Yvonne in Ballet School

Hi.

This chapter from my other novel Our Lives as Kites (recently published in Kindle format at Amazon) shows Yvonne Fillon in ballet school in Toronto.  Only fourteen at this time, she is to become an international soloist.

Let us spend a moment in the memory of great Rudolf Nureyev, since whose death twenty years have already elapsed. He was an inspiration for part of this chapter, as well as for the book. 

Your comments would be appreciated (here or at kitescomments AT gmail DOT com), especially if the ballet and/or the dance are your passion/thing, professionally or otherwise. 

BTW, the famous clip is available at youtube (search for "Nureyev Genzano" and select one over 9 min).

___

4 - 1966-67

Dancing.  Lucien Chu is having a bad day and is bringing me down with him, hopefully not literally, though.  Could he have learned in Montreal this gift of spoiling another’s day, I’m trying to mischievously inquire of him under my breath while still dancing together, with that remotest of hopes that anger might wake him up to a better incarnation of himself.  Coz he’s definitely only a shadow of his better days; anyone in the audience could tell that, for sure, even though he’s just fourteen, just like me.  Glad he hasn’t changed the black in his tights, white on him would be laughable in this more modern piece, making him swanny, as it were.  His square jaw is set today, as though he has something to prove to everybody around and protruding it would be the best business under the circumstances.  His knees and hips still seem low to my taste, I couldn’t quite tell why, though I know I like their contours, within which the muscles are becoming more clear in form and firmer these days.   

     The luck is, the audience this morning, at the National Ballet’s school in Toronto, is only other students — a dozen, perhaps more, but not by much — as well as Mme Alyutina, our teacher for the morning class and rehearsals.   However, the history of other mornings shows only that familiarity brings out the harshest critics, not necessarily in the open, but guaranteed out there in the rumor pipeline at work.

     So when I’ll be showing up at the residence for the out-of-town girls, later in the day, a place I am sure to visit for what I’d call social flip-flopping, I am, guaranteed, going to be bombarded with idiot questions, say ‘Wonder what’s going on with your pointes, Yvonne?  Soon they gonna be as flat as a plate for a lunch with no soup in it.  Did you hear what I said, girls?  A plate for a lunch with no soup it.’ And another is going to take over, ‘Yes, I heard, but I know something which is really boss.  As flat as a C flat!’ ‘Oh, no,’ another is going to play and counterpoint along the same tack, ‘as flat as Mme Alyutina’s rear! No, I’m way off, mind you, she has no front nor back!’

     And howling and yawping should of course start in short order.  Bet you two bucks on that, no questions asked. 

     Or the milling would let itself be sidetracked by just a whisper of a line, ‘Hey, girls, Yvonne’s getting stronger than poor thing Lucien.  Now, that’s manliness at its best.  Look at those arms of hers and look at the thighs, in three years you won’t find room for them in her tights.’

      And hee, and ha, and hee hee hee, all over again. 

     ‘What do you mean, too many boys in those tights of her?  Latest research doesn’t show any hope for that.  Even Lucien and, who’s that white boy, oh yes, I remember now, Vince Pearson it is, might leave the field in total disarray after finding what they’d find.‘

     ‘Like what, what’d they find?’

     ‘Muscles and bones in considerable stock, girls, that’s what they would find.  Clear enough for you, Sharon?’  So Tabitha Clark would identify  for all to know the latest concerns over the so-called over-development of my body, which is doing just fine, thank you very much. 

     Tabitha Clark, of all.  Think about that.  Holy Beatles! As if it weren’t she who had with zero chance of joining the National after getting the paper.  Read that?  Zero.  I mean, she’s double the stage for a dancer.  I mean she’s panoramic, face-wise and body-wise, and for heavens’ sakes, we’re only fourteen, most of us, add or subtract one year, in our class.  Seems to be some Alberta hotel property in the family, angelling her here, playing the lady bountiful on her behalf.  I mean, ‘the school needs generous donors, no doubt, arts are expensive,’ as my mom says, ‘let it pass, girl.’ So I let it pass, that’s part of my code, ‘The dogs bark, the caravan passes on.’ Why feed the rumor mill, there are enough out there who pour into it, and Tabitha’s the best, or the worst, depending on how you look at it.  ‘One cannot pay for dignity, nor for honor,’ my father says, but with less spunk these days, even though I’m occasionally trying to man his barricades for him. 

     Lucien, Lucien, what is going on with you?  What is it, one year since you started to partner me?  It must be about that.  Coming from Montreal.  Rare birds, the Chinese in Montreal, still; many more in Toronto, I’d say.  Recently arrived, the family, so he doesn’t sound too great in neither of our two great official languages, French and English, and it pains him, you can look at his face while the gang is poking fun at his speech, it gets long, long, and disappointed, but doesn’t answer back, and this is something where we two are alike.   

     His body isn’t getting too tall, and this may be one of his pet peeves these days.   Most of the boys are growing up quickly, and it seems he’s slower in this respect.  There’s always growth to be done until one is out of one’s teens, Mme Alyutina and the other coaches tell us each other day, trying to smother concerns some of us, such as Lucien, have, but we all know there aren’t any written guarantees, and by looking at some of our parents, the questions won’t disappear overnight, on the contrary.  I’m lucky with my father, six feet two, as my mom isn’t any taller than five five, and that on a good day, as some would say.  ‘I must have missed all the rainy days in school, but you, Gilbert, you must have been out in St.  Malo with your sweeties in torrential rain, I guess, each and every time  l’opportunité showed up,’ she’s still cranking it to my father.  ‘Oh, ma chère, this only shows you really know me, and the glorious workings of your imagination, and if you must assume that, I can’t deny you the pleasure, especially as I am showcased in such a, mmm, favorable, I’d say, light in front of our dear daughter.’  My father laughs back at her, leaves for the kitchen, if we’re in the living room, and continues to laugh sonorously from there, taking in large gulps of air in between guffaws, and I love it — it just tells me how big and strong he still is at forty-six or thereabouts.  Caveat to the curious: I still haven’t seen, at this point in time, the birth certificates of my parents, so who’s to say they told me the truth about their ages; many people are running carefully designed circles around the issue, that I know for sure. 

     Lucien has been on tenterhooks since he learned about my intentions to continue with him as a partner only for the modern, I mean not for the classical stuff.  Everyone was shocked to learn — that must have been two months ago —  that I went to Mme Alyutina and I asked to have two partners. 

     The coach was quite on pins and needles that day, which was visible even in her broken English.  This was September, quite warm outside, still she had to lug, coiled around herself, the silver-fox collar that could tell her at any time of the year from half a mile, no doubt, her and her needle-ish frame, apparently prone to fall over under any faint breeze from the Lake, still so sturdy and well-balanced when it came to showing something in class.   She was holding her handkerchief hidden in the left cuff of her dress, as usual, ready to dab any sweat that might appear on her pale, dignified, but sucked-in face, which told me Father Time might well have spun tales of need on her.  Her dress was always ankle-length, today a beige gabardine, and she was known to despise the mini and those carrying it, of which Twiggy was one of the banner carriers in her sights. 

     ‘Who you are, mademoiselle, fourteen, to ask for two partners?  What’s wrong with Lucien for everything?  You been wiz him for one year and half now.  What the problem is?’

     ‘Well, Mme Alyutina, it’s that he’s a bit too stiff for classical dancing and it bothers me that we can’t have a good style together.  I’ve nothing to complain about him in modern pieces, and I want to stay with him for that.’

     ‘Well, well, getting bit too specialized already here.  Sometimes soon, I might myself come, to you, Mademoiselle Yvonne, and tell your body build is going less favorable to classical dancing and a better fit for modern ballet.  What are you going to do zen?  Must your partners reject you because of that?  Think a bit.  This is school, not ballet company, difficult to put people sideways just on your own taste.  Concern is first and foremost everybody enrolled here has a chance to become a dancer, educate people.  Pruning out, I think you call zat in English, is part of, but I don’t think we teachers should allow students to do that job themselves.  Young people just don’t have a long-terms experience.’

     ‘OK, could you, please, talk to other teachers and find a solution for me?  I don’t want to embarrass Lucien with observations all the time, it’s not fair.’

     ‘Well, I will try see.  But, mademoiselle, do you in a moment ask yourself who is going to dance with Lucien classical parts if is found in fact you rejected him?  He talented dancer, he might not best be, perhaps, his niche, in classical ballet, but he was accepted in school on his merit, has been progressed quite well from admission, so I don’t see problem for him to success in another area of  ballet or dancing, or even classical.  You young people, growing and changing a lot, bodies, as well minds, and perhaps the holy ghost — or someone else, I know you young don’t like us to talk religion any more, but this is how things are —  will help him in this dancing kind too.  You a bit egoistic taking it this way this early, you know, no?  Many people are possible to get strong miffed at you.’

     Just three weeks ago, Mme Alyutina took all of us from the School and its studio on Maitland Street, with those cathedral-tall windows and ceiling, to a television studio downtown to show us a four-year-old recording of Nureyev, the great star we haven’t seen here in Canada yet.  It was made, the technicians told us, by an American network, in the Bell series.  It was Nureyev, only twenty-four then, dancing with Maria Tallchief, the great ballerina that seems to also partner Erik Bruhn from time to time — who,  to me, seemed quite wide-hipped, sorry.  The piece was the pas de deux in the ‘Flower Festival in Genzano.’ We were all shocked to see Mr. Nureyev so young and sporting such a short haircut, he who’s known for his great flowing hair.  Mme Alyutina told us stupid American television executives forced ‘Rudi’  — this is how she calls him, as though he’s family to her, which of course he isn’t — to go through the terrible put-down of having had to cut his hair, just to get on air in ‘Free Amerika,’ this how she put it, and there was like vinegar in her words.  ‘I mean, even if he was their replacement for Mr. Bruhn, still he is ze great Nureyev, but they know nothing, some of ze Americans, from culture, so Puritan and so forth.  Haircut, as army, GI, pfft.  He ran death from KGB, now stupid Americans instead.  Life.  But girls and boys, look at him, open your eyes and look.’

     And he was indeed, something to behold, so light in his jumps and staying up-up-up there as though forever; light-blue knee-length breeches with laces on the sides of the knees, white thin hoses on his ankles and white shirt, a navy-blue neckerchief, a thin smile, and sending to us with a small irony under his lips, ‘Look how easy and nice the ballet is,’ but I knew already then and there that I might not ever see something like it in legèrité et panache, and that it takes something soh-soh rare to have those super-light jumps, the height of which never ended, those quick-as-mercury entrechats, those high raccourcis and tours, those cat-always-falls-on-his-paws-like landings.

     ‘Zis is style Bournonville at best, boys and girls.  Do not forget, choreography, redone by Mr. Bruhn, Danish person too, like Bournonville, closely works with Mr. Nureyev,’ happily Mme Alyutina sang away, and we, young teens still, started to look at each other, as even we had got a whiff of the nature of the relationship between the two great men of the ballet of this time.  Not that we know or understand too well the details. 

***

     On two nights during that week, I had dreams about Mr. Nureyev.  At times he was being nice and even wanted to dance with me, but had to get away, still telling me, and I respected him for sticking to manners and protocol, before leaving airily through some exits in a barely distinguishable stage ‘But, you know, Yvonne — this is your name, no?  — I have to dance with Miss Tallchief and Mr. Bruhn tonight and I plan to do some of those double sissonnés and double jetés that I know you like to see me do in the Flower Festival.  Perhaps other time, when you get bigger and older,’ or ‘You like me dancing, Yvonne?  You should then see Yuri Soloviev from the Kirov Ballet; unfortunately, he doesn’t come too frequently to the West.’ Other times, he was terribly angry at me, telling me ‘You’ll never amount to anything in ballet, Yvonne.  I know, Mme Alyutina has told me already, you haven’t been able to dance even with Lucien Chu, what is zat?’ and his accent was terribly thick and Russian-like, just like Mme Alyutina’s, but he was more bossy, as I imagined great men should be.  Not that I had met any of the kind, my acquaintances having been, I was starting sorrily to realize, terribly normal and ordinary people, and that had to start, unfortunately, with my parents, their kindness and all.  Even though I was willing to issue a special dispensation to my father, for his introducing the kites to me and teaching me how to deal with them and use them in day-to-day life, which still seemed to me terribly neat, and for thinking and imagining together with me what could happen when of a day one would launch and fly and drive them around in the sky and its clouds.  My father has always been so sweet he can give you cavities if you don’t really take care. 

     When I was a child, I liked to take cutouts from my ballet books with me in the bathtub during bathing and to make the greats of the art swim in my bath, until slowly, sloshed and heavy with water, they went to the bottom, to my utter dismay.  Why were they so lazy as not to want to swim and stay longer at the surface?  I asked myself.   Mother hated this, as it was she who had to clean the tub of all those smudged and ink-leaking pieces of paper, before they managed to clog the pipes, which entailed more expense, to bring in the seemingly ever-expensive plumbers.  I was learning to consider some crafts and professions, as the word was told me, as rather to avoid, if one was desirous — ‘desirous,’ I like this word I read in old books — of having an easy life.  That included doctors, of course, lawyers, plumbers and electricians.  ‘One should marry some of them, if one becomes interested,’ said my mother, suddenly worrying about some abstract circumstance that was never thought about before, ‘but not to have them wait on you, or you wait on them.’ 

     Two days ago, I met Lucien Chu on the stairs leading to the School’s studio.  He caught up with me coming from behind, in fact, both of us on the way to change in tights and shorts for the morning class.  He had a lost look in his eyes, as though part of it was going past me, toward another part of the world, I don’t know how to put it.  There was no smile on it and to me he felt tense, not in the regular joking mood he usually has or sometimes even parades for me. 

     ‘So we won’t be dancing together tomorrow, will we?’ he continued. 

     ‘What do you mean?  I said. 

     ‘Come on, you know, Mme Alyutina told me already.’ A prominent vein on his forehead pulses.

     ‘What did she tell you?’

     ‘That we won’t dance together any more in the classical.’

     I was caught short, as I didn’t know what else Mme A. had told him about my own wishes starting it all.  So I decided to let him continue.  Just listening. 

     ‘I think it was you who asked for it, wasn’t it?’

     I suddenly realized that things weren’t as bad as they could’ve been.  It seemed to me that Mme Alyutina didn’t tell him about me asking for it.  Good thinking on her part, thank God!

     ‘Asked for what?’ I continued to play the innocent’s part, and I realized I was doing it for the first time in my life for the benefit, if that was a benefit, of someone outside our family.  This play was usually enacted in front of my parents —  whenever there is no other escape, play possum.

     ‘At least we’re going to remain together for the modern part.’  He looked at me more directly this time, as though sounding off the truth of this sentence. 

     ‘We are?’ I continued trying to remain poker-faced as hard as I could. 

     Again, that bumblebee or whatever it was caught his sight and he looked past me, suddenly older and sadder. 

     ‘OK, let’s get changed, today is the modern class, so we’ll dance together.’

     ‘OK, let’s,’ I agreed, mouse-like, to let his eventual anger pass.  I knew from my mom that many men ‘have a short fuse’ — what that really meant I never asked — and one just has to wait for it to blow and the smoke to be fanned away.

     Somehow, the girls in the locker room knew already about the change. 

     ‘Ah, look who’s here, Yvonne, all decked out.  Is it true that you won’t be partnered anymore by Lucien Chu, oh, sorry, the Buddha Head, in the classics?  So finally you’ve decided you don’t like anymore his copping a feel at you?’ Tabitha had been lurking in wait. 

     ‘What?  Where did you hear that?’

     ‘I won’t tell you that, but I know it from sources better than yours, you dirty little schemer, you.’ Thinking she’d just chopped me, she pulled a face at me, while taking off her street clothes, our uniform of Scots design, then getting her class stuff from her locker. 

     Once again, she seemed to have one up on me, better posted than I was about the goings of the teachers and of the board.  ‘Small wonder,’ said I to myself, and I’m sure my mother would have been in full agreement with me on this issue.

     Today’s morning class, after barre, was modern, as I’ve said.   We all know this isn’t Mme Alyutina’s cup of tea, for even when showing a simple pose, she strikes it in a very showy way, as though standing on the edge of a pedestal, close to tumbling down in some undefined ravine there available as if by chance for the use of the unlucky dancers, as in old Sparta on Mt.  Taygetos.  Still, each of us was seriously putting themselves through the motions, which today were tap dancing as Fred and Ginger in ‘Dancing cheek to cheek’ of ‘Top Hat.’ The boys had to bring yard-long sticks, which had to do for his cane — which, by the way, he didn’t carry in that piece —  and some borrowed mixed choice of hats, all purporting to be his top hat, all, as expected, too big for their heads, so needing some improvised filling arranged on the spot from crumpled newspaper, disused bad-smelling cafeteria rags or other stuff.   

     There was something extra in the air between Lucien and I during that time today.  I felt somehow it pushing me to be nice and smiling, as he most definitely looked tense after the latest news.  The weight of the overall showing of our couple had suddenly been flushed onto me, as if the lights of an imaginary stage had been focused just on me, something which I found it not to my liking at all, but then I had to be a trouper under the most dire circumstances.  This, I knew already, came part and parcel with being a performer, something that had been so much drilled into us by now, and probably successfully, at least in part, in my case, that I didn’t feel shaky at all, not today. 

     We had to do a small bit of the final dance between Ginger and Fred that takes place on the columnated terrace in the movie, the part where they tap separately but in that total sync, each of them with both their hands raised for balance and advancing in a line together to and from the edge of the stage, while their feet tap, tap, and the main of their bodies shifts to the left, then to the right, in an undulating controlled wobble on alternating support legs.  The most difficult part, of course, was where we had to tap a three hundred and sixty degree turn, each around our own axis at the time, still in a perfect replica of the partner’s. 


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