The Art of Grace by Sarah L. Kaufman

Author:Sarah L. Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THE TURBULENCE of Fonteyn’s personal life revealed her gracefulness as a core value, not just an aspect of performance. The defining characteristic of her brand of grace was serenity, in her unflappable cheerfulness, in her fluid motion and airy stillnesses onstage, and in her workmanlike ability to make the best of things, whether it was the limited limberness of her body or her marriage. In doing so, she transcended her difficulties.

Difficulties exist to be surmounted, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great heart doesn’t complain about them: “A strenuous soul hates cheap successes.” Within many a graceful person—dancer, athlete, whomever—beats a large and uncomplaining heart.

Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova has one of those. Her quality of movement was not like Fonteyn’s—Makarova ran hotter, more impassioned and free—but the two ballerinas shared what all graceful dancers possess: the ability to move effortlessly and to transfer that ease to us as we watch them. To lift us spiritually beyond their steps, beyond the stage, beyond any easy form of description.

As serenity was the foundation of Fonteyn’s gracefulness, Makarova’s openheartedness and generosity are what make her graceful. Her giving nature arose paradoxically from the strictest austerity.

She was born in 1940. Her childhood was defined by the Siege of Leningrad, three years of hell when the Nazis encircled the city, choking off supplies. Nearly a million inhabitants died.

Her father was killed in combat. In the postwar privation, Makarova once lost her family’s monthly ration cards and was beaten by her stepfather. If her grades fell, there were more beatings. Afterward, her mother would command her to ask for forgiveness.

“No way,” Makarova told me one fall afternoon in her mountainside estate in California’s Napa Valley, overlooking vineyards turning gold.5 Seventy-two at the time, she still had translucent skin, lightly careworn; her blue eyes shone as she grinned toothily.

“I would never ask. I’d rather suffer.” She rolled her Rs luxuriously in the rumbling accent of her native land.

Makarova started ballet training late, enrolling at the renowned Vaganova Academy at thirteen, and fought to keep up with younger classmates. Life was a strain, but it was also exquisitely simple: nothing but dance, art, books.

“What’s good about Russia: we had our own freedom, actually,” she said. “It was free from frivolous things. This whole Soviet world, without food, without entertainment, without nonsense, it’s kind of pure. And you concentrate on the real treasure. That’s why it built the spirituality and the substance, at the same time.”

Makarova realized that her greatest gifts were contradictory: strong self-discipline and fearless spontaneity, stemming from her natural physical coordination and spirited personality. These qualities produced in her a distinctly luscious, free-flowing, effortless-seeming grace that made her stand out from the technique-driven stars in the West, after she defected in 1970.

A finger strayed to one of her gold hoop earrings as she described her sudden impulse at twenty-nine to make one of the most important moves of her life. She was on tour with the Kirov Ballet in London. She had made it to the top rank of the company but was tired of losing parts to lesser dancers with Party ties.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.