I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [189]
We were there in mid-May, and bundled in furs. Once again, George Kennan’s daughter Grace came as our interpreter, and Grisha made all the necessary connections, through friends in the Ministry of Culture for the city of Yakutsk. He got us from the domestic airport in Moscow, and it took him six hours in that hideous, chaotic, and thug-filled hangar to get us to our plane. We sat on the tarmac for another three, and then we flew through six time zones to the city of Yakutsk. Joining Grace was her friend Evgeny,6 a cameraman and journalist, who was recording our adventures for a future television news story.
Yuli Markov and Lisa Roandall pose on a hot day in May 1993 (image credit 19.11)
In Yakutsk at two thirty in the morning, the sun was up and so were the people. Yuri Sheikin, the deputy minister of Yakutsk, was our host, along with a compatriot—a woman named Galina. She was from northern Yakutsk and would be the key facilitator. For the next several days we auditioned and danced with close to a hundred of the most adorable children. Every girl in pigtails, and most of them had training in dance.
For meals, we ate on massive aluminum plates, heaped with mountains of buckwheat groats—kasha. Ladles of boiling fat were poured on the heap, and on a separate plate, what appeared to be slices of Wonder Bread were actually slabs of solid fat. You could opt to wash this down with flavorless sticky sweet soda, beer—or vodka. A whiff of their prize vodka caused brain cells to wither, so I stuck to soda and beer. They claimed the vodka was 400 proof, whatever that means. To touch your lips to that brew caused a third-degree burn. What would it do to the esophagus or stomach lining? Maybe nothing—grease-soaked kasha and fat slabs make superb insulation.
The local ballet company was performing the ballet Don Quixote, and Yuri Sheikin arranged our tickets. The superb training given in the Moscow and Leningrad ballet schools somehow extended all the way out to Yakutsk. The dancers were very good, especially the two principals. This company put most American regional companies to shame.
On our final day of auditions, mothers and fathers filled the doorways of the studio. Of the places we visited, choosing here was the most difficult. There were dozens of boys and girls of equal ability and charm. We paired up combinations, and Liza Lazareva, an eight-year-old Audrey Hepburn lookalike, was a perfect match for our handsome ten-year-old hero, Yuli Markov. Galina recommended the choreographer Lyubov Bogdana Nikitina, and we had many meetings with her before we left. As with other choreographers, it was not carte blanche, there were guidelines. I knew approximately the small area of the space they would dance in, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, and each dance was limited to approximately three minutes. Lyubov would be responsible for the dance movement and choice of music. “I think the musician should be shaman,” she proposed. “Whatever you choose,” I responded, “just let us know as soon as possible, as passports and visas have to be arranged.”
A year later, at the first rehearsal in New York City, our American musicians were in awe of the sounds that came from the shaman. His two-inch fingernails tapped a small round drum, alternating with beats from a thin stick with one end carved into a small ball, sort of like a musical quarter-note with a twelve-inch stem. His rhythms supplied background to bizarre magic conjured by his voice—bird coos, crows, hisses, howls, and grunts—plus the whistling vibrations from a Jew’s harp tucked in his mouth. The range of pitch, at times, soared so high ears screeched, and in lower registers the shaman’s rumblings caused your stomach depths to quiver.
Traversing the globe, experiencing the extremes of landscape, Carrie and I were amazed