I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [39]
In class, Vladimiroff stood more than erect; he seemed to lean backward. His cherubic face, Slavic features, and balding pate exuded sweetness. His hands, floppy and flowery, were soft fluttering petals. Vladimiroff’s style was of the prince, not the peasant. “No!” he would say to us, “not with arms reaching up as if asking for something! Peasants look up! Prince is above. Everything else is beneath. Be light, on the balls of your feet. Let others be stuck on earth. You are a prince.” After class, he elaborated and clarified: “A prince has everything worthy in himself and doesn’t need to strive for things outside. Others bow and kneel to him from below. You must be self-contained, benevolent, and graciously lower your gaze. Only God is above.” Later, when I danced in Florence in 1953, and first saw Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, I recognized Vladimiroff’s ideal. The nobility of the sculptured head and neck and serenity of the gaze—David looks downward modestly, not at his feet, but over the world. The simplicity and purity of dancing this way! Some think it feminine, and opt for heavy, heels-on-the-floor dancing, Soviet macho realism, and need to proclaim loudly through their dance, “I AM HERE!” That style of dancing carries with it heaviness.
Keeping the weight on the balls of your feet allows you to move quicker, lighter, and more effortlessly. Espoused by Balanchine, that technique didn’t originate with him. Vladimiroff said he would walk into the theater heel-toe, heel-toe “like ordinary man”—go to the dressing room, put on makeup, then walk to the stage with his weight forward, on the balls of his feet. After he finished performing, he would walk out of the theater and the weight would go back into his heels—“ordinary man again.”
When the Bolshoi Ballet was performing in New York City, the superb Russian dancer Vladimir Vasiliev,7 invited me to join him in their company class. Messerer, the renowned teacher, officiated, and had only one correction for me: “Weight in the heels, Jacques. Stick them to the floor.” I smiled and nodded, and tried to do as he asked (not very successfully). Messerer’s suggestion would have made Vlady furious, for Vladimiroff advocated the pure, classical technique he’d learned in St. Petersburg, derived from the courtly behaviors of Europe. God, how I miss Vladimiroff and those classes!
Vladimiroff expressed the rivalry with Nijinsky with generosity and humility. He would stand in front of the young boys in class and describe, “I start here, leap in the air in sauté”—then he would walk some eight or ten feet across the room—“and land here.” Our heads nodded in amazement and admiration as Vladimiroff returned to stand in front of us again. “But when Nijinsky leaps in sauté, he starts here”—walking across the room until he came against the wall, and pointing and waving with his hand, through the wall, on and on, to the next room and beyond—“and lands there.”
In class with Pierre Vladimiroff (image credit 3.11)
In the days when Vladimiroff and Nijinsky were dancing, the costumes for male dancers derived from the court wardrobe of the aristocracy: heeled, buckled shoes, hose, pantaloons to below the knee, belt, and sometimes a short sword. That’s the reason you see so often in classical ballets the males standing in a pose with the right hand at the left waist, weight on the back (left) leg. It’s the “draw your sword” position. As ballet developed, the costumes changed. Hose became tights all the way up, pantaloons shortened to allow freedom of movement, the tunic, a doublet similar to court attire, soft canvas shoes with little heels adorned the feet. In the Maryinsky under the tsar, these were the costumes male dancers wore. The dance belt we wear now (the ballet version of an athletic jock strap) didn’t exist, and without the pantaloons the body hair and genitals could be seen through the tights.
Well. Nijinsky shocked the whole court by going onstage without pantaloons—just the sheer silk tights with nothing underneath—and was ostracized by the