The Russian Style Training Compared to the Balanchine Style – The Training Style of Goodrun Leben

While the Balanchine style is known for making long and lanky legs and the spontaneous, spirited movements of colts, the Russian style is much heavier in its approach because it strives to create great power and strength through tedious repetition of sequences so that they become almost automatic in the body memory.
The Balanchine style’s focus is in speed and the lithesome lightness of energy and spirit that has an upward airy quality.
The Russian style has a downward focus where you use the floor and learn to push hard against it so that you can fly with the suspended power that captivates the breaths of an audience and give the illusion of powerful flight.
The Russian style holds the sinew and strength of a Siberian Tiger where the American Balanchine style at that time was more like a young thorough bred colt.
American dancing feels like racing.
Whereas the Russian training gives that feeling of intense focus, meticulous attention to detail, and that is accentuated by the canes that often Russian teachers used (in the old days) to make their point, pound out the tempo, and make it known where your body is out of alignment.
While Goodrun never had a cane in her hand, her voice grated like a commandant, and she preferred to use the military discipline and exactitude of her German upbringing to pound out exercises with determined authority.
In the Myrtha rehearsals, she was a drill sergeant, booming her voice and driving home her point.
In ballet there are “ballet coaches” that help one hone the finer points and that experience feels like a fluid sharing and discussion of the style that is required in a role. Then the coach shares his or her experience of it, how they used their mind and thoughts to instill a quality of movement in that character, and then tries to bring out the meticulous subtlety and nuance that makes any dancer into magic.
I do not know if Goodrun was ever a principal dancer, but I do know that she did not approach things as a coach but more like a drill sergeant, making the dancer do what was required by the raising of her the voice and the determination that was demanded from her rehearsals.
In hindsight, she was probably exactly what I needed.
I was a young colt in all ways, gangly and still trying to gain control over my overly long legs. What I lacked was strength and she was bound and determined to make sure that was what she was going to give me.
I look back on that time with the eyes of wisdom and maturity, now knowing that she was perfect to make me into a better dancer. But at the time, it felt like torture.
My feet would begin to bleed through the shoes but that was no excuse (in her reality) to stop.
She believed that I had to learn to endure the pain.
I had to learn to work through painful moments.
I had to learn to turn off my emotions in favor of objective control.
In her words, “Only then would I have the ability to move beyond and into something that could be … great.”
Her rehearsals for Myrtha were nothing I had ever experienced before.
In my world (at that time) they were brutal. I would go to do a jumping sequence once full out only to realize that the next hour and a half … that was all we were going to do. That one sequence over and over again.
She wanted it perfect.
She did not care if I was exhausted. As far as she was concerned that was no excuse. Bleeding feet were no excuse. Not being prepared was my fault not hers. I was to do what she wanted at all times.
And in my desire to not let myself or anyone else down, especially Rudolf Nureyev, I keep going, pushing and driving myself in any direction she wanted.
I knew she had the power to pull the plug on this performance. I remember her saying, “How much do you want this? Then let’s do it again.”
While she was not Russian, her approach and style aligned with the Russian systems of doing things repeatedly to gain so much strength that then in a performance, doing it once would feel easy and give one the ability to possibly transcend the human density and find the magic inside to finally fly.

~Suzanne Wagner~