The Passion Of Gert Reinholm That Attracted the Potential of Grandiose Productions

 

I lived in a world where I believed that others would play fair. I thought that goodness and genuine heart would turn the tides of everything.
Perhaps in another time and place that is true.

Perhaps in another dimension that I call home … that is the way of things.

Perhaps I did not want to face the cruel truths about a world that seems to love to twist knives into the souls of others.

I believed I was here to leap at opportunity and to grasp those “gold ring” that would be offered.
But the truth was that I was here to learn. I was here to see past my own façade and the façades that existed in this complicated reality.
At 21, I still believed that “Everything is beautiful at the Ballet!”
I was to learn that there are no victims. Only those that refuse to fight for what is right and their own autonomy and freedom.
It is hard to fight when the fight was never intended to be fair. It is hard to stand up when there are those that will relentlessly cut your legs out from under you, in ways that allow you to taste the bliss of opportunity but also do not want to allow you to every realize your own power and fully … run.

What is so hard is how the gifts of opportunity seem to be owned by some and in their arrogance, they believe that you owe them because they had the good fortune to see that special something inside of you.

It seemed (at times) a twisted game.

One that those who crave power more than creation … play. There will always be those that intend to seize upon the talents and gifts of others to perpetuate their own agenda, influence, and mystique.
Rudi tried to warn me. He showed me that one should never give up their creative autonomy to another. He said that one should never allow the projections of others to define who you were as an artist.
In the end, even Eva Evdokimova and Galina Panov would try to warn me in their own ways. Each knew how to play the game masterfully with those that wanted to claim their talent as the construction of a master outside of themselves.
Appreciation of art does not define the true artist. It only defines the levels of awareness in the audience of that art.

I did not dislike Gert Reinholm.
Quite the contrary.

I found him charismatic and somewhat interesting in his need to be distant and hold the air of disdain.
His … was a carefully crafted façade that had served him well.
I could see that he did have an ability to spot talent.

In Berlin, all the dancers had that special … something.
I am not making that up. I looked at each dancer whether they were on the lowest level of corps de ballet … to the principals. Each dancer carried something special in their eyes and mannerisms.

For some that gift was a terrific sense of humor. As in John Skripek.
For others they carried a light on the stage that made you look at them.

Each seemed to carry a particular flavor of emotion, passion, power, and personality.

Gert Reinholm loved the projection of complex faces and the raw tempestuousness of personalities as they clashed into characters on and off the stage.
He knew how to push those personalities towards places that he suspected that they could learn to fly by falling into some characters psychological abyss.
He was a master of the dark and gloomy undertones that post-war Berlin still felt inside and that had been burned in their souls through two world wars.

I would look at him and I knew that he was a creature of his own experiences.
And most of those experiences were something that I could not fathom.
I could sense a dark thing lurking in those eyes that had seen too much and that had been through too much plastic surgery in order to look younger and capture the fading youth that was over too quickly because of the seriousness of war and his own mechanisms of survival.
My weakness was that I felt his love of the theater and art.
I believed that we were the same in that regard.
That hook was enough for me to let certain things slide and to give allowances to his personality that I wanted and needed to believe lived and ruled his behavior.
While I saw the ego, I did not see his need to create “ballet stars” to satisfy some other desire within that seemed to still need to be in the limelight.

He had a power to draw in amazing talent and those that exhibited a type of wild abandon that seemed unquenchable and timeless.
I think that this theater personified a “Bigger Than Life” attitude which was familiar to my psyche as I was raised in Texas and “Everything is the Biggest and Best in Texas.”
And he did have an eye for that type of artist.
He loved the drama because he was that drama, he liked to create that drama because it felt so alive, and that drama was the buffet upon which he feasted in his mind.

The talent that moved through the Berlin theater was something that constantly amazed me.

There was a dancer that wanted to sing and would practice in his dressing room when he probably thought no one was in the area.
I heard this voice through the walls as he practiced in the men’s dressing room. And heard it strengthen over time to become more powerful as he learned to train his tongue and throat the way he had trained his body for ballet.
He would eventually become a part of the Opera … as his age forced him to retire from ballet.
I was very happy to learn that he had found a path that would allow his voice to be heard and expressed … still
That same dancer was given the amazing task of being the only person in a critical moment to speak loudly in a ballet. An effect that was so very Russian and startling in the world of ballet where dancers danced, singers sang, and actors acted.
This priceless moment happened in Valery Panov’s Epic Ballet, “Der Idiot” taken from the stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

At a critical moment in the story, one dancer was to yell, “Idiot!” (An English word pronounced with a German accent … of course!)

The effect was powerfully stunning in a world that is always verbally silent … but loud in actions and emotional expression.

It was a powerful effect.

This particular dancer was chosen because of his ability and skill to project a great deal of sound and volume at that precise moment.

This whole saga was so classically Russian. It had all the drama, pathos, and emotional intensity that characterized the Russian culture.
And like the very long novel, it was a four-and-a-half-hour ballet.

That was something very new.
It had never been done.
Gert Reinholm had a passion that wanted to create colossal new works of massive proportion that would leave a mark on the world of Ballet.
And I believe that this would in the end be a part of his legacy.
He gave a lot of creative rein to those that desired to try out a dream.
It seemed … the bigger and darker, the better he seemed to like them.

Valery’s Panov’s massive undertaking in this ballet must have been hugely expensive and while we did it a few times, I am not sure it was done ever again after that one season, and our fabulous opening in New York at the Metropolitan Opera house with Nureyev playing the leading character.

I remember the power of the event, the agonizingly long dress rehearsals where we seemed to stand for hours in point shoes trying to keep the blood moving in our legs as our feet began swelling while the lighting people tried to get the scene just right.
I remember, Nureyev wanting a final scene to have him naked on stage but that seemed a bit extreme even to Valery Panov and Gert Reinholm.
They compromised on a flesh-colored dance belt so that he looked … almost naked.
In that final scene, Nureyev’s muscles rippled out with an exact type of lighting which created an epic effect of great tragedy and a profound loss of faith.
Watching the powerful moments in the Berlin Theater, taught me a lot about the life in the real world, the emotional conflicts that linger in the psyche and torture our souls.

I was to learn first-hand how that would feel shortly. In my wide-eyed innocence, I did not believe my life was destined to be a powerful story of pathos that would give me profound feelings of sympathy and compassion into the misfortunes of others. Or that I would also have to learn to have deep compassion for the feelings that this life would invoke within myself.
I did not understand that I was to become the central character within my own epic drama.

I was to become “Der Idiot” and the yell from the stage in my mind would become the lesson that I was to learn around the games that egos play.
My life was to become a Soviet rhapsody that I did not see coming.
Until it was too late.
~Suzanne Wagner~

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