(369) Marina Harss, on her new book 'The Boy From Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky's Life in Ballet'
On today's episode of 'Conversations On Dance', we are joined by Marina Harss, author of 'The Boy From Kyiv', the life story of the great choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. We talk to Marina about her own journey to writing dance, how she came to admire and love Ratmansky's work and what her process was researching and developing the book. You can purchase 'The Boy From Kyiv' at your local bookstore or on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Ql3WMa.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:01:01]:
I'm Rebecca King Ferraro.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:03]:
And I'm Michael Sean Breeden.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:04]:
And you're listening to conversations on Dance. On today's episode of Conversations on Dance, we are joined by Marina Harss, author of The Boy from Kiev the life story of the great choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. We talk to Marina about her own journey to writing dance, how she came to admire and love Rudmansky's work and what her process was researching and developing the book. You can purchase The Boy from Keev at your local bookstore or at the link in this episode's. Description.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:35]:
Marina, thank you so much for joining us on what we were just saying before we started. Recording is maybe the busiest week of your life. So we're going to take it back to a simpler time. Since we've never had you on, we want to hear before we get into anything about the book, how you first started to fall in love with dance and then when you first started to write about it.
Marina Harss [00:01:57]:
Absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for having me on. First of all, I love your podcast. It's an honor.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:02:04]:
We've been wanting to have you on for so long, but we've actually had this on our calendar for so long because we knew it was coming and we're like, we will wait for that. So that's why.
Marina Harss [00:02:14]:
And I've been waiting forever for the book to be out too, so it's perfect. How did I get interested in dance? Well, I have a background in music. I grew up playing the piano pretty intensively and I did study ballet as a little girl. But I was absolutely I had no talent. What I did have was musicality, which I think is something that has really come in handy as I developed my interest in dance, which came on the late side. I was working at the New Yorker magazine as a fact checker and I was also doing translations on the side, literary translations. And I kind of thought that that was the direction I would go in. But I started checking a lot of Joan Acicella's reviews and I just found her way of writing about dance so visceral and so exciting.
Marina Harss [00:03:13]:
That it made me want to see more dance. So it's a kind of interesting way of entering the art. And as I went to see more dance, I felt my musical background clicking into place, and I was going to see a lot of City Ballet. So the relationship between music and dance was so clear in my head, and it really made me want to write for the first time. I'd written because I was a literature major, but I never had thought, oh, I want to be a writer. And so that, combined with my translation background and the desire to actually translate what I was seeing on stage in a way that a reader could visualize it without necessarily seeing the performance, because that's what you do when you're, a reviewer, made me really want to write and analyze what I was seeing and what I was feeling. Dance made me excited in a way, an intellectual way that nothing else had really accessed before. So it made me want to see everything I could as many different kinds of dance.
Marina Harss [00:04:25]:
And I audited a lot of classes, actually a Barnard taught by Lynn Garafola, who was incredibly generous and let me sit in on her classes because I knew I needed a background. And then I started taking ballet because I knew I needed a vocabulary and I needed to know how it worked. And I started with little things, and then I went on to bigger things.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:04:52]:
You're just mentioning the way you got onto dance, but I think that that's what writing on dance does for me, too. I mean, granted, that wasn't my entry point to dance, but I remember when I started to read Crochet and I was like, this makes me want to go back and revisit this video I've seen of this performance. And good dance writing expands your own love of the art form outside of just strictly sitting and watching it. So I love that.
Marina Harss [00:05:18]:
That was what absolutely and everyone brings a different element to their writing. Like with Crochet, it was her immense literary, film, art historical background, so she could bring so much context to bear. With Joan, it was this incredibly visceral writing style, like, so direct. I think David Remnick once said that she writes about dance as if she were writing about a boxing match. And I feel that, and for me, at least, I felt at first, and I hope it comes through. It was this combination of how dance and music interrelate.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:05:59]:
I wonder what were some of the first things that you started seeing once you started to have these ideas, like, maybe I do want to get more into dance? What were some of those entry points for you on stage?
Marina Harss [00:06:10]:
Well, there were a few. I mean, definitely Concerto Baroco is a ballet that is just by just I think it was one of the first times that I felt that I was seeing the score before my eyes and I could hear, oh, this is when the other violin comes in. And, oh, this is how this figure. I could literally see the notes in my head. And that was very exciting to me. And it's not something that's unique to ballet. Like, I love flamenco. And one of the things that's so exciting about flamenco is it's less seeing the music and more seeing a body at the service of the music.
Marina Harss [00:06:57]:
It's like the music takes over the body and then you see the music and the voice. It's this comment also, I have an interest in the voice. My husband is an opera singer, so the voice is another thing that really excites me. So seeing the vibrations of the voice and the vibrations of the body kind of riding the same wave and having this conversation back and forth is something that I find extraordinary. I feel the same way about Indian dance, even though classical dance, even though obviously it's something much more foreign to me. You can spend a lifetime trying to learn all the technique and the musical modes and all of this, but there it was also the words. Well, in flamenco, too, but in Indian dance, the dancer is responding not just to the music and the tonality and the sound and the rhythm, but also to what's actually being sung about and is depicting what is being said. Which is interesting because Mark Morris also often uses vocal music.
Marina Harss [00:08:05]:
And I feel the same way about his music. He shows you in some way in his operas and in his vocal pieces, like Gloria, what the music is.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:08:16]:
Mean. I think, yeah, that's what great dance does. I mean, I ran into you at Russell Janssen's retirement and we had a little conversation just specifically about that. There's nothing better than listening to a score of a ballet you love and the steps just pour forth in your brain. I was saying to you that I felt like I remember every step of Ruby's. Of course, I never danced the women's roles. I never danced the lead. I just did my little core part.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:08:44]:
But I remember everything because it's so musical. I feel like it creates a math in your brain.
Marina Harss [00:08:49]:
Yeah, absolutely. I saw a former City Ballet dancer posted on Instagram. She was at the reunion and she was on stage and she was so excited that she was actually doing the closing of Diamonds because she had always been in the core and she was singing the music to herself and she remembered every step. And that's awesome. When I see videos online, before I even click on the music, I know what it is.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:09:18]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:09:18]:
Isn't that funny?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:09:21]:
So good.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:09:22]:
I also wonder what your experience was like once you started taking ballet in order to create not create, but in order to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary. What was that experience like for you?
Marina Harss [00:09:32]:
Yeah, I mean, as I said, I have absolutely no gift. So it was really research. And now it's become a meditation, also a form of exercise and a meditation and a focus. But I think what it really taught me is I understood better. Can't never fully understand but what turnout meant, what pointing your foot means, what straightening your leg means. I mean, these are things that mean something to everybody, but they don't really mean the same thing as they mean to dancers until you feel it in your body. I actually took some point classes, and understanding the straightening of the leg in point and the strength of the ankle was something that was really revelatory for me because it's something beyond straightening and you understand the structure of the body, how it rises from the bottom and stretches in all directions and all this stuff. And so it definitely helped.
Marina Harss [00:10:33]:
I'm sure it still helps in understanding what's happening. What I see, it's not like, oh, it makes me feel this way. Why does it make me feel this.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:10:45]:
It I love it. Let's go into the world of the book a little bit. I want to hear about your first experience or early experiences watching Alexi's work and then what it was like interacting with the work as a writer.
Marina Harss [00:11:03]:
Yes. So, as I say in the prologue of the book, I mean, my first experience of his work was The Bright Stream, which came to the Met when the Bolshey toured to New York in 2005. And at the time, Ratmansky was the director of the Bolshey, but he was extremely young and very few people even knew who he was. I know Robert Greskovic had seen him dance in Denmark, so he knew who he was, but most of us really didn't know who he was. And also in this season of ballets, like Don Q and Pharaoh's daughter, and I can't remember if they did Spartacus that time or not. And then there was this ballet called the Bright Stream. It was like, what the hell is know? But I remember Joan told me, you should go see this. And nobody had any idea what it would be like.
Marina Harss [00:12:05]:
It's a ballet set on a communal farm in this early Soviet period. It's about farmers and artists coming from the big city for the Fall festival. And it has this kind of farcical plot with cross dressing and masks. And the music is by Schustakovych. I mean, I think that's the thing that everybody was really intrigued by, it was music by Shastakovych, and everybody knew that Shostakovych's Ballets had been banned. So this was really intriguing. What were these ballets that hadn't been seen since the 1930s? So I was there, and the thing that really hit me was, oh, there were so many the musicality and it was different from Balanchin's musicality. It wasn't analytical.
Marina Harss [00:13:01]:
It was this music evokes a certain time connected. It was a musicality that was connected to the subject matter. Balanchin goes beyond it's eternal. I mean, there are exceptions, obviously, but with this ballet it was very connected with the Bolshei at a certain time in its history, the Soviet period, so you could feel all of that. And the dancing style was so interesting because it was both very beautiful, but it was also tongue in cheek. There was this lightness, while at the same time there was this incredible bravora happening on stage. But it was bravo that they were just sort of throwing off as if there were nothing. So in Dongq it was all like, let's jump as high as we can.
Marina Harss [00:13:54]:
But in the bright stream it wasn't that. It was bravora tossed off with this incredible sophistication. And I think the sophistication was another thing that really struck me. This was obviously the product of a person who was of the Soviet world, but had already emerged from it and was looking back on it with knowledge and irony, but that was combined with also humanity. So it was this incredible mix. And I think the second ballet that really solidified my impression was Russian Seasons, which he made the very next year, because that was a more abstract work, it was to much more challenging music, vocal music. It showed that he could be abstract, he could be modern, and that he could transform dancers, because I knew those dancers because it was made on New York City Valley, but they looked totally different in his work.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:15:05]:
When did you become interested in the biographical side of Ramonsky? And was that related to you just wanting a deeper knowledge of him as a creator?
Marina Harss [00:15:16]:
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I was just already very curious because of Russian Seasons, because it seemed so different from anything we were seeing here. And I wanted to understand why it was so good. But when it was announced it was announced in 2008, but he joined in 2009 that he was coming to American Ballet Theater and I found out he was making a new ballet. I thought, this is my opportunity to kind of get behind the curtain. And so that was when I wrote my first long piece about him. It was for the nation and they gave me lots of words. So I went and watched him in rehearsal and interviewed him and that's where I discovered what an interesting person he was. I was very intrigued by this combination of reticence openness, immense ballet knowledge and these references to all sorts of other ballet traditions that he was making.
Marina Harss [00:16:32]:
I just realized he was a complex and interesting person. The idea of writing a book about him didn't really come until quite a bit later. I mean, I never thought I would write a book of any kind, but I just think that as the ballets accumulated, I just realized this is an extraordinary artist. People use superlatives, the greatest, the successor to balancing. I don't believe in that sort of thing. I just believe that when you are in the vicinity of a really interesting artist that's something very unique and something to be appreciated and followed. So as the ballets accumulated, I just realized, here I am. Here he is.
Marina Harss [00:17:25]:
I have this extraordinary window on his work. Abt has always been so generous in allowing me to sit in and watch rehearsals. And not only Abt, he is incredibly relaxed about having people sitting and watching rehearsal. Even when he's having trouble. He doesn't care. It doesn't bother me. He worked at the Bolshey, for God's sake. A million people in every studio and problems and all of that.
Marina Harss [00:17:55]:
But I just realized that he had an openness to my being there. And so I thought, this is a huge wealth of information and of access that I really should do something with it. And so the idea sort of started percolating in my mind. But it took years. It took years for me to feel the confidence to say it was always one day I'll write a book about it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:18:22]:
It's funny, as I'm hearing you talk about this like that. You've seen some of his work and then you start to meet him, talk with him and be in rehearsal. For me and Michael, I'm not sure if it was the same for you. When we worked with him on Symphonic Dances at Miami City Ballet I hadn't seen any of his work yet. So my first impressions of him were in the studio and seeing him work. And then I don't think I got to see the ballet for years later just because we did it so much but I didn't get to see it from the front. And so I just wonder, as you're seeing his work first and then you go in because the way he works in the studio is so specific and maybe you can speak a little bit to that too. How did it shift your perspective of him?
Marina Harss [00:19:00]:
Yes, the way he works in the studio, I think is really extraordinary. And I've watched a lot of choreographers in the studio for different articles I was writing. By no means have I seen everybody. You've seen many more. You've worked with many more. What struck me is combination of factors. One is the way that he works with dancers. The way he comes in with an idea that seems very clear in his mind and he sets that at the beginning of the rehearsal.
Marina Harss [00:19:46]:
And by the end of that rehearsal those steps have become something completely different because he works. My best analogy is like a sculptor. First you have a block, then you have sort of a recognizable figure. But then that figure, through constant, very careful shaving away of facets and curves and dimensions becomes something so much more complicated and so much more interesting. I mean, that's the thing about his work. It's never neutral or straightforward. It has an infinite number of nuances and details and he doesn't go ahead and work on the rest. He works on that until the end of that rehearsal.
Marina Harss [00:20:43]:
And at the end of that rehearsal, that little whatever it was sometimes you sort of feel like, oh, it became this other thing. It's very striking. The other thing that I was struck by in rehearsal is that he'll work little by little on the different parts. He can work under any conditions, it seems like. Yes, noise, pressure, tired dancers which is a huge thing. And you'll be in the studio either with just a few people or with a million people. And his focus is really powerful. And out of this mess comes some kind of order.
Marina Harss [00:21:34]:
But not only that. And that's what speaks to the difference between what happens in rehearsal and what you see on stage is maybe in rehearsal you'd never even see all the parts together. But then what you see on stage is this mosaic that suddenly has clarity to it. And you think, oh, that little singing Mabob that I was seeing it's over there in the corner. And nobody can even see it. But it matters because everything has complexity. I mean, in a way, he's a very baroque choreographer.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:22:05]:
That's kind of how it feels as a dancer too, I think. There's so many things that can happen. I'm just thinking specifically of Symphonic Dances just because it's in my memory right now. But there's so many little things that you're doing in the back and then you can't really see how it comes together until you sit in the audience and then you're like, wow. That comes together in a way I didn't even expect. Even though I'm on stage every single time doing it. It's really interesting.
Marina Harss [00:22:26]:
I remember specifically Whipped Cream, which I watched most of the process of and how the dancers were not that excited about the subject matter. A ballet called Whipped Cream. Sounded silly. And the choreography is very roco and very kind of orcadacious because he's a man of few words people didn't really know what he was getting at. And then I remember seeing the first run through or the second run through of something of everything. And there was this vibration in the room as people realized what was happening in that ballet and how many layers it had and how much was going on at the same time and how actually complex and sophisticated and funny it was.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:23:20]:
Right? Yeah. You know something else that you bring across so well in the book. What struck me about Alexei first when I was first working with him is how he can be so quiet and almost shy but so demanding at the same think. I think you think of a choreographer getting in the room and yelling at you and bossing you around. And that's demanding. But there's something he's insistent upon getting what he wants. But it's in this quiet, almost shy way. And I think it's kind of wild to watch him work in that way.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:23:58]:
There's nothing I've ever seen before.
Marina Harss [00:24:01]:
He's shy, he's reticent, he's very polite. I mean, I always love seeing the way he approaches dancers in a rehearsal. There's so much worry about the relationship between choreographers and dancers. But when he's going to touch someone because he just hasn't been able to communicate what he wanted, he'll say it. And he'll kind of approach already with his hand extended so that they know what's about to happen, and he touches with the very tips of the fingers so that there's this great respect and care for not impinging on people's space. At the same time, what he's asking of them is enormous, almost impossible, seemingly impossible, actually. And this goes back to what I was saying about rehearsals. There are things when he sees someone do something and he sees that they can do more because they just did that, he always asks for more.
Marina Harss [00:25:09]:
And when they do more, he thinks, well, maybe they could do more. So the word is demanding. Yes. And insistent and sure. Well, not sure. He has doubts. He has doubts, and there are things that don't work out, but he keeps asking and asking and asking. And I think it's a combination of his faith in dancers, because he knew himself that there were things that people didn't think he could do and that he pushed and pushed until he could do them.
Marina Harss [00:25:51]:
And because he sees something very clear in his head. I mean, he told me, even when he was a kid, that when he heard music, he saw a television screen in his mind. And so there is something so definite in his head that he wants to reach know. It's not like, oh, let's see what we can do. And then the personality is one that and he was already like this as a child. I mean, he told me how he would put on these shows at the Bolshei school, and his friends would say, yes, but then they would go off and do something else, and he would go and get them and bring them into the studio, because to him, it was already really, you know, he's completely focused on what he does. And people, because of that, have always sort of done it. One of his friends from Bolosco School, Natalia Ledovskaya, said, for some reason, we just did it.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:26:54]:
Let's talk some about your process in putting the book together outside of, of course, your own interactions with the ballets, which I'm sure you've viewed many, many times in person and on video, just to capture your thoughts on who he is as an artist. I'm sure there were things, places you visited or like, artifacts from his life that you got to view. Tell us about that part of the process.
Marina Harss [00:27:19]:
Yeah, I mean, the book was an extraordinary adventure. I didn't quite realize how I would be pulled into his world. When I started, I knew I wanted to talk to people from his childhood and from his training and the different people he had spoken to and worked with over time. And I think my idea was and this is also why I wanted to do the book at this point in his life when he's still young, is I wanted the people that he worked with as a child to be able to tell me themselves what he had been like. I wanted to gather those stories before these people were no longer around. So I was very lucky. I was able to go to Russia twice before that became impossible because of the war. I went to Kiev as well and spoke at great length with his parents and with his sister and with his director at the National Ballet of Ukraine at the time that he was there, and his ballet mistress.
Marina Harss [00:28:40]:
I got to see where he grew up in Kiev, in this outlying neighborhood. I got to see the opera house, and the archivist there took me through the archives and showed me photographs. I mean, the whole thing was surreal and unbelievably valuable. And one of the things that I mean, there were all these little AHA moments, and one was going to the Chernobyl Museum in Know. I knew about Chernobyl. I had read about the I saw the through you didn't live through it, but I lived through it. I had friends who had been in Belarus at the time, but going to the museum and seeing these photographs of the Red Forest and of the after effects and then talking to Rotmansky's parents about what it had been like to live through that period, I realized what a it's in his subconscious, but what a formative experience that had been. The fear, the unreality of it all.
Marina Harss [00:30:00]:
And I also realized something very specific, which was that his firebird bears traces of that his firebird is said in a post apocalyptic landscape. And when I talked to with these sort of glowing trees and putrid looking spaces, and when I talked to him about it, we talked about everything except Chernobyl. But when I went to the museum, I realized there was a connection there. And so then I called his set designer and he said, oh, yeah, we talked about Chernobyl, we talked about the Red Forest. So there was this connection there that absolutely no one had made and I hadn't made and I never would have made, and that he didn't tell me about. So there are things you find. And then when I told him, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I guess, but but it's there. And then another one was going to the Bolsheui school in Moscow and seeing this place and realizing what a transformative experience and how that building, which is a huge block, large, it's circular, it's totally self contained, is an absolute world for the students.
Marina Harss [00:31:22]:
They come in, they're children, they come out, they're dancers. It's something I don't think exists. Maybe the Paris, the opera school. I don't know. But it's something very particular about that place. Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:31:39]:
I was just thinking towards the end of the book, and it's Lexi's mother just kind of she doesn't even finish her sentence. She just says, you know, he was so young. And then it just kind drops. Yeah. You're sending your child off and then that's it. They're transformed after yeah.
Marina Harss [00:32:01]:
When she told me that, it actually made me cry a little bit, because meeting his parents, they're the most wonderful people. And that also explained a lot about his character, the fact that he's quite a positive person, quite a soft spoken person. I mean, partly that's just his character, but partly it's his parents. He comes from a very loving family and very sweet family and very supportive family. And the idea that they let this little ten year old boy leave for Moscow, which was 10 hours away by train, and it's not like they never saw him again, but his life happened elsewhere from that moment on. And I don't think that for his parents, they even could grasp what was happening. And so when she looked in my eyes and this was through a translator, obviously, but somehow I found out that you can talk to someone through a translator and still feel like you're speaking to them directly. As she said this to me, she held my hands as we were at the door.
Marina Harss [00:33:08]:
I was about to leave Kiev and I thought, oh, my God, I'd better write a good book, because she deserves that's.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:16]:
So nice. I wonder, what was it, the conversation like with Ratmansky? Like when you approached him and you said, I want to write this book? What did he say? And then, how did you guys work together on this project?
Marina Harss [00:33:30]:
So when I first approached him, it was after I saw Serenade, after it was after Serenade, after Plato's Symposium. And I was very excited by that work, and I felt like he'd hit a new kind of level of sophistication in his work. And I very uncharacteristically wrote him an email at one in the morning. He's also a night owl, just saying, one day, I'd really like to write a book about you. Would you be willing to take part in such an enterprise? And he wrote, I can't remember exactly, but very short immediately, because he was up also working on something, saying, sure. And so then the wheels really started turning, right? And so then we had a real conversation, because then I talked to some people to see if there was really a possibility. You never know if there's a place for a book like this. So I talked to a few people and it really seemed like there was an interest.
Marina Harss [00:34:40]:
And so then I sat down with him and we had a real conversation about it. And I. Said, this is going to be a pain if I do this. It will be a pain. It will take up time. I'll be around a lot. Are you willing to tolerate that? I mean, I totally understand if you're not and we'll just drop it there. And his answer was, sure, but who would want to read a book like this? He was very puzzled by the whole idea.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:35:17]:
Everyone?
Marina Harss [00:35:18]:
Well, I have a feeling there are some people who might want to read it. And actually, I gave him a copy of Joan's book about Mark Morris, because at the time, that was my model, because she had written a book about him when he was quite young, quite a young choreographer. And people had wondered, why write about someone when they're in the midst of their career rather than later? But I thought, this is why. Because Joan's book about Mark really captures who he was as a child and his family situation and all the influences. So he said, Fine. He said okay. And I also said, in order to do a good job, I really need this to be an independent thing. I want to interview you, but it's not an approved biography, and you wouldn't have approval of the final copy.
Marina Harss [00:36:14]:
Is that okay with you? Of course. We'll let you see it, and then we can go over factual problems. And he said, Fine. You know how he is. All right. Very hands off. But what I got at that moment was the reassurance that he was willing to kind of sit there and be interviewed. And what I discovered was he's a man of his word.
Marina Harss [00:36:43]:
If he says he's going to do something, he does it. And so even though he's very difficult to keep up with because he's constantly on the move, he really allowed me total know, can I come to Russia and watch you work with the bolshei dancers when you're setting Romeo and Juliet on? You know, I've watched him work in many different places, and it was always okay, sure, he wasn't he wasn't hands on in any way, but he was but he gave me something much more valuable, which was total access, let's say.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:37:28]:
Right?
Marina Harss [00:37:29]:
And then in conversations, I think he began with a certain shyness about talking about himself. It's not something he's used to, but I found that over time, those conversations became longer and longer. I would come with a million questions. We'd get through some of them. And he was just so frank. If you ask him, he will tell you exactly what he thinks. He doesn't pussy foot or try to hide things. And so those conversations also just became much more wide ranging.
Marina Harss [00:38:10]:
And I sensed I may be completely wrong, that he enjoyed them as well, because he enjoyed talking about his work at length in a way that he had never done, at least to that extent before. And so the conversations became more and more interesting.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:38:33]:
Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:38:35]:
Something I think is such an integral part of the book. And what made me love it right away was the way that you are assembling his life experiences in a way that helps you to understand just where all of his influences are coming from. Like, sure, on a piece know in my mind, I knew, of course, that he had been at the Royal Danish Ballet, so he's going to have influence there and had danced in Canada and of course, trained in Russia. But you kind of just very meticulously put all those pieces together in a way where you're just like, oh, well, this is why he is the choreographer he is. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what each of those periods meant and I guess maybe how long you were going to devote to each one, how big of a piece of the puzzle it is in his mind as a choreographer. Talk a little bit about that.
Marina Harss [00:39:31]:
That's something I really wanted to do in the book because I saw so many traces of so many different dance traditions, but like you, I could just see the surface of it. But I didn't know how he had experienced them in his dancing and in his intellect. And I think that going to these places and talking to him about these traditions, I realized just how much of a researcher and assembler he is because he really loves ballet. He truly loves ballet. And so that means that he's a kind of self appointed researcher about ballet in all of its forms. And one of the things that really illuminated that was the way he approached learning about Danish ballet. And that I really found out through him, through conversations with him. But even more, going to Denmark, talking to Eric Oshengreen, who, alas, has recently died, the most wonderful dance historian of the Danish tradition.
Marina Harss [00:40:55]:
Talking to Gudrum Boysen, who was in the company with him at the time, talking to Thomas Lund and hearing about and Anne Middleball, who's a critic in Denmark, hearing about how he came not just to dance, but to learn about Bornoville. And I think that before I went there, I didn't realize what an influence that had had on him in many aspects. He was there for seven years. They were the final years of his dancing life. It was like the end of his dance education a little bit. He went and he wanted to learn how to dance Bornoville, and it's really hard if you're not trained in that tradition. And he's Russian. He was trained in a tradition that was almost the opposite of the casualness of the Danish style.
Marina Harss [00:41:42]:
He was muscular. He was all about know. And so he went to Eric Oshengren, who was at the university then, and asked him, can you talk to me about Bornoville? Can you tell me what to read? Can you show me prints? Can you lend me videos? And he really researched it like a graduate student and took all the Borneaunville classes at the company. He took every borno. And I remember he told me that the Danish dancers were rather bored with the Borne onville classes, but he was obsessed with the Borneville classes. And he learned and learned and learned, and worked and worked and worked, and he never got to be somebody told me that he never got to be a great born onville dancer, but he was quite a nice born onville dancer. This was a Dane who said that, and quite a nice bornonville dancer is like the highest form of praise. He gets to dance James, just once, but on tour.
Marina Harss [00:42:47]:
He had danced it before, but to dance it with the Royal Danes was a very big deal. And Gudrun told me that he would sit and watch performances and rehearsals of Napoli and other ballet teams. Say, look at that. It's incredible. And Guru would look at it and she'd be like, oh, yeah, I've been dancing that home my whole life.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:43:08]:
Okay?
Marina Harss [00:43:10]:
And then eventually, when he started making his ballets, like Torndo's Dream for their company, and then later the Bright Stream, she saw little snippets of Bornoville, and she also saw and this was a wonderful detail in the bright stream there's those two kind of dopey peasants. Well, they're not peasants. They own a dasha. They're called the dasha dwellers. And they're these comic bumbling characters. And she said that was straight out of the Danish tradition of Mime. And he told me then I asked him about it. It was a tribute to Kirsten Simone, who was a great Danish ballerina who later became a character dancer and who's still alive and living in Denmark.
Marina Harss [00:44:04]:
I met with her as well. So these things aren't just theoretical.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:44:10]:
Right.
Marina Harss [00:44:11]:
They're real.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:12]:
Right.
Marina Harss [00:44:14]:
The steps are actually there.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:16]:
Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:44:17]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:18]:
I wonder how much now that you've really like you're saying you traveled with him when he was working at different companies. You are so well versed in that now. I wonder how your perspective has changed on seeing him dance with different companies. Like you're talking about, he comes into the studio and he's like, this is what I want to do. And then it evolves into something else. How is it evolving for balancing trained dancers versus Bornenville influences?
Marina Harss [00:44:42]:
Yeah, I didn't travel with him. I traveled independently and met up where he went.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:48]:
Sorry, you were there when he was there.
Marina Harss [00:44:50]:
Right. I'd be like, Where are you going to be? Making a ballet. Okay. And I'd be there. Very important distinction. What I noticed was a remarkable consistency in his work with different companies. I think the difference I noticed with New York City Ballet dancers was that I haven't seen rehearsals recently, but when they did his movement in rehearsal, there was something they gave it a spin already. That was Balanchinian, and he would work with would and I think he does this with every company.
Marina Harss [00:45:42]:
But maybe because Balanchin and Bornoville the bees, I think it's because the Balanchin style is something he's so excited by, it comes out even more in his choreography. But what I notice working with other companies is that he takes what he sees in front of him and he just works to mold what's in front of him. And also an infinite patience. I mean, as you said at the beginning, Michael, this desire to see something very specific and working towards it is always there. But it works at different speeds with different dancers and with different traditions. And for example, working with the Bolshey, I noticed there was more, I'm not going to say resistance, but they had to come from a much farther away to get to his style.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:46:46]:
Got you right.
Marina Harss [00:46:48]:
And so the patience, the patience, the repetition, the cajoling, the quiet, the showing, always the showing. I mean, that's something that he does in every company. And that I think there's no better interpreter of his movement style than himself. Even now he can show a phrase and you understand the musicality, the accents, the size of the movement. What is more important, the emphasis, all this stuff. I don't know how he gets through a day because the amount of energy he puts out in a rehearsal and he'll do 8 hours of rehearsal, he'll show and show and show and show. And that happened in every setting that I saw. And I think it was probably the same when he was 20, right?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:47]:
I mean, gosh, the way he shows, we all loved to talk about it because it was so beautiful. Sometimes you could get caught, caught up in just watching him and be like oh wait, I have an assignment here, I'm supposed to be emulating. But it's so wild. How many years into retirement from the stage is he? And yet it's just the scale and the specificity and you immediately know what is expected of you and yet it feels like dancers that are at their own peaks. I'm friendly with Isabella Boylston and we talk about him often, where it's just like she is a principal ballerina with American Ballet Theater and can do everything and she'll just look at it and go like what?
Marina Harss [00:48:39]:
Yeah. And you can see the vocabulary streaming through him. You can see that he danced Dear Achillian, you can see that he danced Balanchin. You can see even that he danced Bijar because that sort of big opulent upper body stuff. You can see in the footwork that he danced Bornobel. You can see in the strong back that he comes from the Russian tradition. It's like this alphabet soup in his body.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:49:12]:
One thing I'm curious about, I have a question about the name of the book. I was wondering how you got to the name of the book and if that maybe changed in recent years.
Marina Harss [00:49:24]:
Yeah, so it wasn't the original title. The original title was I worked really hard to find a title. It's a very difficult thing, I bet.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:49:36]:
Yeah.
Marina Harss [00:49:37]:
This was one of the titles that was in the mix, but nobody really liked it. It's like, boy, I don't know, it's a little maybe a little cheesy. So I came up with a very dignified title. It was very dignified, very neutral. It's like, oh, this is a serious book. And then the war started, and then I saw what a cataclysmic event this was for him, for his family, for the world, for Ukraine. And it brought to the fore a theme that I had been really thinking about from the beginning, which was, who is Rotmansky? Where is he from? What is his origin story, as people like to say? Or what is his identity? And I had always had a little bit of trouble pinpointing it, because for many reasons, and I think he had had trouble pinpointing it as well, when I would ask him, So, do you feel Russian? Do you feel Ukrainian? The answers were always a little murky. I realized he was a Soviet man, he was a post Soviet man.
Marina Harss [00:51:10]:
He didn't have a home, blah, blah, blah. But then the war made everything very clear. The pain he felt was very specific. Who mattered to him in his life became very clear. And I realized at that moment that it had always, in a way, been clear, because when he went to the Bolshey school at ten years old, so 1978, it was still the Soviet period, he was known at the school as the Boy from Kiev. So this was already a label that was being put on him. That was, you're here, you're great, you're lovely, but you're from somewhere else. It was a term of endearment also, but it was a mixed term of endearment.
Marina Harss [00:52:05]:
And, in fact, when he graduated, he was expected to go back to Kiev, which to them meant, like, the provinces. You go back there, go dance with your other Ukrainian dancers. And so there was an othering there, and at the time, he felt very disappointed. Oh, I have to go back to Ukraine, blah, blah, blah. But what became clear with the war is that that was very intentional in the you know, Russia tried to and successfully managed to obscure people's sense of nationality, because Russia was really what mattered and Moscow mattered and St. Petersburg mattered. So everything else was kind of out there. It's the know.
Marina Harss [00:52:56]:
And so I felt suddenly that that little tidbit from school was actually really significant. And I realized that had to be the title. It wasn't really like I had to choose. That was the title. And now, when I look back, I think it couldn't have been anything else.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:53:18]:
When he posted on Instagram the other day about the book, he commented on the title, and it seemed based on I don't have it in front of me. But it seemed like it meant a lot to him that that was the title, which made me curious about how it came to be.
Marina Harss [00:53:32]:
Yeah, I mean, I didn't tell him when I was going to change it. I did make some changes after the war started, and after it was announced that he was going to New York City Ballet, I went back and I just kind of gently thought about everything. But when I changed the title, I didn't ask him or tell him. But I am very happy that it means something to him. I got it right.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:54:02]:
So, of course, we hope all of our listeners go out and get the book. Where should we be buying the book? Where would you like us to buy the book?
Marina Harss [00:54:10]:
Well, of Know, your local bookstore is always the best place to buy a book, but it can be bought from the Macmillan website. It can be bought from Know, all of the chains or whatever it's out. So we're going to put a link.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:54:32]:
In the description of this episode so that people can get it because we really hope that everyone will and dive in. It's so wonderful and we're so happy to hear about.
Marina Harss [00:54:41]:
I really appreciate it. And, you know, one last thing. I really feel like in great part, I wrote it for the dancers because there are so many dancers who have done his work and who love doing his work. And you don't have time in the studio for these conversations. Right? Why did you do it this way? Why does it look like this? Where did you come from? There's no time for that in the studio. So I think that for dancers, it's an opportunity to kind of lift the veil and understand this person that they work with a little bit better.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:55:19]:
That's exactly how I felt. Yeah. It was just illuminating an artist that I already loved and appreciated so much. But, yeah, I feel like the next time I see one of Alexi's ballets, I'll love it even more. So thank you for that, Marina.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:55:34]:
I was having the credits in the back of ballets that we were in, that we were part of the origination of felt so cool. It's like being in a history book or something.
Marina Harss [00:55:44]:
Oh, that's so great. I hadn't even thought of it that way.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:55:47]:
Yeah, it felt really like there was a little piece of us and names in there that we knew and it said And Ensemble, which is us.
Marina Harss [00:55:54]:
Oh, my God, that took so much time. Can I just tell you?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:55:57]:
Oh, my God.
Marina Harss [00:55:59]:
When they told me could you do a chronology? I was like, really?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:56:04]:
I actually was thinking that I was wondering if he had all that available to you and was just like, here.
Marina Harss [00:56:09]:
No, I mean, he did help, especially with the really early works that there was no record of the names and stuff, but no, I mean, how could I have impinged on his time in that way to be like, okay, and who was the original? This ballet? No, I did 90% of the footwork myself. And then I did get help from different people who were like, oh, this other person was in the ballet.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:56:38]:
Yeah.
Marina Harss [00:56:38]:
Cool. And from him, he did help me at the end.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:56:40]:
Sure.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:56:42]:
All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, Marina. And we hope you're taking a big victory lap this week because it's article.
Marina Harss [00:56:50]:
So not exactly back to reality.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:56:53]:
All right, well, we'll get you back on the pod for your next book, for sure. Thank you so much for joining us.
Marina Harss [00:56:59]:
You guys, so much. Really appreciate it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:57:01]:
Thank you, Marina. Conversations on Dance is part of the Acast creator network. For more information, visit conversations on dancepod pod.com.