I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [42]
Then there was Felia Doubrovska and her dramatic entrances. Students would be lined up at the barre, preparing for class, stretching and gabbing, and the studio door would swing open slowly. Doubrovska would appear and press her body against the wall, making herself small, hiding, her head downcast and tucked into her shoulder (becoming wallpaper). She would then slide and creep along, making a series of freeze frames as in a Mata Hari spy film, until she reached a corner of the studio. Then, in a second, she would lose twenty years of age, gain six inches of height, turn to face us, transformed, and, smiling, float to the center of the room on tippy-toe, as if entering a spotlight onstage, and announce, “Fifth position!”
“Et voilà! Fifth position!” Felia Doubrovska, 1980 (image credit 3.13)
One morning, late in her life (I think she was in her eighties), she made her usual entrance. It was a gray winter morning, and we were all stiff and tired, preparing for morning class. After her slide along the wall, she did her move to center and called, “Fifth position!” Most of us responded lackadaisically, and half-heartedly got ready for the first plié. “Oh, no!” Doubrovska said in a gentle voice. “It is hard for me to come to class. I am eighty years old, and I am tired. But when I put my hand on the barre and take fifth position, no one would ever know this.”
More time is spent by the dancer at the barre and in the studio—a lifetime more—than performing on the stage. It takes years, and generations of dancers, to transform a dance studio into hallowed ground. In the spring of 2003, I visited Cuba for the first time. Touring Alicia Alonso’s ballet academy, I felt at home. Instantly, I recognized the atmosphere, the smells, the wooden floor so familiar to the salles de ballet of Europe, Russia, and the old SAB. The sweat-stained barre, polished from the touch of a century of dancers’ grips, was lined with ghosts. At Alonso’s ballet academy, I put my hand on the barre, touching the imprints of ten thousand dancers before me, took first position to prepare for a grand plié. Well, it was nice to dream. In 2003, I couldn’t do a grand plié. The knees don’t bend.
My training at SAB was not just ballet. Janet Collins taught modern dance. I had her once a week. She was café au lait, with light, chocolate-colored skin. Her solid, muscled body and powerful torso were shapely. She kept trying to teach me how to swirl and spiral down to the ground. I never got it, couldn’t do it, and, frustrated, gave up. It went against my dreams of flying in the air.
Merce Cunningham also taught at the school. There was a bony kind of stringy strength to his physique, angular. No Botticelli look with curving lines of soft grace. More Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Cunningham’s vision was not about going to the ground. You floated and improvised, inventing dance movements of randomness and accident. Merce choreographed a piece for Ballet Society called The Seasons. It was 1947, and that is when I first heard what a piano sounded like when it had been “prepared.” John Cage, in doing the score for The Seasons, was experimenting in altering the sounds of the piano, and the results were bizarre. To me, they were outer space.
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