Topic for this edition: Maturity Questioned
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Maturity Questioned
By
Shahab Nahvi
In the article “The Competitive Edge,” published in the April 2000 issue of Dance Teacher magazine, the writers, Rose Marie Wurzer and Katherine Mayfield, raised the issue of competition among students and differentiated between a good competition and a bad one. They stated that it is the teacher’s responsibility to create the proper atmosphere and that he/she should do so by sharing their time among the students, not degrading or lifting any particular student to an extreme (which creates polarity for years to come among the students). Wurzer and Mayfield suggested that attempting to degrade any one student would cause other students to gang up on him/her and demoralize them further. On the other extreme, putting a student on a pedestal would create tension whereby other students might feel that they have no chance of achieving the same level of technique and ability.
Wurzer and Mayfield give sound advice; however, it rarely is followed in the professional dance schools that I have seen. More often than not, teachers invest their time on the 3-4 students that have the best chance of joining the parent company and the rest of the students have to learn the technique by observing these students and the correction thereof. The best example that comes to mind is the late Stanley Williams (1925-1997). At the time, he was recognized as one of the best dance teachers around. Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Peter Martin, Peter Schaufuss and many more visited his class on a regular basis. This was the class that was suppose to train the next individuals who were to join the New York City Ballet. Wurzer and Mayfield’s advice is sound because they recognize that children and teenagers are not mature enough to be able to see through the imbalance that they experience. Although many of the students that joined large dance schools were highly skilled and recognized in their home state, they found themselves shunned while others were preferred, day after day, by their teachers in the new environment. Handling rejection requires maturity. Some were unable to handle the situation—they dropped out and disappeared into the population and occasionally, some attempted suicide.
In 1977, as a teenager, I left my parents behind and started making decisions on my own. I had no choice—the country was at war with itself and with everyone at arms length. My journey to the United States started in England with Nicholas Beriozoff (1906-1996), a famous choreographer and teacher, who offered me a scholarship to Indiana University where he was a ballet master at that time. Within a short period I found myself in New York where the top 10 male and female dancers in the world roamed the streets. You could literally see them shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue or taking dance classes in preparation for the night’s performance. Looking back, I must say, I was overwhelmed and unprepared for what I was about to face. I am not talking about technical skills, but the social habits that somehow had engrained itself in a small community, that is the dance world. A world where it is best to keep silent and not make waves, in the hope of meeting the right person who will help you, in a short duration, to achieve your goal.
This is instinctive for all dancers who have worked practically all their lives to reach the top. They put blinders on, with help from a society that ignores them, in the hope of achieving success. Afterall, they are nothing but mechanical machines that perform for meager existence and take on all assaults with a grain of salt. They know that the average age for a performer to retire is about 27 and are willing to do anything, from starving themselves to making themselves available to morally degrading circumstances. They are aware that the best companies, more often than not, make hiring decisions behind closed doors and that auditions sometimes are just to satisfy the union and anyone else involved. Mind you that more and more younger crowds are able to master a high level of skill and their future is in the hands of those who have total control over them, from their income to their position in the company to their self-esteem.
Recently, I was watching a television program called ‘American Idol,’ where three judges were auditioning ranks of singers for an upcoming performance. They would listen to an individual’s performance and then give their opinion about the performer’s skill and potential future, which is not that different from dance auditions. One of the judges on the show, who was from Britain, attempted to eliminate the performers by demoralizing them on national television, calling them “losers,” before eventually cutting them. Although it is rare for a judge (the one who auditions) to verbally abuse someone they have just met, it is not unheard of. The same individuals can even become quite aggressive and abusive to those whom they are familiar with in the company. Similarly, large schools, where hundreds of students are auditioned every year for a few openings and there is no sign of a student shortage, give the impression that teachers and those in charge have absolute power over the students. Afterall, the skill has to be passed on from teacher to student directly. Hence, these youngsters become easy targets for abuse. They are always threatened by the presence of a newcomer to fill their spot. Parents, world over, send their kids to these large institutions, pay for their housing and education, hoping for him/her to be the chosen one. These teenagers, having been trained for years in their own state under their parent’s supervision, are all of a sudden packed in a group of 2-3 per studio apartment without adult supervision. A circumstance that normally is not found until much later, perhaps at university level, where they are no longer teenagers and they have some life experience, not to mention a decent education and hopefully some level of an analytical mind to differentiate good from bad. These types of dance institutions most often rely on skill and ability rather than on age to decide whether or not a certain group should be together. As they move into the company, again their skill becomes the motivator, hence, the teenager might be working with a 30-year-old person. Somehow once the teenager joins the dance company they seem to be considered an adult. I have rarely seen a teenager who is in a company to be supervised by their parents—it is looked down upon.
Excerpt from Edward Villella’s [b 1936] book, Prodigal Son (1992) p.24-25:
By now I felt more at home at the school and thought a lot about Balanchine [b 1904, d 1983] and Lincoln. They both personified the special new world I wanted to be part of. Although at that age I had no real understanding of its true nature, it seemed European and provocative, certainly far removed from anything I had grown up with. For one thing, I knew that Balanchine had had several wives. At the time he was married to Maria Tallchief [b 1925], who was his leading ballerina. Not long after I enrolled in the school, she danced the lead in his production of the Firebird. I was part of the opening-night audience and was thrilled by her performance. It was said that Balanchine had given her an expensive diamond bracelet after the premiere, but I was also aware of rumors about his relationship with another dancer in the company, the seventeen-year-old Tanaquil Le Clercq [b 1929, d 2000]. One day I saw Balanchine sipping a drink with Tanny in the Schrafft’s restaurant on Madison and Fifty-ninth Street. He was oblivious of everyone but her. By then everyone knew he was in love with her. He was casting her in many new roles and wanted to marry her. Watching them together, I felt as if I were getting a glimpse of something I wasn’t supposed to see.
I was thirteen, and just then beginning to understand Balanchine’s relationships with his dancers. There was always a ballerina who inspired him. He’d fall in love with her and then usually marry her. I was fascinated. So was everyone else. I had the feeling all the ballet mothers sitting in the hall would have gladly thrown their twelve-year-old daughters at him on the chance he’d become entranced with one of them and make her a star. After all, people said that in the 1930s in Europe, he had choreographed ballets for Tamara Toumanova [b 1919, d 1997] when she was thirteen years old and Alicia Markova [b 1910] when she was sixteen.
Mr. Villella failed to mention that Le Clercq became Balanchine’s student at SAB at the age of 12. This might, however, have been an unconscious act on his part, owing to his loyalty to Mr. B. In this excerpt from his book, Mr. Villella suggests that Mr. Balanchine’s success with the teenagers mentioned above excuses him having a relationship with them. An idea that persists to this day.
The dance world is a small, minute portion of society. Desire for success against all competition is so severe that it seems that all norms of society are washed away. No one asks any questions about the treatment of these individuals until much later, when the dancer has achieved some level of success and fame and decides to write about his/her experience as a teenager in the dance world (i.e. Collusion: Memoir of a Young Girl and Her Ballet Master by Evan Zimroth; Nothing to Hide by Robert La Fosse with Andrew Mark Wentink). The assumption is that someone who has achieved a great amount of skill in the arts has somehow managed to incorporate that skill into his/her daily life in order to lift him or herself to a higher level of consciousness. It is also difficult to imagine that the same person could be morally corrupt and socially inadequate. A similar parallel can be made with Catholic priests who are found guilty of sexual misconduct. I submit that parents should become more involved, ask questions, and guide their children to adulthood in this field rather than leaving it to the institutions.
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