I, Maya Plisetskaya - Excerpt

Dance Magazine, Oct, 2001

Born in 1925, Maya Plisetskaya--ballerina, choreographer, international personality--joined the Bolshoi in 1943 but was held behind the Iron Curtain until 1959. Insistently creative and beloved by audiences, she survived purges and politics, dancing through her 50s and 60s, making first Odette/Odile and then Fokine's The Dying Swan her signature roles. Wife of composer Rodion Shchedrin for more than thirty-five years, she collaborated on ballets with Alfredo Alonso, Maurice Bejart, and Roland Petit, Here, in her own words, is her story, [] As this excerpt begins, Maya's father bas been taken by the police and his fate is unknown, and her pregnant mother, taken from the theater during intermission, has been sent to a prison camp for wives and children of arrested husbands. Maya now lives with her aunt, ballerina Sulamith Messerer, in Moscow.

Excerpted from I, Maya Plisetskaya, to be published in October 2001 by Yale University Press. Copyright [C] 2001 by Yale University. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter Ten--Tchaikovsky's Impromptu

Mother was released in April 1941, and she finally returned to Moscow with my little brother.... The whole family was waiting for her on the platform of Kazan Station, from which she had left all those years ago. A sea of tears. Hugging until we were dizzy. No end to the joy. They had released her early.

I was preparing for the next performance [at the Bolshoi school]. I wanted to show my mother that I had not wasted my time, that I had progressed. Mother, switching swiftly from her travels, started asking me about my ballet studies, what new works I had learned.

Her last year in Chimkent had not been easy. On one of her visits to the police, to check in, she was sent to a back room on some technicality. An imposing and pleasant-looking man awaited her. He asked about her health, her children, how the daughter who had visited her was doing....

MAYA PLISETSKAYA DANCES FOKINE'S THE DYING SWAN, A ROLE SHE MADE HER OWN.

"You must help us, it is important to report on the moods and conversations of those around you, what the exiled parents of your ballet students at the club think, who visits your landlord Isaac." She was supposed to do this in written form, neatly and clearly. Simply put, they wanted her to be a snitch.

They couldn't break Mother [when they questioned her] in Butyrki Prison ... and certainly the pleasant fellow got an implacable refusal.... An admirer appeared. Later, she figured out he was from the KGB.... He wanted to marry her and adopt all three of us. "Your husband, unfortunately, is no longer alive. I love you madly, I saw all of your films when I was free. You are the love of my life. And the children need a father." Mother sent him packing. She did not want to believe that Father had been [shot].... She waited her whole life ... jumped every time there was an unexpected peal of the doorbell, ring of the phone, or unfamiliar voice in the front hall. She never saw him again.

I wonder if I exaggerate the drama of my family? ... But it all happened It's all true.... I don't want to smooth the sharp angles or hide the nasty details. This is how my generation lived. I am its child. No better, no worse....

The school was preparing for its graduation concert. For the first time, this would be accompanied by the Bolshoi orchestra and held on the stage of its second theater.... The main performers were those graduating that year. It was a strong group. ... I danced the Tchaikovsky Impromptu in Yakobson's staging. The pas de trois was a very successful piece of choreography. My partners were Shvachkin and Evdokimov.

I've stopped writing, in order to sit, eyes shut, and recall that little ballet.... What a miracle the mechanism of human memory is. I'm often asked, "How do you remember all the moves and their order?" How do readers and actors remember poems, verse, hundreds of pages of prose text, roles, and monologues? I cannot explain how the body remembers the most complex choreographic text. There are times when you can keep an entire ballet with all its performers in your head for years. And sometimes you struggle to remember when the left goes, the left arm, the elbow in a variation you danced only yesterday. It's like a telephone number you've dialed a hundred times which suddenly is erased from your memory.... Explain to us, wise men, what memory is....

The Moscow audience was delighted by the number. Perhaps it was--dare I say it?--the concert's high point. Mother was in the audience, and I saw her happy eyes glowing in the first row of the parterre boxes. She was seeing me after our long separation on the stage of the second theater of the Bolshoi to the strains of the orchestra, conducted inspiredly by Yuri Fayer.... The audience applauded wildly, and we kept bowing and bowing, coming out from the curtain onto the ramp. She was happy. Asaf [Messerer, Maya's uncle], when he congratulated me, made a mocking face: "You bowed like an audience favorite--you should be more modest."