House. Nor the politics that ran through it all.
There were very strict rules of conduct. Such as; As a ballerina you never took off your point shoes, even if your feet were bleeding through your shoes, or to the hard reality of the vast number of shows we were required to perform from dances in Operas to full length ballets. This theater had some sort of performance most nights. And the Russian training was strict, rigid in its structure, heavy and repetitive. Ballet Masters could have doubled as drill sergeants to my younger self.
As a child, my experience with the Dallas Metropolitan Ballet did not teach me about all the strict placement of corps de ballet lines and holding positions for extended periods of time, while the principals performed their Adagio Pas de Deux’s.
My training was done in a full-fledged playful American style! Rehearsals and performances in America always had lots of things happening, lots of movement. Dance was more about freedom, abandon, and spontaneous, playful, fun!
Now, here I am in a very classically structured German (Russian) Opera House and order is suddenly paramount.
At first, it felt like having my hands and body tied up into certain excruciating poses and told to be still for entire Pas de Deux’s. That was so we did not distract from the amazing performances of the principal dancers, because the corps de ballet, becomes the frame in a picture whose center is moving.
If I was supposed to be still, I took that very seriously.
At times, it was so difficult that the only way I maintained certain positions in Swan Lake was to focus in such a way that it was like going into a meditation while I would watch the sweat beading up on the young dancer’s fingers in front of me. Because as she continued to stand there … frozen in place, the strain was causing sweat to bead up on her body and I would watch the sweat flow down her arm and eventually hold on her fingertip as that droplet would get bigger and bigger, until it would drip to the floor.

In the Berlin Ballet, what saved my sanity, again and again, were the other dancers.
Because there were so many from other countries with other languages, we were a motley crew of talented and artistic misfits. Most of us did not have some of the trauma that some of the dancers had from being descended from survivors of WWII.
We would get together and have Sunday afternoon brunches where we would all laugh and tell jokes. Or we would go places and walk in the many parks and sunbathe if the weather permitted.
We shared recipes and enjoyed the stories of other countries, childhoods, and crazy events in each other’s lives. I learned so much about the ways that others grew up and how they saw reality.
My favorite stories were from the Aussies and those from South Africa. Their version of English was (shall I say) playfully different than the American or the English versions. I would constantly bump into words that meant one thing in America but quite another in Australia. It was very fun!
I learned that a “rubber” in Australia was an eraser at the end of a pencil. Not the American slang word, “condom.”
I learned that a Capsicum was a red pepper in Australia. The list goes on and on.
I realized that the American way is not (at all) the only way.
And I am grateful to all those who broadened my perspective in the beautifully diverse ways that cultures, countries, and languages can offer.

To this day, I think the best thing anyone could do for their children is to allow them after high school, to go to any foreign country for a year. Allow them to become immersed in another culture and language. Let them learn that there is so much more out there and so they then come back more open and eager to learn because they see that the world is a colorful palette and that to paint a beautiful life, we will all need to learn to embrace all the colors that this world offers.
~Suzanne Wagner~