Svetlana had an extremely tight bond with her longtime coach, Ludmila Semenyaka. A fiery woman, Ludmila had been one of the great Bolshoi ballerinas. She warmly welcomed me to the company in our first rehearsal together. It was the four of us in the studio: Sasha, Ludmila, Svetlana, and me. We got straight to work on Sleeping Beauty.
From the start, I was assured that this wasn’t going to be a one-way partnership. Both Svetlana and Ludmila told me to chime in if there was ever anything I thought would work better for us; all I needed to do was let them know. I had expected to be told what to do with little room for deviation. But I was pleased that they were curious about what I had learned previously and about the nuances I brought to the ballet. It reminded me of Makarova’s words on the eve of my arrival to Bolshoi: “Don’t try to be like the Bolshoi. Show the Bolshoi who you are.”
They also made every attempt to help me transition smoothly to life in my new environment. They constantly asked what I needed. A good masseur? Directions? The best grocery store? Anything. They had true empathy for the fact that I had left the familiarity of home.
* * *
SINCE SVETLANA AND I hardly knew each other, our pairing, in a situation with such immense pressure, was a gamble. In our first rehearsals, I was shocked by her strength and her physique. As I had seen when she danced at ABT, she is an ideal ballerina with long hyperextended legs and arms, a short torso, and piercing, overarched feet that come to a very defined point, finishing off her line in a visually optimal way. She is lithe and thin, which in a ballerina could signal a lack of power. But as soft and ethereal as she looks, she is made of steel. She is always in control. If there was ever a moment when I had her somewhat off her leg, she conjured her strength to keep herself up on her own. It made partnering her a joy, with little stress about her abilities to hold herself up. The worry beforehand—about not being able to keep up with her, not having an artistic and personal rapport—was forgotten at the start.
Svetlana is a ballerina of two sides: A model of grace, as one would imagine a ballerina to be. Also, a strong woman who makes decisions based on nothing but her own instinct, who forms her own opinions and sticks to what she believes. For which I have complete respect. Like other successful ballerinas she is in charge of her own career and artistic choices.
From the beginning, she told me to stand up for what I believe in. I prided myself on being a team player, compromising for the bigger picture of a given situation. Svetlana would state very clearly what she needed and why. Nothing was irrational. It was never rude. Never impolite. But firm and assured.
* * *
I HAD QUICKLY learned that I’d had to be approved by a number of people before I was approached to dance Sleeping Beauty with her. There had been other choices, but she’d agreed when my name was suggested to her by Sergei and the former director of the Bolshoi Yuri Nikolayevich Grigorovich. I was clearly the most controversial choice, and possibly the riskiest, but she had taken the gamble.
Initially, when we were introduced in the studio in front of the other dancers, we had been like shy little kids whose parents had set up a play date. But we soon got to know each other. She had a husband (an accomplished concert violinist) and had recently given birth to a baby girl, Anna. As we rehearsed more, I came to see how serious she was in the studio, making the sharp division between work and private life. We joked and laughed from time to time, but there was always a goal to accomplish. A task at hand. She reinforced for me, by example, the absolute power of the work ethic. Not only did she work hard, but she did so day in and day out with no complaints.
Months later, when we began rehearsals for Swan Lake she would toil endlessly on every detail with Ludmila. She would at times be slow to start, chatting while putting on her pointe shoes, but once she was ready, her focused, deliberate energy was never wasted on anything else.
I took none of those moments—partnering her, watching her rehearse—for granted. From time to time, I was reminded of when I watched her dance La Bayadère at ABT, me blending in with the others on the side of the stage, all eyes on her stunning physique and polished Vaganova training. Now we formed our own bond together, embarking on a new partnership.
CHAPTER 28
At Bolshoi, I became an ever more avid observer of the company’s traditions and history. They were everywhere. In class. Before performance. After performance. During rehearsal. I found personal fulfillment in adhering to customs upheld for generations. I didn’t feel a need to be the American trying to break them one by one. Instead, I viewed them with fascination and enjoyed making them a part of my routine. Before one of my first shows, I sat in my dressing room and did my own makeup, just as I had countless times before. After the performance, the head makeup artist for the male dancers approached me and kindly commented that I hadn’t had enough makeup on. The underlying issue, as I realized from her comment and by observing the other male dancers pre-performance, was that she did their makeup from start to finish. No one did his own; that was her responsibility, her job, in which she took enormous pride. She was, after all, a professional, and my amateur application would offend anyone with her expertise. So from then on, before my warm-up for a show, I sat in her chair and let the professional do the job.
* * *
THE COSTUME DEPARTMENT at Bolshoi Theatre is a part of its history that I regarded with genuine awe. When I arrived in Moscow, the costume shop occupied an entire building where dozens of women toiled away making tutus, tunics, tights, opera cloaks, tiaras, hats, boots, even pointe shoes with the stamp of Bolshoi Theatre on the sole. When I was summoned there, a curt security guard sitting in a small entry box asked for my Bolshoi identification. No smile, no greeting, no idea who I was. Like all Russian guards he treated me, or anyone, as a threat until proven otherwise. My identification accepted, he gave me a single nod to pass through into a desolate courtyard. I could see an unmarked metal door across the way. I always noticed these entrances throughout Moscow. Nothing adorning them. Nothing welcoming. I entered into a sparse lobby area. On the wall was a huge plaque adorned with a hammer and sickle and the letters USSR written in Cyrillic script. Around it were dozens of pictures of employees, stern-faced men and women from the 1960s or ’70s. Frozen in time. From another era. Buildings like this one would become unremarkable to me during my time in Moscow, but this first impression was startling.
The building’s interior had pockmarked walls and floors, as if the concrete was disintegrating. I walked up a huge staircase with massive windows looking out onto a playground. Workmen in overalls and women in blue aprons crowded the stairwell landings, where there were worn couches they relaxed on. Everyone was smoking. They stared at me as I walked, observing me coolly, not knowing who I was. I reached the fourth floor and made my way down a long hallway with a dozen metal doors, all looking exactly the same. Through trial and error, I found that inside each one was a separate department that housed costumes for the opera or the ballet, with different departments for men and women. Finally, I entered a vast room where half a dozen women were huddled together. Some were middle-aged, some were older. They all had tape measures around their necks. Their faces lit up when they saw me, and they signaled to me to walk in. I noticed that several mock-up costumes lay on a chair beside them.
There was no single source of light but many lamps and ad hoc chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The walls were lined with mismatched couches, chairs, and tables that looked as though they’d been passed down or found on the street. Giant mirrors lined two walls, not one matching the others. One huge mirror hung in a gold-painted and elaborately corniced frame; another, unframed, leaned against the wall. Devices that looked like clip-on reading lights were attached to the mirrors and lit the fitting area. The light they emitted was bright and harsh and distinctly unflattering. Off to one corner, the changing area was designated by a piece of fabric used as a curtain. Inside the tentlike space was a single chair to sit on while trying on tights. In the back, past the fitting
area with the couches, were the large worktables where fabric was cut and costumes constructed.
The ladies who worked in this room had a singular specialty: the creation from start to finish of the men’s ballet costumes. There were other women in another department altogether who made the tights and the shoes, and a completely different group who made the women’s costumes and their tiaras. Everything worn on the Bolshoi stage was made in this building, by a dozen different departments.
I was slated at that time to dance all the classics in the Bolshoi repertoire, so every one of my costumes would be fabricated especially to fit me. This is a major difference from many other companies, where costumes are shared by several dancers and handed down to new generations of dancers who come after them. Although it’s less personal, there is a certain nostalgia when you put on a costume once worn by a dancer you look up to. For a ballet at ABT, the tag inside my costume once read Baryshnikov. It was such an old costume that it had completely lost its elasticity and fit me even though he and I have a serious disparity in height. Any male dancer would get a thrill wearing his costume.
Given the length of each classical ballet, there were no less than two costumes for each one and as many as four costumes for a single role. Ensuring the perfect fit and size meant I would be in those fittings for hours, spread out over a number of days. In addition to the two costumes for Sleeping Beauty, there would be three for Don Quixote, two for Swan Lake, two for Giselle, four for Onegin, and four for Marco Spada. The fittings seemed interminable as the kostumeri surrounded me and contemplated every inch of fabric. How it lay. How tight it should be. Patience was my ally. I had to keep in mind that the meticulous work I demanded from myself in the studio, repeating steps over and over again, was the same work the kostumeri expected of themselves. I couldn’t rush them; regardless of how much my legs and calves started to cramp. I was used to dancing all day, but oddly enough, standing perfectly still for hours wears out your legs in a completely different way. I’d get hungry and tired. Then I’d zone out, a zombie in a prince’s tunic and tights.
* * *
ON MY INITIAL visit, the first things the kostumeri showed me were very rough mock-ups of the costumes I would wear for the opening of Sleeping Beauty. Both jackets were a lightweight velvet; one in a very pale blue, the other a very pale yellow. The ladies put the mock-ups on me and started pulling and cutting and pinning. All six women surrounded me, speaking in Russian, analyzing how the costume would lie on my body. It was a science to them. I stood there for the better part of an hour and a half, legs throbbing in my white tights. When I tried to indicate certain changes I wanted, for instance to make the front of the jacket more open at the bottom, we did our best to communicate through gestures. They would contemplate what I asked and decide among themselves whether or not it was possible, a negotiation that always led to a very animated back and forth among the six women. When they reached a decision, it would be conveyed to me by Yulia, a petite woman in her fifties with pulled-back brown hair that smelled faintly of cigarettes. Yulia became my main costume lady, partly, I suppose, because she could speak to me in very slow basic English. I would respond either nyet or da.
Most of what I suggested was put into effect. But there was one thing I wanted to alter for my Swan Lake costumes that turned out to be asking too much. Swan Lake has reached iconic status globally as the most recognized ballet in history. But at Bolshoi, where it was created and premiered in 1877, the ballet is a part of the theater’s identity. I was well aware of this when I tried on my mock-up for that role. Nevertheless, I requested what I thought was a simple change. The silver-laced white fabric of the sleeves jetted out at the shoulders and resembled a white pouf that looked, to my eyes, too old-world and old-school. I asked if they could just make a straight sleeve with no ruffle at the top; trim it down to streamline it a bit. I’m not typically finicky with my costumes, and I’m usually content to go along with what the designer intended. But this was one thing I very much wanted to modernize. The women surrounding me looked puzzled and reluctant. They took the sleeve in about a centimeter.
I looked at them and said, “Can you get rid of the whole thing? I would like just a straight sleeve.”
They took it in another centimeter. I wasn’t getting very far. Finally Yulia said that this was the designer’s wish and they couldn’t do a straight sleeve. The sleeve had been that way since the original production. I could have refused and told them how I envisioned the sleeve, but I realized that respect for tradition was strongly upheld by the kostumeri. My costume was a part of Bolshoi Theatre history and had to be honored as such.
* * *
IT WASN’T LONG before I became comfortable with the kostumeri, swinging open the door to the shop and greeting them with “Zdravstvuyte krasivitza!” I had no idea whether I was saying “Hello, beautiful!” correctly; or was it “Hello, beautifuls!”; or “Hello, the beautiful!” But it brought an immediate smile to their faces nonetheless.
When I needed to come in for a fitting, the message would be conveyed to me by any one of a number of people: Svetlana, Sasha, the rehearsal coordinator, the assistant director. When I finally got a mobile phone, I received texts in English that read, “Please come. Yulia costume.” Succinct; to the point; and, endearingly, in English.
Occasionally, I would learn what roles I was going to be dancing from the costumes for which I was being fitted. One day the women showed me the mock-up for the title role of Pierre Lacotte’s Marco Spada. To my knowledge, it had been decided months before that I would dance the supporting role of Prince Frederici, not the main character. I told the kostumeri they were wrong, but they insisted they had been told to make Marco Spada’s costumes for me because I was dancing the premiere. And so it was that I found out that I was not only dancing the role of Marco Spada but would do so on the opening night.
* * *
WHEN A COSTUME is made especially for you, it has the power to change the way you carry yourself. At my final fitting for Sleeping Beauty, I slipped on the pale blue jacket to be worn with my matching pale blue tights. Gone was the mock-up with its rough muslin. In its place, delicate velvet and ornately hand-stitched embroidery. The velvet stretched; neither too heavy and cumbersome nor too flimsy. It hugged my body perfectly. I was proud to have the kostumeri’s work on my body. Dancers need material that breathes well and cooperates with the extremities of movement when we perform. If the costume doesn’t fit or the fabric is too stiff, we become stiff ourselves, uncomfortable in our adopted outer layer. Certain steps can also become impossible because of the restrictions of the costume. The kostumeri had sourced the ideal fabric to allow me the freedom I required. There was room in the shoulders for when I would lift my ballerina, and tightness in the waist to create an aesthetic line from the hips downward. The proportions were perfect, as was its detail, down to every rhinestone sewn on with absolute attention. The cuffs were laced with intricate gold and silver beadwork with more beads edging the fronts and decorating the backs. Each jacket would be worn over an embroidered vest, under which was a high-necked silk shirt with a cravat and pin. Everything was meticulous.
Costumes for a full-length ballet had rarely been fit to my exact measurements before. At times they were gorgeous to look at but difficult to dance in. But this was entirely different. What had begun as a jumble of rough fabric and straight pins had turned into the most comfortable and beautifully ornate costumes I’d ever worn. It made me happy to see the pride on the kostumeri’s faces, with the finished product on my body.
In the press conference just before the final stage rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty, I faced the cameras wearing the pale blue jacket made for me. I stated how lush the production was, down to the costume I wore at that moment. I said I was honored to be dancing in such beautiful attire. The next week, when I arrived for more fittings with my kostumeri, the ladies thanked me for mentioning the costumes in the media. How could I not have? Hours had gone into every detail of fabricating the
best costume possible. These women were just as committed to Bolshoi Theatre as anyone who received more public accolades. They deserved as much attention as any other element of the production.
* * *
DANCERS FORGE VERY close relationships with these women who make their costumes from scratch throughout their careers. When I first visited the costume ladies, I noticed they had hung pictures of some of their favorite dancers on the walls. Sergei Filin was there, Nikolai Tsiskaridze and Yuri Grigorovich as well. At the end of my first season, on my way into a fitting, I noticed that I had made the wall. I was deeply moved by this gesture, knowing it was entirely up to them to determine who was on the wall and who wasn’t. My picture was one that had been taken in Colorado during the Vail International Dance Festival by Erin Baiano, a friend and photographer. The kostumeri had found it on the internet, had it blown up and printed, and there I was, in a gold frame next to some of the great dancers of Bolshoi Theatre. I supposed I might have won them over with my “Zdravstvuyte krasivitza!” every time I walked in the door.
* * *
THE COSTUME SHOP eventually moved from the crumbling Soviet building back to Bolshoi Theatre. Its windows were situated just behind the giant statue positioned near the top of the theater that depicted Apollo, god of music, and his chariot drawn by four mighty horses. Beyond it you could see the imposing Kremlin and Red Square. Yulia and the other costume ladies had the best view of anyone in the entire theater. They had put in the years at the “warehouse” with not much of a view, so they rightfully perched high above the theater, looking out over all of Moscow.
A Body of Work Page 20
