I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [122]
The lobby of the once-posh Astoria. The leaves of an enormous potted plant slowly part as if a curtain is split, to reveal pixie-faced Allegra. She looks around ner-vously, then slowly allows the fronds to close, hurries around, and crosses in front of the plant and moves out of the picture, leaving the camera to zoom in on a close-up of a paper bag nestled at the base of the planter.
An enormous potted plant, Hotel Astoria, Leningrad (image credit 12.3)
Balanchine, Lincoln, and I set off on a nostalgia tour. Four decades before, Balanchine had danced, choreographed, and loved here. He refused to use the word “Leningrad.” His hatred of Lenin was intense. “That awful man with beard.” Leningrad was known as St. Petersburg before Soviet rule, and the Kirov Theater was known as the Maryinsky. “It’s Petrograd! And Maryinsky!” he would assert. He seemed in a daze as I filmed him, traipsing through the streets and along the canals of the city, with Lincoln looming off his shoulder. Balanchine would stop, point to a second-floor window, and say, “I stayed here,” and later at another building, “Ah. Here in her room, Tamara served me tea.” Each time he paused to expound on mem-ories ignited, I filmed, but also I wanted to hear his stories. So I’d listen a bit, scoot back to capture the two of them on my 16 mm, then rush back to demand, “What did you just say? I missed it! Say it again.”
“This must be the year of the cabbage,” I thought. As in Moscow, piles of cabbages were dumped on the corners of alleys and streets. In store windows, you’d see cabbages arranged carefully in geometric configurations—squares, rectangles, circles, and pyramids displayed window dressing à la Bergdorf or Saks. I filmed it all.
Soon, we turned a corner, and there was the Maryinsky Theater. Nearby was a column plastered with posters and notices, and Balanchine translated delightedly, “NYCB,” and the listing of our program. I backed away to catch both of them in the frame, but a policewoman materialized. “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” she commanded, advancing. Tendrils of shoulder-length hair straggled from her austere military hat, emblazoned with a red star.
A policewoman, Leningrad (image credit 12.4)
Certain we were headed for the gulag, Lincoln started squeaking, “Oh my God, George. George!” It never crossed my mind to worry; Balanchine was there. And sure enough, leaning back to make himself taller and looking down his nose, he described to the policewoman who he was, who we were, and, pointing to the poster, concluded, “Amerikanski balyet!” I moved in to get a shot of her scowling face, and, like a frightened little girl fending off Dracula, she raised her open palms to me, gasped out an apprehensive “Nyet, nyet,” and fled.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get in the theater that morning, only circled it, but I captured it all on film. Later, when inside, I thought it the most beautiful theater I had ever seen. The Bolshoi is red and yellow gold; the Maryinsky is blue and pale gold, almost silver, and gentler, somehow. Too bad we only had two performances there.
Vladimiroff had charged me with his request, so at the first company class, I went very early to find his spot at the barre in the theater’s dance studio. The room was smaller, narrower than I expected, dank, musty, with grime-streaked walls. The ceiling was not the shimmering yellow gold Vladimiroff had described, but some twenty feet high and a dishwater gray, speckled with dust and neglect. I stood at the place designated on his map and imagined my hand on the wooden bar holding his from a half century before.
We took