I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [20]
How innocent at the age of eight (image credit 2.3)
An exceptional teacher got this bored child interested in ballet. She challenged me to a test, complimented me on my effort, and immediately issued a new challenge. The Boss was part of this conspiracy and, enlisting my sister as coach, kept me engaged, rehearsing and practicing between Seda’s once-a-week classes. Boss upped the ante by creating a performing element—our living room was the stage, my father and brothers the unwilling audience, and I the center of attention. Heaven. I loved performing.
Shoosh, shoosh, shoosh. Pirouettes, twenty or thirty, and I perch on the ball of one foot, pausing, “Should I continue for another twenty?” A circular blur of eyes from the stunned audience as I toss off another twenty or a hundred spins. “This is an entrechat dix!” I announce. Oohs and ahs from the upturned faces of my gang. The whirling and beating of my feet propels me twenty feet in the air.
I stare out the school window at St. Rose’s, crossing the sky, grand jeté-ing from one cloud to another while Sister Carmelita chalks multiplication tables on the blackboard.
Among Madame Seda’s bevy of girls, I was the only boy, and I loved my classes. Then, spring, and school was out. It was the middle of June 1942, and my mother announced to Madame Seda imperiously, “We won’t be here for the summer course. I am taking my children to visit my relatives in Maine.” She then added, as though conferring a big favor, “You can hold our place for September.”
“Madame,” Seda said, “your daughter and son are very talented. But I will not hold a place for them.” My mother was in SHOCK! Then Seda did an unbelievably modest and generous thing. She wrote on a piece of paper: Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue, George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet.
“Take them here in September. This is where they should be. There are better teachers than I.”
I didn’t think of ballet during that summer. In Maine, I played with my cousins, clamming, fishing, eating lobster, playing cards, reading books, and staining my teeth with blueberries.
September came. I was eight, and, back in New York City, the School of American Ballet awaited.
When Madame Seda said, “There are better teachers than I,” she sent me to a crucible, a laboratory of theater and dance that would shape and influence the performing arts in this country for the rest of the century. There, I would plié, changement, and pirouette my heart out, guided by some of the greatest artists and innovators residing in New York City, most of them from pre-Soviet Russia, role models who demanded the best of their students.
SAB
The primary teacher for children at the School of American Ballet (SAB) was gentle Kyra Blank. She was impeccable—not a scuff on her ballet shoes, and when she demonstrated a turn, a pirouette in slow motion, her skirt floated in the air, to return to rest smoothly, a few beats after, her feet had landed in a perfect fifth position. The skirt echoed the movement, settling a beat later. I stared, mesmerized at the beauty of her—the soft, white skin, black hair and eyes. She smelled beautiful and her soft voice rose only when, in utter frustration, she had to correct this awkward student, “Jacques, feefth, feefth!” I loved her, but my amorous hopes deflated when I learned from gossip in the men’s dressing room that she was married to a guy named Vladimir Dimitriev. Don Driver, a charismatic and manic extrovert, who relished prancing nude atop the bench between the lockers, genitals flaunting at eye level, informed me, “Oh, Dimitriev? He used to be director of the school, but no one’s ever seen him.” My eyes avoided the gyrating genitalia and focused on Don’s tattoo, a Technicolor dragon that twitched on the calf of his leg. “But Dimitriev’s gone. Kirstein got rid of him, planted him somewhere in Connecticut.”
Kyra Blank teaching at SAB, 1957 (image credit 3.1)
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