The Influence of the Russians

 

I have been forever drawn to the passion and power of the Russian training and the Russian people.
Clearly, they have carved some of the most powerful tools and techniques that have shaped ballet for centuries.

While I was never one of those dancers that became famous in the ballet world, I was (never-the-less) shaped and molded by those whose passion matched what I felt inside and deep in my heart.
Unbeknownst to me, my teachers, Ann Etgen and Bill Atkinson, had Russian training and influence. Ann Etgen and Bill Atkinson both studied with great New York Russian Ballet Masters of their generation, Pereyaslevec and Dokoudovsky. Bill Atkinson also studied with Vilzak and Lazowski.
So, from the beginning of my journey into dance that Russian influence was weaving its way into my world.
Once I got to the School of American Ballet, it was all the Russian teachers that gave me the energy, attention, enthusiasm, and tools that would give me more control and strength.

I am forever grateful to Alexandra Danilova, Andrei Kramarevsky, Antonina Tumkovsky, and other teachers who continue to remind me with their favorite phrases that I still hear in my head … even now.
Tumkovsky: Cheek to me! You can do better!

Danilova: More turnout! You are not holding a sack of potatoes!
Kramarevsky: Is so simple! Smile, it will be easier!
Williams: Suzy … Jump but don’t Jump!
Those phrases that they uttered in class, and in spontaneous moments became the corner stones of my ballet reality and kept me going when times were tough.

The teachers at SAB were so amazing that great dancers would come to take class with the students just because they wanted to work with Stanley Williams and the unique petite allegro of how he expressed the Bournonville style. They were fascinated with the way he demanded specific timing, and speed that he required in his class.
Or they came to strengthen their technique with the power and passion that was clearly the signature of Kramarevsky’s, Bolshoi training. Or to just have fun and let go which was Kramarevsky’s signature style. Everyone left Krammy’s class happy and fulfilled.
At the School of American Ballet, there seemed to be a revolving door between students seeking to learn and reaching for greatness, mixed with the greatest dancers of our time coming to continue to learn and grow.
The school itself was the first “Reality Show” that I had ever experienced.
When so many with talent, power, ego, and drive come together, the energy is electric, wildly fascinating, and infinitely instructive.

Famous dancers coming to our classes gave me so much information about the real life of a dancer.
I learned that the best dancers never stopped learning, reaching, growing, and seeking.
I was humbled to see their careful and meticulous minds that analyzed movement. I marveled at how they sought to feel into small muscles that might give a particular nuance or flow to a sequence. I was fascinated with their innate curiosity mixed with deep respect to teachers and those that could help them succeed.
The teachers at SAB carried a wide variety of styles of movement and so the sheer range of expressions was in-of-itself a challenge.
What Suki Schorer wanted in her class … was very different than Richard Rapp. And the Russians all had their own peculiarities that were of such great interest to my soul.

The Russians all carried a confidence and an ability to express wild abandon, with the crystalline clarity of icy footwork.
They drew me in with the meticulousness of their minds and the passion in their soul.
It is funny to reflect on the moments when certain paths began to open … but did not completely connect.

Robert La Fosse (a student at SAB with me) went to see Rudolf Nureyev perform and ended up hanging out with him one evening. He told me parts of that amazing moment, the next day.
Little did I know that I would see Nureyev in a Stanley Williams class later that week.
With awe and wonder I watched from the door as a powerful “reality show” unfolded between the egos of the most powerful principal men in ballet, Peter Schaufuss, Peter Martins, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Nureyev.
I never dreamed that I would get to spend hours of time in a studio and on a stage with Nureyev while a professional dancer.
I never dreamed that in special moments that he and I would have powerful conversations that would forever stay with me, and non-verbal telepathic moments when we could read each other’s minds that were so strong and powerful that we would both end up on the floor laughing and calling the other out because we heard the thoughts of the other clear … as a bell in our head.
And never would I ever believe that now (even though he is on the other side) he would still be guiding me towards writing this book and helping me remember critical moments, special exchanges, and laugh once again to the absurdity that was his way of instructing, teaching, being, and flowing.
Rudi probably had the greatest single influence in my life.
He never intended that to be so.
But with me, he loved to trigger my wrath and frustration. He loved to test edges.
Most would back down to his massive ego and the force of his emotional states. But to me, I knew he was trying to piss me off. I knew he was looking for the chink in my armor and wedge something in there.
But despite what others experienced and felt, I did not see malice in his behavior. I saw a soul that felt desperately alone in a magically artistic world that most were never aware of.
His “poking the bear” was to see if the personality that one created through fear and lack of self-worth was stronger than the soul that was seeking to find freedom and fly.
He used teasing and taunting to shatter the ego that effectively suffocated what he considered true art.
He was not interested in perfection but expression.
Perfection to him was boring.
I believe that was because he did not have the perfect body or faculty for being a great dancer. But to him he did not care about that, because it was what was inside … that really mattered.
As far as he was concerned, it was the soul within … that knew how to light the stages of the world on fire.
He knew he had that fire.
He was a bonfire that did not know how to regulate itself.
He was not a “candle in a wind.”
He was the wind that was created by a raging forest fire that was within his heart and soul.
He liked it when he saw the fire explode out of a dancer’s eyes. He liked to tease the souls of others in a challenge to meet his own.
Most failed miserably in the attempts as far as he was concerned.
Fear was a concept that inhibited great artistry.
Fear was what kept people small.

Fear was what stopped hearts from proclaiming that this was their world and their moment.
Fear was the enemy that he refused to bow to or take the knee.
Yet that fear would chase him throughout his life.
It became clear to me that he feared stopping dancing.
To him that was going to be the end.
Dance what everything to him. It was his muse and his freedom. It was the way he could be completely who he was in every moment.
That taught me a lot.
I knew that I needed to have something more than just dance as my expression in this life.
He showed me the painful truth that was exposed by him being unwilling and unable to gracefully retire.
That is how he inspired me to reach beyond the constructs of ballet and into the greater knowing that I now have.
While the defined structure of ballet in my life would need to be let go of. I would discover that the dancer and artist inside my soul could be alive and well and thrive in other ways that could still reach hearts, inspire others, and show me that there was something even greater beyond the stages of life.
I am still dancing on various stages in my life.
I am still inspired to show the magic that is in all expressions of art. I am still weaving steps and finding the rhythms and subtle sequences within words. And I am in my heart … still an artist.
I cannot be anything else.
I marvel at the energy conversations that happen when people walk past each other.
I hear the whispers of longing from souls seeking to find ways to get beyond their own wounding and personality.
I hear the voices of fear that chain people to their past.
I try to touch them in ways that will open them over time even when I know in doing what is the right thing for their soul, it is often not the thing that their ego desired from me.
And I often feel like Rudi … in that both he and I saw that in this world … most eyes are shut, most hearts are frozen in fear, and most souls are imprisoned by the need to conform and belong.
He tried in his own way to open eyes, thaw hearts, and open the doors to freedom.

With me … he succeeded.

I am sure he did so with many others that are on various levels of awakening.
I can only tell my story.
And my story is that while Toni Lander and Bruce Marks were a part of my personal lessons along this karmic journey. They represent both the beginning, middle and end of my journey through the world of ballet.
In many ways they were the inspiration, the aspiration, the exploration through the light and the darkness. Bruce and Toni were the breath and the death that needed to be completed on a karmic level. And they were powerful souls that were deeply familiar to me and that I agreed to engage with, help in my own way, and in turn their processes would free me from the responsibilities of patterns along this karmic journey. Their gifts continue to support my process and much of that will be revealed through my story
Rudi was the powerful thread of purpose and potential that connected my heart … to my art.
He was just like the rug that he was wrapped in when he was born, on the train in the icy winter of Russia. And he was that same rug that was recreated on his grave that marks the passing of his life from this reality.
To me he was someone that I saw on a deep level, and he was a soul that saw me.

While we were vastly different in most ways. We were oddly the same in others.

Inside our cores understood each other.
And we knew it.
I could allow him to be himself in priceless moments.
He did not scare me.
He did not intimidate me.

He knew I respected him not for his status as a star but for the expression of his soul.
His lifestyle was not one that I understood … as I watched him pick up young men for sex at the subway station in Berlin called “Zoologischer Garten”, in his lizard skin outfit.
I knew he was HIV positive and quite ill. It seemed insane to me that he would put others at risk. He was clearly an unapologetic sexual predator.
I would walk up to him and say to him, “Really? You can’t be serious? This is not a good thing to be doing! You know that!”

And he would brush me away with a wry smile saying that this was none of my business and to go away “little girl”, that I did not understand what was going on and that I was ruining his game!
He taught me that in one moment, he could be masterfully talented in so many ways and deeply flawed and very painfully human in the next.
He taught me that to be human … is to be carrying both at all times.
He taught me that one could embrace both.
He taught me that life is to be lived and that one does not know when it will be over.
He showed me the layers of my own fear and the power held in the potential in my soul that was trying to get out.
He knew the influence he had on others. I am not sure he knew all the varied nuances and ways that he influenced me.

But perhaps now on the other side, he recognizes that to me … he was the embodiment of the three Greek Fates.
Those three Fates were Clotho who spun the thread of human fate, Lachesis, who dispensed that fate, and Atropos who cut the thread, thus determining the moment of death.
Just like them, he was forever weaving, creating, and determining the fates of others.

I got to be one of those that he weaved a few threads for me. He pushed ideas and insights into me that set me on a course for my future, and even now as the end of this life slowly approaches, he stands next to me taunting me with his scissors.

But he knows that I enjoy this dance with him, through life and beyond the end of this life and the manifestation that is this personality.
Just as the Fates ruled over destiny. Nureyev ruled over his own.
And his influence has directed me into uncharted waters and levels of artistic expression that continue to open my eyes, fill my heart, and empower my soul to the day.

~Suzanne Wagner~