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By Root 1264 0

Among the greatest performances of Swan Lake was Ludmila Semenyaka’s and once Allegra Kent and I in Munich sat in the audience watching Marina Kondratieva dance Giselle. We looked at each other: “I think that’s the best Giselle I have ever seen!” we both declared simultaneously. Some of those superb artists became friends—especially Vladimir Vasiliev and Shamil Yagudin. Peers to admire and emulate. Vasiliev, at his height, I believed, was the best male ballet dancer in the world. Yagudin, his compatriot at the Bolshoi Ballet, in his leaps flew over the heads of his fellow dancers. Today, Allegra and I often attend the American Ballet Theatre performances. There we luxuriate in joy and wonder at the artistry of the ballerinas Diana Vishneva and Natalia Osipova. They represent the art of ballet at its apex, where dance has been lifted from the earth to another realm and its artists seemingly transformed into another species.

In Russia, Balanchine conducted himself with his usual aplomb. “Welcome to the home of classical ballet,” one Soviet dignitary said. Later, on the bus, Balanchine, swelling with pride, recounted his reply. He’d parried, “No. Russia is home of romantic ballet. America is home of classical ballet!”—meaning himself!

The bus took us to the hideous Hotel Ukraine. Stalin built seven of these monstrosities, known to the Russians as “Stalin’s wedding cakes,” and they did seem to me a marriage, a union, joining futuristic rockets imagined by H. G. Wells and the castle Gormenghast of Mervyn Peake’s book Titus Groan—hulking conglomerations of dirty yellow blocks with towers and turrets, many topped by red flags enhanced by hidden wind machines and spotlights. Their gargantuan mass made one feel like a dot. Of the “wedding cakes,” only one, the Ukraine, is a hotel. A hotel with not enough elevators. There may have been a bank of six or eight that would carry twenty victims each, but forty or fifty elevators would barely have sufficed. We dancers would wait and wait and wait, amid mobs of locals bundled in their winter clothes, surly and stuffed bears. Each elevator was operated by a disgruntled, rounded woman in a blue skirt, white blouse, and red kerchief. I never saw jewelry or makeup on any of them.

There was no getting your room key in the lobby; you had to go to your floor and check in with another miserable lump, sitting behind a desk in the hallway. All keys passed through her hands, and we had to check them with her every time we left or returned to our rooms. She lived there twenty-four hours a day, catching naps in the wee hours of the morning on a cot near her desk. Of course she was grumpy.

Dinner that night was surprisingly good—delicious piroshki, stacks of dark bread, sliced cucumbers, radishes, and pickles led to borscht, watery but tasty. The dessert, morozhenoye (ice cream), wonderful, but the entrée, Chicken à la Kiev, yikes! The meat was gray leather, and when hacked into, the so-called butter filling squished out like pale congealed worms. For drinks, every table had a half-dozen numbered bottles—sweet sodas, the numbers designating a variety of nonexistent flavors. You could buy cheap but surprisingly good champagne, slightly sweet but a bargain at three rubles, and at the same price, bottles of rough, red wine from Georgia, more purple than red in color. Balanchine was determined to introduce me to the mineral water from his childhood, Borzhomi.3 “For health, you must drink every day,” he told me. It tasted like rotten eggs and sulfur, and the mineral content, while ruining your gallbladder, probably generates kidney stones all while coating your esophagus with copper. Surprisingly, over time, I got addicted.

Throughout the trip, we followed a routine. Early breakfast at the hotel, bus to the theater, class, rehearsal, lunch at the theater buffet, and, after more rehearsal, performance, and bus back for late supper at the hotel. With Quentin’s camera, I tried to film the company in the dining room, but our Russian interpreters and handlers commanded, “Nyet! Nyet photographe!”

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