Third Swan from the Left: The Stories, Musings, and Random Thoughts of a Wandering Artist

THIRD SWAN FROM THE LEFT

THE STORIES, MUSINGS, AND RANDOM

THOUGHTS OF A WANDERING ARTIST

Copyright © 2015 Debbie Wilson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4406-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4408-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4407-9 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 01/12/2015

Contents

Acknowledgments

The Prologue (1959-72)

My Resume

The Beginning

Stefan

The Next Steps

The Curse of Shortness

Contact Lenses

Why My Director’s Hair Was Grey

Partnering

It Ain’t Carnegie Hall

Teaching Mom the Facts of Life

Weight

Injuries

The Teachers

Act One (1978-79)

Anything For Your Art

The Wicked Witch of the East (Before Dorothy’s House Fell on Her)

Definitely Not in Kansas Anymore

Fans

Cast Injuries

The Mob

Hayley

Fire!

Unions

Mary

Act Two 1980-85

My Favorite Riddle

The Daily Grind

Guadeloupe

Head Counts

Gregory

Martinique

The Terminator

Venezuela

Nudity

Colombia

Panama

Immigration

Argentina

Divas

Peru

The Canadian Treasure

Mexico

Todd

The Bad Day

Intermission

Why On Earth Would You Tell Me This Crap?

Red Tape

Jacques in Switzerland

Jacques-of-All-Trades

Act Three (1980-1985)

France

Illusions

J’ai Faim

Sweden

I’m Not Listening

Morocco

Senegal and the Ivory Coast

Cameroon

Zaire

Algeria

The Bully

Drinking On the Job

Mexico City 1985

The Pollyanna Complex

Fanny

The Gina Factor

Act Four (1986-1992)

Macedonia

What’s the Slavic Translation for ‘Shoot Me’?

Injured

The French Teacher, Natasha and the Pervert

The Power of the Mind

China

Ballet versus Modern

Egomaniacs and other Weirdoes

General Practitioners

The Finale (1993 -)

Retirement

The Choreographic Workshop

Macedonia Again

The Multicultural Production Begins

Macedonians in Canada

I Thought the Tsar Was Dead

Canadians in Macedonia

Tolstoy is All About Drama

Debbie Versus the Mosquito

The Next Prologue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my amazing support team:

• Daniella Newman for helping me shape the first draft into a book.

• Brenda Rose for her painstaking work through several stages of editing.

• My best friend and manager, Amanda Parris who guided the editing process and pushed me to finish the project. I really could not have accomplished this without her.

• The entire iUniverse team for their guidance and patience.

• A special thank you to Sarah Tarrant for her beautiful cover photograph.

• David Hou for his great author photograph.

• And Lorelei Wilson Berdos for designing the perfect book cover and being such a wonderful sister.

Any mistakes in this book are purely mine and I need to state that all the views presented in this book are also mine, with a quick reminder that there are many sides to every story.

THE PROLOGUE (1959-72)

My Resume * The Beginning * Stefan * The Next Steps * The Curse of Shortness * Contact Lenses * Why My Director’s Hair Was Gray * Partnering * It Ain’t Carnegie Hall * Teaching Mom the Facts of Life * Weight * Injuries * The Teachers

My Resume

Who am I? I am a dancer. Nobody famous. Just one dancer who like many others spent a lot of years training for a profession that concentrates on the here and now. We give live (never to be repeated) performances that are attended by a set number of people. Some of our performances leave a lasting impression on those who saw them and some of our performances simply fade away into a vast void of lost memories. I’ve worked for large dance companies, medium sized dance companies and a lot of small independent dance groups. Each group has its advantages and its disadvantages. A large company gives you a steady paycheck, the prestige of working for an important organization and the ability to dance in big productions. It can also keyhole you into a typecast position that is hard to move out of. A medium sized company gives you less steady pay but it offers you the opportunity to travel the world. The downside to working for a medium sized company is the inevitable burnout from the manic pace of touring. A small independent group doesn’t always pay much but it does give you a lot of artistic freedom.

Dance is a fleeting art form. My finest moments on stage were never recorded and who except a few remember them? So the question is, why do it? Believe me, I have pondered that question a lot. My answer is that dance is that primal connection to our emotional lives beyond the material world that we live in; a combination of the physical movement and the creative input forces us to constantly connect with our true essence.

The Beginning

I started dancing at the age of four and for the record it was my idea and not my mother’s. I bring this up because several of my fellow students were thrown into dance training in order to fulfill their mothers’ dreams. A student named Emily comes to mind. Emily always stood at the back of the classroom, working her little heart out and sobbing. Her misery was palpable and I could never understand how her mother failed to see the distress that she was causing her own child. Eventually Emily became old enough to defy her mother’s wishes and quit.

A few students in my early classes were there to correct physical problems such as underdeveloped arches, curved spines and crooked legs. In the 1950s (when I began dancing) a lot of family physicians recommended that kids take dance classes (specifically ballet) to correct these issues. While ballet does increase muscle control and overall body strength, my current middle-aged body is paying dearly for a lifetime of unnatural positions. My motivation to begin dance training came from a local kiddie’s television show that I liked to watch. The host always had a variety of guests on his show: clowns, talking birds, etc. One day his guest was a ballerina. Actually she was a ten-year old kid dressed in a gaudy sequined tutu and badly laced pointe shoes, but to my four-year-old eyes she was a full-fledged ballerina: graceful, elegant and wonderful. My mother (like all good mothers) wanted to encourage my interests so she enrolled me in a weekly class at one of the local dance schools. It was a one-room studio in a strip mall, complete with a linoleum floor, ballet barres anchored along the walls, framed pictures of famous ballerinas on the walls and an old record player in the corner. My journey into the world of dance had begun.

Early lessons were more like structured play with a little ballet technique thrown in: point your toes, stand with your feet turned out, hold your stomach in. It was in this relaxed atmosphere that the basics of ballet began to sink in. Each spring culminated in a year-end recital and the next fall the whole process would begin again with the workload increasing and the playtime decreasing. Every year a few more students would drop out of the program until only a handful of ‘serious’ dance students were left. Once it became clear to my mother that I was serious about pursuing dance as a profession, she made sure that she enrolled me in the same type of school around the country: one that taught the Russian technique.

My father’s work took us across the United States several times and there was a point where we were moving practically every six months. I went to three kindergartens, two first grades, two second grades, one third grade, two fourth grades and two fifth grades. With each new location, my parents would re-establish all the needs of the family: new schools, new scout troops, new piano lessons and of course, a new ballet school for me. There are several ballet techniques taught around the world and each one differs from the other in small but important details. Take for example the arm positions. Every position of the arms has a designated number and those numbers change with the varying techniques. You could be holding your arms in, say, third position, but in another technique it is designated as fourth position. Even as a professional, I still find moving between the different technique terminologies confusing, so to make it easier on the young students it’s best to stick with one technique in their formative training years. I have found that sometimes the terminology that you encounter in a new school is simply mangled. When I first arrived in Canada, a teacher yelled out to me to start doing ‘lame ducks’ across the room. I stared at her blankly. All I could think of was a duck waddling across the room while dragging one leg. ‘Lame ducks’ I was later informed are one-legged traveling turns. Who knew?

Stefan

Around the age of eight, it became evident to my parents that it was time to find a better training environment for me, a school with a professional ballet program. In other words, all work and no play. The first professional ballet school they enrolled me in was extremely regimented. No parents were allowed to watch any of the classes because it was felt that their presence would distract us from our work. I always felt that parents weren’t allowed to watch because the staff didn’t want any witnesses to the abuse they heaped on us. We were required to wear uniforms: Russian styled cotton tunics, bare legs, white socks, white shoes and matching headbands. Older students graduated to leotards, long skirts, pink tights and pink shoes. In September, each child was measured for their custom-made uniform that was to take them through the entire nine-month session. I made a big mistake the first time I was measured; I sucked my breath in to create a small waist. The result was an oxygen-depriving corset of cotton that was agony to wear. The next year, I inflated myself up like a blowfish and created a wonderfully comfortable garment that I had room to grow into. Despite the regimented environment, I was totally thrilled with the new school. It produced good professional dancers.

All the professional schools near our home were either run by or staffed by escapees from the Iron Curtain countries, countries in Eastern Europe that were under the influence of Communist Russia. All of these people had a few things in common: they lacked a sense of humour, they rambled endlessly on about the art of ballet and they spoke English with such heavy accents that it was impossible to understand them. My first professional ballet teacher was a Hungarian named Stefan and he was a raving lunatic. He screeched, he called us names, he belittled us, he threw chairs, he pulled his hair out and worst of all, he hit. He hit students all the time. A hit on the leg – Straighten it! A smack on the butt – Get it in! A poke in the stomach – Suck it in! Sometimes a blow would send you flying across the room, landing in a heap on the floor. You’d look up at him stunned and he would say, You weren’t paying attention. I was terrified. Whenever he would pass us in the hall, we would immediately stand up, curtsey and greet him. Failure to do this meant another slap unless a parent was present. I took great comfort in knowing that my mother was waiting for me on the other side of the studio door. I figured that as long as she was in the building Stefan couldn’t murder me.

I finally reached a point where I couldn’t take any more of Stefan’s abuse. After endless begging and crying scenes, my mother relented and had me transferred to another teacher’s classes. My new teacher was a kind and nurturing woman who never had an angry word for her students. Soon after my transfer, Stefan stopped my mother in the lobby and demanded loudly, Why your daughter no like me?

To this day, I can still see my mother shaking as she faced off with him. She stuck out her chin defiantly and said, You frighten her.

Stefan’s eyebrows rose. He glared for a moment at my mother and then strode off mumbling under his breath. I began to calm down as ballet classes became enjoyable again. But, as all good things come to an end, so did my ideal environment. My teacher decided to take a vacation and Stefan was to take over all of her classes. I spent weeks begging my mother to allow me to go to another school. I just knew he was going to single me out for special torture because I had insulted him by getting myself transferred out of his classes. My mother reminded me that this was the best school in the area and that I was the one who wanted to be a dancer, an argument that was always a tough one to fight. Then she’d give me the usual parental advice of, Don’t let him get to you.

At the time I figured that my mother was going to feel really bad when they found my poor broken body lying in the parking lot after having been thrown from the studio window. When my first class with Stefan was about to begin, I quietly slipped into the studio behind a group of larger girls, praying that their bulk would hide me. Standing at the barre, I held my breath and kept my eyes down, using that old adage of not looking an attack dog in the eyes. Stefan didn’t say a word to me. The class started. As I began to calm down and breathe more easily, I glanced over at Stefan. His face was turning red. It was clear to me that he was going to blow. He strode over to where I was standing and abruptly knocked the girl in front of me to the floor. After yelling at her in his mangled English, he turned to me, who was cringing into the barre. He smiled and said, It’s OK Debbie darling, it’s nothing.

In my child’s mind I thought we had reached a truce. He wouldn’t yell at me and I would stay in his classes. Unfortunately it was a temporary truce, as I discovered soon after, when I was having a bad day. I couldn’t remember the exercises that Stefan was giving the class and it got to the point where he could no longer contain his frustration. His body visibly rocked back and forth as he tried to control his breathing and his temper. Suddenly he whirled around and stomped out of the studio. Within moments, he returned with a pad of paper and a pencil, which he promptly threw at my feet. Now you stupid girl, if you have no brains to remember steps, you write down.

He began to rattle off the names of the steps in the exercise. I quickly grabbed the paper and pencil from the floor and in my nervousness, promptly dropped them. The pencil rolled towards Stefan’s feet. I dove for it. Stefan stared at me coldly and then repeated the exercise. I started to write down the first word and then stopped as tears filled my eyes. Stefan couldn’t take any more. What? he screamed. What?

I looked up at him with the tears running down my face and my lips quivering. I don’t know how to spell what you just said. There was a moment of silence. Then Stefan let out a guttural scream. He grabbed the pad and pencil from my hands and threw them across the room. For the rest of the class Stefan didn’t say anything to me but I could hear him muttering under his breath every time he passed me. I’m sure the man breathed as big a sigh of relief as I did when my parents announced that we were moving to another state.

The Next Steps

The last school that I trained at was run by a wonderful German woman named Anneliese Von Oettingen. Anneliese understood the mechanics of ballet better than most people and when she taught you a movement you understood which muscles you needed to use, the purpose of the exercise and the dynamics involved. She was a meticulous and patient woman who instilled the love of hard work in all of her students. Some of her training methods were a little unorthodox but she had solid reasoning behind her training. She began every class with a forty-five minute floor warm-up consisting of strength exercises, calisthenics, stretching and a five minute jog around the studio. Her purpose was to prepare our muscles for the stop and go method of learning the technical details of ballet. Stop. Do it again and this time watch your knee placement, she would call. Stop. Do it again and this time pay attention to your arms, repeating the same exercise over and over until she felt that we had improved sufficiently.

Dance is perfected by repetition. Once you figure out what a movement or position is supposed to look like and what it is supposed to feel like, then it’s simply a matter of repeating it over and over until your body masters it. However, let it be said that knowing that your leg is supposed to be up around your neck and getting it there are two different things. Learning to dance is a long and tedious process. They say it takes a minimum of seven years to produce a decent dancer and that estimate is pretty close. Few people realize how many small details a dancer has to deal with at the same time: all toes on the ground, ankles straight, knees aligned over the arches of the feet, legs turned out, seat in, back straight, stomach in, chest up, shoulders down and back, long neck, head up, elbows rounded, thumbs in, and all this before moving! Then it becomes a matter of maintaining all of those positions while moving gracefully and making it look effortless. It’s a time consuming process that takes a toll on both the student and the teacher.

I can’t remember Anneliese ever losing her temper with any of her students. She loved and encouraged all of us although I will admit that I tried the patience of even the kindest of teachers. While I was one of those persevering students who didn’t need prodding to work harder, I did cry. In fact, I cried a lot. I took every mistake as a personal failure and trust me, I didn’t need Anneliese to point out a mistake. I was more than capable of the kind of self-criticism that led to hours of quivering lips and red eyes. Anneliese begged my mother to intervene and my mother begged me to try to control myself but I couldn’t stop the tears. Eventually, I grew out of it.

Many young ballet students develop physical ticks, those involuntary twitches that people have when they are anxious or concentrating: tapping fingers, biting nails, playing with hair, etc. My problem was my thumbs. They stuck straight up. I looked like I was constantly trying to hitch a ride. Gentle reminders didn’t work and neither did warnings of physical violence. One teacher decided to bind my thumbs to my hands with rubber bands, which only served to cut off the blood circulation to my fingers. After a couple of mind-numbing and painful classes, I was given temporary freedom, providing that my thumbs remained in their proper place. I spent so much effort concentrating on keeping my thumbs down that I forgot all of the exercises and got in the way of the other students. Ultimately my efforts were useless and within a few weeks, my thumbs would pop up again.

One of my more humane teachers felt that using a ping-pong ball would do the trick, on the theory that unlike the rubber bands that physically bound my unwilling thumbs, I would have to consciously hold the ping-pong ball. It actually worked. I really had to concentrate on my hand position. Of course, that resulted in the problem of me repeatedly dropping the ping-pong ball. It would hit the floor with an annoying hollow ping-pong sound and bounce its way across the room, rolling through a myriad of dancers’ legs. I spent several days chasing my ping-pong ball around the room while the rest of the class carried on. The teacher was not amused and switched the freedom-seeking ping-pong balls with a couple of limes, along with the advice that I could drop those all I wanted. I have to admit that the limes did work much better. On the first couple of drops they would roll a bit but their odd shape wasn’t made for long distance bouncing and after a couple of falls they became squishy and would plop unmoving to the floor. Did it work? Yes, it actually did.

The funny thing about the dance profession is that it isn’t always