Two northwest successes - Oregon Ballet Theatre's ballerinas Vanessa Thiessen and Katarina Svetlova

Dance Magazine, March, 1998 by Martha Ullman West

Tall in her pointe shoes, her legs looking even longer in black tights, Katarina Svetlova takes the center of the rehearsal studio floor and throws herself into a heartrending solo in Trois Gnossiennes. The solo, part of a short ballet set to some of Erik Satie's piano pieces transcribed for orchestra, is both technically and dramatically demanding; the emotion-laden piece is Oregon Ballet Theatre artistic director James Canfield's response to loss. As she finishes, there is awestruck silence in the studio, followed by applause. Katarina (Kati for short), a month short of seventeen at the time, turns eighteen on March 18.

Vanessa Thiessen is petite, very petite. At just five feet tall, her compact body a powerhouse, she tosses off a series of pirouettes and jetes for the same choreographer's Duo Vivante, a pas de deux set to Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Grande Torantelle that requires precision, speed, and enough energy to fuel the city of Portland. She, too, receives applause from the older company members lining the Studio walls.

Vanessa, then sixteen, won't be eighteen until September, but like Kati, she is every inch the professionally committed dancer. Since the fall of 1995, both young women have been full-fledged members of the twenty-six-dancer troupe, a company with no principals, no soloists, and in which the six apprentices often perform leadings roles.

They were fifteen-year-old students in the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre when Canfield sat down with them and their parents and urged them to relinquish the life of the overage American high school student for a full-time commitment to dancing. Too young to leave school, they could finish their academic studies with home schooling and correspondence courses.

They now have schedules that would fell an ox. During the season, which begins in August and ends in June, the young dancers work eleven hours a day, six days a week at the ballet, then do schoolwork for two hours before going to bed.

They love it.

"We've given up a lot," they said in an interview for Portland's daily newspaper, The Oregonian. Following their second season with the company, Vanessa nodded her agreement when Kati said, "I've given up things I don't need." The two girls often agree. Of vastly different backgrounds, with very different bodies and learning styles, Kati and Vanessa are also much alike.

Kati, who has the pouty-lipped, dark-eyed face of a nineteenth-century ballerina, comes from a family that is involved in the performing arts. Her father is a Bulgarian opera singer who met her American mother when both were singing with an opera company in Germany. Now divorced, Kati's mother works for OBT's school. Kati's who is blessed with a body Canfield calls the "ideal instrument," grew up in Europe and Florida, where she began her ballet studies with Haydee Gutierrez, who is now head of OBT's school. Kati and her mother live within walking distance of OBT's headquarters in downtown Portland.

Vanessa's story is as different from Kati's as are her body type and dancing style. Also dark-haired, Vanessa has a beautiful and serene oval face that is not at all like her persona on the stage. "She's a spitfire," Canfield Says. "At five feet she dances like a giant of six foot three!" At the age of four, because she was so physically active, she was enrolled in a preballet class in the port town of Astoria, Oregon, at the Maddox Dance Studio, and took to dance like a duck to water. Her father is a corrections officer who soon got a job that moved the family closer to Portland. Her mother comes from the Philippines and currently works in a cookie factory. Not at all centered on the arts, Vanessa's parents are nevertheless supportive, driving miles each day from Aloha, a small community south of Portland, to pick up their daughter when she finishes a grueling day.

Both girls agree that their second year with the company was far easier than the first, although both did much more dancing in a repertory that includes a number of technically demanding contemporary ballets set to rock music. There is also an American Choreographers Showcase each year in which they must perform a range of movement that has featured Bebe Miller's idiosyncratic postmodern style as well as Paul Vasterling's contemporary take on classical ballet.

Although they are in only their third season with the company, both girls have already danced big roles, Vanessa doing a full-length Juliet for a school performance and the ballerina role in Canfield's version of The Nutcracker. Kati has had major parts in many short ballets, including Canfield's Go Ask Alice, as well as Mathilde Kschessinskaya in The Nutcracker who, in OBT's libretto, is a party quest who later becomes the Snow Queen and the Sugarplum Fairy.

"We [now] know more about what to do," Vanessa says. And they love being onstage. "It's a reward to be in the spotlight," says Kati.