I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [40]
Vladimiroff always said you must practice, practice, practice, repeat, repeat, thousands of times, rehearse, and rehearse, again and again. And then, when you go onstage, forget everything! Just listen to the music and dance. If you’ve done your practice, your body will do everything required, and your soul and spirit will be free and spontaneous. Your dancing will be lifted out of the rehearsal room, out of the ordinary, and you’ll have freedom. If you try to make your performance a recreation of your rehearsal, you’ve lost it. But after performing, like a racehorse cooling down after the race, Vladimiroff would take off his costume, put on his practice clothes, and, keeping his fans waiting, go up to his favorite place in the theater’s studio. There, he would do a short, ten-to-fifteen-minute barre, a few pliés, a few tendus, running through the alphabet of exercises to clean out any residue of performance excess and remind his body of the discipline and order that was the technique. The simplicity of the unadorned dancer.
His classes started with a short twenty minutes of routine barre exercises that quickly ran through the menu of basics. Then we moved into the center of the room, where he gave us a series of dance combinations that incorporated those basics, but with no barre to hold on to. Ten or fifteen minutes later, he launched us into a fifty- to fifty-five-minute smorgasbord of the most joyful combinations of dance steps. Some were variations borrowed from choreography he had performed himself, others were taken from memories of his own training back in St. Petersburg. I loved especially when he gave us some of the steps from his legendary roles—in Les Sylphides, La Spectre de la Rose, and Sleeping Beauty. His combinations took you all over the room, and required tremendous control of how you moved your body through space. We would perform each combination a few times before moving on to another. In fifty minutes of Vladimiroff’s center, we would perform ten or twelve or fifteen varied combinations. Oboukhoff’s classes emphasized gaining power through brute repetition, repetition, repetition. Vladimiroff’s style was more filigreed, emphasizing variety and lightness. Nicholas Magallanes, a mentor to me, was always mumbling, “Someone should write these combinations down. They’re going to be lost.” Nicky was right. There were hundreds; today, I recall only a few.
Balanchine explained to me how Vladimiroff ended up teaching at SAB. “I told Lincoln, ‘Vladimiroff must come with me, start a ballet school,’ but he had engagements in Europe.” Apparently, he later came to America with a small troupe from Europe—and wound up dancing on lousy stages in smoky cabarets. “Very unhappy,” Balanchine said. “In Petersburg, after performance, fans would crowd stage door to wait for him. They would unhitch horses from his carriage, take reins themselves, pull carriage through snow—to honor him, to pay homage. Here after he danced, no applause, hardly anyone.”
I envisioned Vladimiroff wearing white tights, in old-fashioned makeup and a powdered wig, dancing his variation from Les Sylphides as Balanchine described, “on tiny, slippery nightclub stage with audience of fat, cigar-smoking gangsters. They laughed at him. It hurt his soul,” Balanchine said. “I invited him to come teach with me from beginning of the school.”
What a fabulous place SAB was. Stamping and leaping in “character class,”8 I learned folk dances, waltzes, polonaises, czardas, and mazurkas, all from a short, dark, and vigorous man with little command of English. Yurek Lazowski was his name, and he was an exceptional folk dancer. We dancers doffed our ballet shoes and put on shoes with little heels and/or boots. The girls donned skirts or wrapped scarves around their waists. The styles were difficult to achieve. Watching non-Slavs attempt mazurkas, czardas, polkas, you may view the steps, but you miss the spice. Much as I loved the classes, I never mastered the style. Or with any