07 October 2011
Ballet: Gelsey Kirkland
Here's Gelsey Kirkland, the great (and maybe the greatest) American ballerina. Her many personal problems aside, Gelsey was always exceptional on stage. This particular video highlights her performance of the Sugar Plum Fairy variation in The Nutcracker, with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Yes, she's very thin, but...oh my goodness, the way she dances. Every movement, every moment is beautiful. She brings out things in the music that might not have seemed so obvious before. I read somewhere a comment that she becomes a three-dimensional representation of the music in this variation, and I can't argue with such a description.
What to note:
Gelsey was a student of Balanchine, but to me she was a more truly classical dancer than he tended to develop. And she stands head-to-toe with any dancer that Russia produced. Those arms, that footwork, that balance, that control. It's perfection.
(Hint: Her variation is the first two minutes of the video.)
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3 comments:
I'm curious, what school of dancing you grew up in, now?
My training was certainly a blend. My teacher came from Britain and had been influenced by the British style that developed after WWII (when she was dancing). There was also some influence from the Cecchetti style, but not all that much I suspect. I was trained, as many dancers in America are, with something of a blend of backgrounds. That's both good and bad. It creates the potential for versatility, but it also lacks any real purity. I've had to hone my style by observing others and applying elements after the fact.
The one style in which I was not trained at all was the Balanchine style. In fact, I once took a class with Suki Schorer, who was (is?) a teacher at Balanchine's School of American Ballet. The whole experience was completely frustrating, and I came away from it grateful that I hadn't been shoe-horned into such a limited style. On the other hand, I also took a class with former Kirov ballerina Galina Mezentseva, and while the class itself was fairly painful (she yelled at us and demanded perfection, as most Russian teachers do) I remember it being a better experience and far more educational. In the Schorer class, I was inundated with useless pedagogy; in the Mezentseva class, I was reminded that we were learning how to dance. In fact, at the end of the class, Mezentseva -- who had seemed so grumpy the whole time -- turned to us, smiled sweetly, and said, "You are all beautiful."
I'm not sure if that was much of an answer to your question, but my simple answer is just that my background was highly varied and influenced by all kinds of things.
R.A.D. will give you the foundation and the flexibility to work with just about any choreographer along with the details to make you an exceptional dancer. Balanchine was exceptional as a choreographer but splayed hips in a grand jete are just ugly. The Russian temperament is useful in impressing us with the fact that ballet training is hard work. Good luck.
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