Vasiliev

THANK YOU, IVAN VASILIEV!

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In this post, I will not defend any idea – I will be only a fan.

First of all:

This link is a Christmas gift to Ivan Vasiliev’s  fans, and maybe to him too.

Snapshot - 152

It is also an “I am sorry” gift to him, because of the stir  my first post about his injury unwittingly caused – besides the fact that I’m always writing about him.

But most of all, it is a Thank You, Ivan Vasiliev!

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Now,  why am I grateful? Because there is so much to like in his dancing. What do I see?

… the same all do:

– his super-hiper-ultra jumps: the ballon, extra-difficulties, clean landings;

– his turns, and their nice controlled ending;

…. but also:

– the sure feet: where he steps, where he lands, there they are, planted on the ground like roots, no fidgeting, no need of correction;

– that he is able to perform in such different styles of dancing (much to his choreographers joy), and fearless to try new ones – how could a dancer with classical training possibly master Labyrinth of Solitude so quickly? Or have the swing to dance Jazzy Five? or deal with all that was new in Solo For Two? … was he BORNE knowing all this?

– his expressive power in any kind of role, and how he uses dancing as a way to expression, instead of just glueing some pre-choreographed poor mimic on the surface of dance;

– how he dares to let go of a classical line if it doesn’t  help expression: outstretched hands, contracted shoulders and chest, relaxed arms, and so on, and it is still SO beautiful dancing, sometimes more than ever before;

– the beauty of his movements:  he is asked to point a finger, he points, and there it is, ridiculously  beautiful, deserving a picture to be taken.  Never knew a dancer  so graceful, moving, standing, whatever, he is always nice to look at – I suppose it’s still the borne dancer thing;

– his reliable partnering. In Vasiliev’s  PDDs, my natural reaction is to sit back, relax and enjoy, because I  have no doubt, at all,  it will work seamlessly and be beautiful to watch;

– the commitment  to his partners, making us pay attention to them because he, the great star, pays so much attention to them;

– the disarming joy in dancing, and disarming pride on his feats;

– that he is the most masculine dancer ever, not just in his looks – all his dancing is masculine;

– that he is handsome, and I don’t give a fig that he does not fit “classical” standards – in fact, he could be the new standard, because I like it better;

– that he gives his best every single time!;

– his self-esteem and individuality – he is always stepping outside of invisible limits others try to set on him. He is fearless, like Ratmansky said, and is always accepting new challenges . Irrepressible, I called him, and I hope he will not change, ever!!

– his charisma. It permeates all other items, and enhances them, and the outcome now becomes really impressive! In order NOT to see and feel it, well, you will have to close your eyes and walk away very quickly… If you stay, you are hooked – wellcome, one more fan! And this quality, more than any one other, enabled him to the next:

– his communication skills: he knows how to create rapport with his audience, how to win them to his role AND even to Ivan Vasiliev himself  –  awesome feat for a dancer! How many dancers can boast of such a skill?  to such an extent? in classical Ballet?

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Has Vasiliev really all these qualities?  Oh, they may not be there all the time, or may not be there all at the same time, but, yes, they are all, already, HIS.

He also may not have reached perfection in all these features, and other dancers may be favourably compared on this or that feature, but if you sum these up, you’re compelled to realize he is unique, no superlatives needed.  Not a single dancer, until now, had them all together.

Dance becomes DANCE,  when he steps on stage, and I’m grateful, deeply grateful every time I see DANCE. So, yes, Thank You, Ivan Vasiliev, I wish more classical dancers were like you!

I hope your example give other dancers “ideas”, boldness. I Hope! I don’t like to see all that weight on just your <classical> shoulders, muscled as they are,  because it is cumbersome, you should not know about all this, you should just DANCE!  Please!

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About Kings, Battles and Muses

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Kings in battle

The second King is down: Guillaume Cote is also injured! ACL, the excrucianting cruciating ligament tear that needs 6 to 12 months rehabilitation, that is maybe also Vasiliev’s problem. Or has the Russian newspaper cruciated, I mean, crossed over Kings x Injuries?

It is lucky that Medicine can nowadays stitch dancers whole again, everytime they tear themselves apart! Or at least most of the times…

Accidents happen. If your mind is your tool, almost none. If your tool is emotion, sometimes. If your tool is your body, frequently. I can accept that, it comes with the trade.
What I cannot accept is when you, with open eyes, bring the tool of your trade (that sounded a little weird) to the verge of collapse. There are always signs, made by Nature to help avoid the worst, PAAIIINNN!!!! being it’s favourite.

That so much choose to ignore pain, to suffer before and even more after collapsing – I cannot grasp: it simply does not find a way into my rationality. It sounds to me too much as a kind of offering, of sacrifice, of flesh-mortification, seen somehow as worthy and positive and needed to earn a dubious reward.

“The body is a sacred garment”, said Martha Graham. She certainly did not mean it in the martyrdom sense above. To me her words evoke the flowing garments of ancient Greece, and their reverence for the beauty of human body, especially when moving. Music and dancing were present in any celebration, then, and were joyous celebrations themselves – they even devised goddesses to symbolize them.

Terpsichore means The Joy of Dancing. How can pain, deliberate pain, be part of joy, except in a self-mortifying or sacrificial sense?

We all know perfectly well that physical conditioning requires certain amounts of pain. Small amounts it should be, if things are made the right way, and not continuously. I believe that’s ok, if it happens while you’re having joy IN your activity ITSELF, but becomes perverse if the pain is great, or accepted not because of the pleasure you get out straight out of work. The pain you accept, the suffering you impose on your body because of OTHER kinds of reward is something I cannot understand.

Terpsichore abandoned

If you are climbing a steep mountain, and push against your limits so you can reach the next safe rock niche, where you then sit down to recover and enjoy the breathtaking view, is anything more perfect? But if you keep pushing and pushing, just to excel yourself, or test your ultimate body limits, or be the first to reach the peak – and end up hanging down a cliff, breathless and trembling all over, your life in danger, too much bruised and full of cramps to go on, does that make any sense? Not to me! You are not enjoying your body, you are abusing it.

Other physical activities, ranging from Sports to Arts may offer less dramatic examples, but that senselessness applies to all. You see, when Vasiliev was injured, I associated it with another event, in the Olympic Games of 1984 – when marathonist Gabriele Andersen ended her race as a crumpled, cramped, semi-parallyzed, vacillating little heap of pain, she was collapsing, and came very close to death that day.

I believe I was (am?) the only person in the world that didn’t WOW her feat: for me it was even more unacceptable than IV’s injury. In my troubled eyes the whole thing was just twisted, so perverse that I was done with Sports, and never again watched a single Sports competition again. The link between the two facts was precisely my indignation!
Why I do feel that way? Maybe because one of the first books I ever read in my life was about Ancient Greece, and it hooked me for life to their values and aesthethic, or maybe because I belong to the make-love-not-war generation, that was all for colours, nature, music, dancing, and a fierce defense of body’s freedom.

Anyway, I love the human body as much as I love trees or rivers or birds. Lack of respect to any of them, specially if it is done because of competition, profit, fame, or any initiative that uses but does not reward THEM, makes me mad – to me all are sacred, in the pagan Greek sense, and in Martha Graham’s sense too, I bet.

I cannot because…

Guillaume Cotê had a stress fracture and an Acchiles tendon problem while rehearsing Nijinsky, but just kept working. Marcelo Gomes already made two major surgeries – in an interview after the first one he mentions 23 performances in a single month, and 12 different roles in a single season (all the rehearsals!).
I know, I KNOW, there are all kinds of motivation to push your body beyond reason: you must think of your career, you love to dance, you must provide for your family, you love to dance, you cannot let down so many people and things that depend on you, you love to dance…

Ok…

Now Cote is out during months…

Finding “rational” reasons to explain a dangerous behaviour does not lessen the risk involved, nor does it prevent a bad outcome.
“Currently active dancers expect to continue their performing careers well into their forties. However, dancers whose active careers are now over remember that, although they thought they could continue until their late thirties, on average they actually stopped dancing professionally in their early to mid-thirties.”
This quote is in a report called “Making Changes, Facilitating the Transition of Dancers to Post-Performance Careers“, the result of a research on dancers, both active and retired, in 11 countries. Dancers retire earlier, and earlier, nowadays, and a lot because of injuries. Do you know how many?  “Twenty-nine percent of surveyed former dancers in Australia, 33 percent of former dancers in Switzerland, 35 percent of former dancers in the U.S. report that the health effects of injuries caused them to stop dancing.”

A THIRD OF THEM!

My point is, if you deal with your body (as all Nature) in a respectful way, you will run fewer risks, you will lengthen its useful life, you will have more joy when dancig, and you may still excel in your trade. Maybe you will never reach more than 182,546 degrees in your split, or that last half inch in your jump, but when you leap you will fly beautiful, happy and safe as a bird, and will keep flying for a long time…

The disquieting Muse

Terpsichore is loosing ground, her gracefulness and joy of dancing are almost out of sight, giving way to Chirico’s Disquieting Muse – oh, THIS one fits our times: hard, empty of joy, lifeless, but so impressive!!

The joy IN dancing is a continuous, fresh spring of emotional and physical energy. The mere promise of a reward that is OUTSIDE dance in any way (to the dancer himself, to the audience, to an Ideal, to his future) turns dance into a heavy chore, a hard duty where all the energy has to come OUT of your muscles and brain, it is depleting.

These are hard, cold, demanding times: the lack of real vitality is disguised with lots of sparkles in all spheres of life, on the stage even more so. It may seem that you must shine the more brighter to conquer excellence, work opportunities, success, pleasure, retirement. An audience with eyes already wearied by way too much glitter ‘outside’, seems also to demand even more on the stage.

In fact, what we all crave for, not just the audience, is a way to reattach to real life, to the “big questions”, to deep emotion – only we are, most the time, unaware this is our real yearning. Art can do that, through its magic, deep, all-encompassing, carry-you-away magic, but it certainly is not to be found where there are only sparkles.

And what next?

Imagine a Ballet evening in the future, where all dancers are very young, but with serious eyes already. Imagine all of them dancing because of a lot of different reasons, except the one, the single one that makes sense. Imagine all of them performing impossible feats: 270 degrees extensions, jumps like olympic athletes, turns that defy the laws of physics, bends and twist that make them look as disjointed dolls of a cruel child, lifts so complicated you wonder they don’t end up in knot.

This IS the future, not even a distant one, given the rate at which the relative value of physical excellence is increasing – and because it is just the logical development of overrating Form in Ballet (it fits our times like a glove). Imagine physical excellence is so common now, we in the audience are no more easily impressed, the dancers have to excel themselves – and one another – all the time, pushing hard against their bodies’ limits. They are all so terribly young, because all dancers finish their professional lives early, after a series of successful surgeries, until the one that isn’t.

Deeply worried about the physical  accomplishments, they have no time and energy to act, or even to learn to act properly, or to create rapport with the audience – their artistry has not matured yet – all they can do is flash a big, fake smile once in a while. Chirico’s muse would be rubbing her hands (had she any).

There is a clear danger here: that young great dancers – current and future Kings and Queens, on whom the spotlights shine the brighter – are lured down this road, and become engaged in unnecessary, senseless battles . I hope they recognize the crossroads when they come to them and choose Terpsichore’s ways instead.

I will write a lot about Ivan Vasiliev

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Ivan Vasiliev will be a recurring subject in my texts. Why all this attention? Am I just an old woman secretly dreaming about a handsome young boy? Maybe I’m that too, kkkkkkk…
I always  acknowledge that I am a fan – a certain amount of my writing is firmly rooted on admiration: as I see it, he is a really gifted dancer, not because he is perfect, or my superhero, but because he has a combination of assets that makes him unique (nice subject to another post).
But I will insist on him as a subject because he is also emblematic.  If I were to list my worries and hopes about Dance today, and then I had to exemplify them, I could always pick something about him, or out of his professional life.  Often, when I write,  the larger picture is in my mind, but I pick Ivan Vasiliev because spotlights are always on him, and even if they were not, HE unwittingly draws our attention (one of his assets being an overload of charisma). So it is so easy to single him out  (poor lad, I’m sure it would be very annoying, would he ever be aware of it): he is so “visible”, anything I write about him can be understood, seen, conferred, by anyone who loves Dance, bringing the broader view in it’s wake.
What I mean? For example, he is emblematic TO other dancers, in that he is a Despite-Success.
He is successful despite his “inadequate” physique, despite “technical flaws”, despite a one-sided development of virtuosism (the bravura thing), despite  being “unrefined”, “brash”, “vulgar”, despite “inflated ego”and  “bad manners”, despite “show-offing”  (and so on, it is a huge list, since Solo For Two, even more so),  despite flirting with the audience, despite sending  joking messages to supercilious critics…
Ooohhh… (wondering…)
So it is possible to be so out-of-limits, and still be a success? So maybe all the rules he bended or broke are not really that wise?  Perhaps they should not even exist? hhmm…
He is also emblematic  OF other dancers, who share this or that trait with him, traits that make their lives difficult: those trapped into only one kind of role because of their bodies, like it or not; those who expose themselves more and more to injuries as they continuously try to excel  in inhuman technical feats;  those who suffer severe control on their… 5th positions (as if Dance would cease to exist without perfect ones);  those who are not allowed to participate in the creative process; those who are not allowed individuality; those who cannot take a stand to a choreographer or wardrobe designer without being accused of inflated ego; those who had to damp down  communication skills; those who had to damp down acting skills (no, no, you must dance Aurora exactly like Fonteyn did… and of course, be unfavourably compared…).
So when I think about Vasiliev, I’m  looking well beyond him too, but he stands in the front and middle of the picture. Like Sylvie Guillem in her time, Vasiliev IS a potential revolution by himself.
If he can, others can, too. If he finds a better way, others will follow, or realize they can find their own.  He has been opening closed doors since he stepped on the Bolshoi stage for the first time, 7 or 8 years ago. I would totally believe him if he said it was never his intention, that he did nothing like that, that he only wanted to dance.  He may even not be aware that he, inadvertently, IS revolution. No problem, there is no need he DOES anything, actively.

But there are a lot of innovative companies and choreographers and dancers nowadays, you can say, pointing accusingly at me with your almost empty glass of wine.

Yes, there are (waving my almost full glass at you – I talked so much I had no time to drink). But they are smaller and have less impact than the maybe 10 big companies. It is inside these Sacred Temples that a conservative audience dictates what is Dance, and their priests sanction liturgy rules accordingly (costly big productions, always the same hard-classical ballets each season – how many Swan Lakes and Sleeping Beauties were already staged, year after year? In how many ways can you stage them with a really new twist? – Matthew Bourne, I love you!!!! – I grudgingly admit, however, that Giselle is an exception: dancers, and nobody else, can bring some freshness to it). My, what a confusing sentence! But I bet you got it.

As long as change does not definitely and surely  enter the holy recincts, innovation will have limits.     AND it is right inside, in the midst of this holy ground that Ivan Vasiliev IS revolution!

And he is also, in a most personal view, emblematic of my hopes. If he would choose a REAL  growing path (bravura roles are a dead-end), any one nicely to his liking, and take a stand about it!  No more would be needed: the more he fulfills his potential, the more revolutionary he will be.  Because, you see, he already winned a fair parcel of the audience to his side. So he already has enough power: his audience is great, the greatest an individual dancer had in a long time, AND  he is able to bring more in,  AND  has enough charisma to convince at least HIS audience to follow him in new experiences, and ensure they still have fun.

What a grand all-win situation: IV happy, audience pleased, a great example to other dancers. Even the sacrossanct Temples Of Dance would win: more, and new, audience… more $$$$…

So I watch his steps so closely. So I worry: he must step out of this bravura roles BEFORE a serious injury  – there is still so much to explore!

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A “posthumous” Note: this was written just a few days BEFORE his injury, can you believe me?

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If Ivan Vasiliev keeps going and kicking, more stones in the foundation of the Sacred Temples will be shaken…
The derisive remarks in reviews about him, however, may be a problem to my hopes.

Or not.

Who knows? He already surprised me with this new, unheard-of behaviour in curtain-calls…  I really couldn’t have imagined anything like that, ever, not when such a lot of negative remarks about “bad-manners” were already showering on him. But deliberatedly or intuitively, he found a way to break rules AND finish the Mikh Tour in NY as a winner, and as a winner to be received in San Francisco.

Oh! I love to be surprised!