Teacher talk: tough talk from two teachers - advice to those who want to become professional dancers

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1996 by Marian Horosko

Do you want to dance professionally? These famous teachers advise you to keep your focus on the process, not on the prize.

IRINA BARONOVA, LUCIA CHASE

FELLOW AT NORTH CAROLINA

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

Legendary ballerina Irina Baronova, recently a guest teacher and coach at the renowned school, gave classes in technique and coached variations. In two speeches, she recounted her remarkable career and told the students that becoming a dancer required more than going to classes: "There are no short cuts. Your education includes learning music, painting, and reading, especially historical novels. These books tell you about the styles. customs, manners, and mores of various epochs, which are all part of the research that enables you to give an interesting, colorful, and accurate characterization for any ballet. They give a frame of reference so that a performer may be able to move, think, and respond in the proper historical style of the role. With this knowledge, your performance would not be shallow and limited only to the physical aspects of technique."

At another point, she stated, "Some students regard music as some kind of background noise. Not everyone is musical; but if you listen to a score often enough, you will eventually hear a passage, a melody, or a finale, for instance, to which you will respond. Allow this emotional reaction to happen."

As for dance training being a sacrifice or hard work: "If that is so, you are not doing something you love and it would be best not to waste your time, your teacher's attention, and your parents' money."

Baronova, an extensive traveler who lectures as vice-president of the Royal Academy of Dancing, feels that parents often regard dance as a hobby and cram a young person's calendar with too many activities. "A decision has to be made about what the student likes best to do. Then they have to get on with it and give it their full attention."

WILHELM BURMANN, NEW YORK

MASTER TEACHER

"Our profession creates illusions. It is not a matter of having a perfect body, but of dancing in such a way as to look perfect. Students have to be pushed, directed, and inspired by a teacher or director, but I don't see much of that anymore." Burmann, who performed with New York City Ballet, Grand Theatre de Geneve, and Frankfurt and Stuttgart ballets, among others, is a teacher who belongs to no school, studio, or company, and is independent and tough about it. "That position gives me the right to give the corrections I think are right for the student instead of what is right for the school." It evidently works, for on any given day at Steps, a mid-Manhattan rental studio (when Burmann is not coaching ABT star Julio Bocca, for instance), his open class includes members of major companies and an assortment of students in one daily class that requires concentration, correctness (no matter who you are), and musicality.

"How can you get dancers to move when all they want to do is stand in First Position, with their arms in Second Position with the head immovably facing front for forty-five minutes at the barre! People from the street can do that. Epaulement becomes a tremendous effort. No wonder there is no joy of movement. Any movement you do with your legs without using your torso is garbage. You might as well not do it. I see a lot of exaggerations being taught in Balanchine's name. It's out of hand. His use of beautiful arms, hands, and head positions has become contorted.

"It's commitment to dance that I find lacking. What I can't get over is that you can't make a demand in the classroom. You get sued or the school gets rid of you. The student is so encouraged to concentrate on academics that there is no priority for dance. They are even preparing to make a career transition when they sign their first contract. What kind of commitment is that? The second career will have the same kind of passionless, divided, and unexplored commitment as their dance career and will pass out of their lives like the first career, which was never really there in the first place. Maybe it's because dancers peak so early, far ahead of their time, and go all the way down. Without a properly trained body, you quit early or become crippled. What's the rush?

"I don't get the lazy, the always late, or those full of theories. We are there to work. That's it. I have a feeling that a lot of dancers today just can't move, and if you can't move, you have to give it up. They are taking everything apart with the help of doctors and therapists and hoping to put it all back together. Sometimes I think there are more therapists than dancers. You can't analyze something Fifth Position, arabesque-that you have not done. Do it, feel it, then talk about it.

"Physicality is gone, and Balanchine, for instance, was very physical. If you are not physically strong, you can't make your movements expressive; they will always be weak and tentative. I see beautiful bodies with extensions up to the ears but these dancers are dead, dead, dead. Energy and life are missing. The misinterpretation of the imagery that Balanchine used while teaching his company classes now makes him sound like an idiot; as if he didn't care about the safety and well-being of his dancers, or their development as individuals, and that is not true. He was all about beautiful things in everything, from good dancing to good music, even to good food. That was his life. And he was a teacher in the sense of always being there. Had he not been, it would have all ended up as it is today, and I think he knew that. Without his ballets as an example of what he wanted, he never would have made it as a teacher. But he also had the advantage of fewer and more dedicated dancers.