Chapter One
Marika Besobrasova is one of Europe's most renownedballet teachers. She has taught in Monte Carlosince the early 1940s. Her school, L'Ecole de Danse MarikaBesobrasova, attracts an international array of studentsand professionals. Although born in Russia, Besobrasovawas raised, and received her dance training, in France. Sheperformed with René Blum's Ballets de Monte Carlo in the1930s, and, in 1940, while still in her twenties, founded theBallets de Cannes de Marika Besobrasova. From 1949 to1950 she worked as ballet mistress and company teacherwith the Ballets des Champs-Elysées. Subsequently, in additionto maintaining her own school in Monte Carlo, shealso directed the schools of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Zurich,and the Ballet de l'Opéra de Rome (1966-69). She is a frequentguest teacher throughout Europe and, since 1970, hasmaintained a close relationship with the Stuttgart Ballet. In1971, she staged Nureyev's Paquita for American Ballet Theatrein New York City.
During the 1960s, Besobrasova developed her teachingsystem into an eleven-year program. Based on Vaganova'sRussian syllabus, but heavily influenced by the FrenchSchool, her system, complete with examinations, is nowused by teachers in several countries. Besobrasova is a frequentmember of the jury at international dance competitions.She has been decorated on several occasions and is aclose friend of Monaco's royal family. Prince Rainier providedher with the lovely villa, Casa Mia, in which her academyin Monte Carlo has been housed since 1974. It wasthere that I first visited her in 1991.
Each Morning, Marika Besobrasova takes a moment to enjoy the viewfrom the balcony of her spacious apartment high in the hills of MonteCarlo. She has already exercised, eaten breakfast, and checked on her manypotted plants, including an impressive collection of orchids. As she watches,the pink sun slowly rises through a thick blanket of gray mist over theMediterranean. Below her, on rocky cliffs descending to the water, the tinyprincipality of Monaco, a picturesque collage of pastel buildings, flower-filledgardens, and winding streets, sits tightly packed around an azure harborfilled with luxury yachts. Besobrasova has lived here—the city whereDiaghilev presented his famous Ballets Russes in the 1920s—for almostsixty years.
Early mornings are the only quiet time in Besobrasova's long days. Yet,even in these calm moments, there is an air of impatience about her. Atseventy-three, with her tall, trim figure, she is still a very active woman.Her face, with its aquiline nose and flashing Nordic-blue eyes, reflects astrong, resilient character. Abruptly, she gathers her things, calls for herever-present Bedlington terrier, Doucy, and descends to the garage for hercar. Her first class of the morning begins at 8:30 A.M.
It was only on the five-minute drives to and from her school that I eversaw Besobrasova lose her aristocratic manners. Her performance rivals thatof any Parisian taxi driver. Honking and swerving her deluxe sedanthrough Monaco's narrow streets, she comments colorfully upon the lackof driving ability of all around her. Upon arrival at her academy, Casa Mia,she leaves her car keys with the Italian caretaker, briskly climbs the stonesteps to the vestibule, and swirls into her office, casting aside her silk scarf.
In the few minutes before she begins her morning class, Besobrasovamay discuss correspondence with her secretary, take international phonecalls, answer questions about costumes or music for upcoming performances,or discuss building problems. Perpetually besieged by all the mundanematters of running a large academy (sometimes even in the middle ofteaching a class), she somehow manages to remain calm and businesslike.
Surprisingly, in spite of her fame and aristocratic Russian background,Besobrasova has no airs about her. She is neither grandiose nor remote. Polite,efficient, and often wryly humorous, she is simultaneously dignifiedand down-to-earth. She has a quick, delightful smile that can, in a second,interrupt the determined set of her jaw, causing years to disappear from herface. She moves fast and is by nature a problem solver. One can imagine herrolling up her sleeves without hesitation in order to mop a dance floor ormend costumes.
Her desire to be heavily involved in every aspect of her academy—evenif it means, as it usually does, ten-hour work days—is, no doubt, one of themain reasons her school has endured successfully for almost half a century.The intensity of this involvement is reflected in Besobrasova's descriptionof her relationship to her students. "I am not a teacher," she saysemphatically in her delightfully accented English, "I am a master—somethingmuch more than a teacher." Her statement is not made in an egotisticalway. As she explains, "If I'm only a teacher, I will make sure that youbegin class on time, finish on time, that you don't miss the next class, andthat you know your program. And I will correct your physical and evenmusical mistakes, but I will not look at your entire life. As a master, I havethe right to examine the way a student lives—if, for instance, he is not takingrest at the right moment, or not concentrating insofar as reviewing hisday or properly planning for the next. As a master, I have the right to sayanything to my pupils. I look further than just teaching—into their souls,not just at the skin."
Elizabeth Hertel, a soloist with the Stuttgart Ballet who trained withBesobrasova for seven years, says: "I'm a very pessimistic person, and shetaught me how to be a fighter, to push myself to get through things, to kickmyself to go for it, not to waver. One of her favorite sayings is `Prenez vouspar le main' [Take yourself by the hand]. In other words, don't just standthere and feel sorry for yourself"
Besobrasova feels this kind of personalized teaching is necessary to helpstudents become aware of who they are and how they are acting. "Awareness"she says, "is the key to understanding one's problems. A personmakes mistakes until he is aware of making them. A dancer will not correcthis 5th position until he corrects his own way of approaching that 5th position."She believes students must be sincere: "They must be willing to becorrected and not pay you just to look at them and admire them, whichmakes no sense for either you or them."
She readily admits that she or any teacher can make mistakes at varioustimes. "But" she says, "I always know why I have chosen a particular pathfor the moment. I know, for instance, that even though a mistake may resultfrom my pushing him too fast in a certain area, that this is not as importantas another thing I have to make him understand first. But I will alwaysbe sincere; if my method doesn't work, I'll say, `Excuse me. I made amistake. Let's try something else'"
There is something motherly about Besobrasova. She is charming andearnest as she moves quietly along the barre using her hands to correct thedancers' bodies. Sometimes she leans close to a student, saying somethingin a low voice, and both will giggle. Often, narrowing her eyes, she will concentrateher gaze on a student across the room for several moments beforeshe speaks. "I try to develop the capacity with myself to penetrate my students,"she says. "I stop all my own thoughts and feelings and just go inthem. It's a very difficult task because you agree to abdicate yourself, but, inso doing, you start to feel how they feel when they are moving. Then I understandhow they are working their machine and what is wrong."
In order to make a student aware of his problems, Besobrasova oftenuses physical contact. She explains: "I will make him feel my breath, thepulsation of the muscles. I'll make him move my arms, or I'll stand in backof him and make him move." She may jolt a student into awareness by puttinghim on the spot with a question such as: "Why do you move yourshoulders when you start to move your left foot? Can you explain that relationshipto me?" One day, when a young lady was having trouble gettingher hips into the air on a failli-assemblé combination, Besobrasova draggeda chair onto the floor, and, holding the girl's hand, commanded her to stepup onto the seat ("Montez! Push up!"). Complying, the student immediatelyfelt exactly which muscles must be strongly activated in order to elevatethe body from the ground.
Just before 8:30 each morning, Besobrasova breezes hurriedly into thesunny top-floor studio at Casa Mia. It is a lovely, long, pale-pink room witha hardwood floor. A line of partially shuttered, arched, Renaissance-stylewindows—reminiscent, perhaps, of a set design for Romeo and Juliet—stretchesalong one entire wall above the barre. Through them one sees avast expanse of blue sky and, on the rocky cliffs across the harbor, the palaceof Prince Rainier.
As the students finish stretching and pulling on their shoes, Besobrasovadisappears into a small dressing room adjacent to the studio. Quickly, shereappears clad in a dark knee-length skirt, pink tights, and a pretty black-laceleotard. Around her neck are a pair of delicate gold chains. She clapsher hands. "Bon! Allez! Travaillez! [Good! Let's go! Time to work!]" Thestudents space themselves a few feet away from the barre. Taking a deepbreath, they lift their arms to the ceiling. As the music begins, they bendforward, heads dropping toward their knees, in the stretch with which Besobrasovabegins all her classes.
Several mornings a week, Besobrasova teaches two classes, workingfrom 8:30 until noon without a break—a very long stretch for anyone, letalone a person in her mid-seventies. Yet she does not seem to tire, perhapsbecause she paces herself well. She is also well cared for; midway throughthe morning, her secretary arrives bearing a small tray with biscuits andcoffee in a china cup. Besobrasova dispenses with both quickly, almostwithout thinking and never taking her eyes from the dancers. Although shestill has a lovely pair of long, shapely dancer's legs and can move easily andgracefully, she maintains a quiet, rather than demonstrative, presence asshe teaches. Her focus is entirely on the students. Only occasionally will shedraw attention to herself as a physical example, primarily when making apoint about artistry. She is fond of demonstrating (to those who dancewith dour faces) how vibrant a dancer's face must be in order to catch anaudience's attention. Her students told me that Besobrasova's ability totransform her face momentarily from that of an elderly teacher to a beautifulyoung ballerina never ceases to amaze them.
Elisabeth Carroll, a former ballerina with the Harkness Ballet who studiedwith Besobrasova from age fourteen to seventeen, recalls: "WhenMarika demonstrated, we had to stand perfectly still and watch. Her artistry,coordination, and flow of movement were an inspiration. There wasso much to learn by observing the care she gave to small details—the wayshe used her head and eyes in connection to the tips of her fingers, her feet,and beyond. I watched with my entire being and absorbed in completetrust, hoping to move as gracefully as Marika did. She always told us: `Youmust be as expressive with your feet as you are with your hands. Talk withthem!'" Another former student, Tamako Akiyama, a soloist with the StuttgartBallet, still returns whenever possible to study with Besobrasova andnotes that "when Marika demonstrates she seems to extend herself beyondher body."
While Besobrasova can be stern and demanding ("Stop! Stop! Inadmissible!"),she exercises utmost patience in class when explaining things. Shestresses that the students must understand exactly how to do the exercises.Nothing must be arbitrary. Precise placement of the toe or heel in all positionsis essential, as is exact rhythm.
I enjoyed watching the detailed manner in which she worked with students'hands. For those with the tendency to curl their fingers, she had aunique solution. She placed a thin, light-weight stick, about the size of acocktail straw, between their fingers—over the middle finger and underneaththe index and fourth fingers. This forced their fingers to lengthen,producing a correctly shaped balletic hand. At the barre, students wouldexecute one side of an exercise with the stick placed in their outside hand,then quickly change it to the other hand when they turned to the otherside.
Besobrasova told me, "The hand is made up of two parts: fingers andpalm. The palm must be relaxed—in the center—then you begin shapingthe hand from the middle finger. It gives the direction. You lift the indexand fourth finger and the little finger highest of all. The thumb moves towardthe middle finger" She added that she "hated" the old-fashionedcurled hand, which she remembers Balanchine (with whom she had a finefriendship) describing as "like holding an orange." She explained: "If youlearn to hold the hand like that, you stay like that forever." (In this, sheparted company from Balanchine, who favored such a hand position forstudents.)
When her students execute an arm preparation beginning with a"breath" port de bras outward from 5th en bas, Besobrasova tells them notto start the movement from their elbow. "Start it from the middle finger-youhave to see your fingernails when you allongé your hand. And theopening of the arm happens because of an inhalation. As the ribs expand,the whole arm moves outward. This is involuntary, but the fingers—thenails on top and the tips below—these you must consciously move."
Attention to such detail is not unusual in Besobrasova's teaching. Duringan allegro combination, she repeatedly stressed the importance of coordinatinga small movement of the head and body with the leg action intemps de cuisse. As the students did the initial petit passé, she wanted themto lean and look down at their working foot. As the foot closed in 5th, sheinstructed them to lift their chests and chins and look up and out whiledoing the sissonne that followed. "It's so important" she told them, "themovement of the body with the leg."
The breadth of knowledge Besobrasova offers her students has been accumulatedduring more than fifty years of teaching. "I never had the urgeto make a big career for myself as a dancer or choreographer," she says simply."My wish was always to teach." In Monaco, she is a venerated publicfigure. Everyone in the Casino plaza where we had dinner one nightseemed to know her. The bellboys at the adjoining hotel ran to park her car,and our waiter, with whom she chatted cheerfully, produced steak tartarein a dog dish for Doucy. As we talked, she threw bread crumbs to the tinysparrows that flitted around our table.
Besobrasova was born to Russian parents in the Crimean city of Yalta in1918. The event took place, she notes, "in a villa in the garden of the palacewhere the famous Yalta agreement between Stalin, Churchill, and Rooseveltwas later signed." Prior to the Russian Revolution, her grandfather hadbeen a general in command of the Czar's guards, and her grandmother hadbeen a lady-in-waiting to the mother of the Czar. Besobrasova's fatherfought in the White Army until the last possible moment before escapingwith his family (and many others of the Russian aristocracy) to Europe. Shewas two years old. The family was stopped in Constantinople. "We spentforty days on the pier lying out in the open on our luggage without anyprotection from the weather" she says. "I got double pneumonia anddouble pleuritis. Because of this, I have a large scar on my back from theoperation I had to have at two-and-a-half." She was bandaged for monthsafter this operation and, as a result, developed skeletal problems that wereto plague her much of her life.
After leaving Constantinople, the family stopped briefly in Venice,where Besobrasova notes that, at two-and-a-half, she was taken to seeDiaghilev's ballet company. Her family settled first in Denmark. "But mygrandfather could not stand the difficult climate there" she says. "He soonleft for the south of France, and we followed." During the early part of herchildhood, she was educated in a convent where one day a week she spokeEnglish, another French, and the rest of the time Russian. (Since then, shehas taught herself Italian and German as well.) From the age of nine, sheattended the Russian Lycée in Nice. She began to dance at the age of twelvewith Madame Julie Sedova after her parents decided that ballet lessonsmight correct the weakness in her back, the result of her childhood operation.At fifteen, she started her professional career with the opera ballet onthe same stage in Monte Carlo where the Diaghilev company had danced.
When her first opera season finished, Besobrasova completed her academicstudies and, in 1934 at the age of sixteen, joined René Blum's Balletsde Monte Carlo. She recalls working with Fokine: "He was a genius—areal genius. You could see it in his eyes. The ballets were always ready in hishead when he arrived to begin rehearsals with us."
Besobrasova remembers that when she arrived in Paris, she was toldby the other dancers, "Tomorrow we will start Les Sylphides." She was veryconcerned because she seemed to be the only dancer not familiar with theballet. "So, being sixteen, I had the guts to go to Fokine and say, `You know,it seems I am the only one who does not know your ballet, Sylphides. Wouldyou please forgive me?'" She has never forgotten his reply. "Well," he toldher, "you'll be the only one who will know it because the rest all think theyknow it, but they don't!"
She remembers Les Sylphides as "lightness and breathing." The movement,she notes, did not come from the arms. It was the arms that reactedto the breath. "Breathing and releasing" she says. "It impressed me so muchthat in my teaching, there is always a placement of the breath. It is not comingoutside the movement; it comes with the movement" As she tells herstudents, "Breath is life. If you don't breathe, you don't live."
Fokine, who was residing in New York City at the time, returned to Europeto accompany the troupe to Monte Carlo, where, Besobrasova recalls,the dancers learned twelve ballets in two months! "We had a season here,"she remembers, "and then we went to London. It was a rather peculiar situationbecause we danced in the old Alhambra Theatre, and the De BasilBallets Russes was at Covent Garden, so throughout the season there wasalways this rivalry going on between Blum and De Basil. But we had anenormous success. I remember fifty-six curtain calls after Scheherazade."
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Besobrasova, then twenty years old,elected to stay in France rather than follow Blum's company to America.She returned to Monte Carlo and began to give ballet lessons. For a shorttime, she became involved with staging ballets at the Casino in MonteCarlo, but soon moved to Cannes, where, in 1940, she founded the Balletsde Cannes de Marika Besobrasova. "I was twenty-two" she recalls, "and Ireally knew nothing, but I took the responsibility of running a company, aswell as dancing in it and teaching the dancers" Because it was wartime,many famous dancers came south from Paris to work with her company,among them Janine Charrat, Roland Petit, Serge Golovine, and JeanBabilée.
Babilée, a Paris Opera star, was sent to her by René Blum, who felt it wasnot safe for the young half-Jewish virtuoso to remain in Nazi-occupiedParis. She remembers the day he arrived. "I understand you are a dancer,"she said to him. Without a word, she says, Babilée, then seventeen, assumeda preparatory stance and executed fourteen pirouettes. "Then he threw offhis shoes, jumped in the air, and did entrechat douze. After that, he lookedat me and said in an incredulous tone of voice, `Do I know how to dance?'"
She says she has known many great dancers. "But Babilée," she says, "didthings no one else did. Can you imagine a grand jeté entrelacé with a doubletour in it? And he did a double manège of these!" She remembers him as a"fantastic talent" but notes with regret that "he was very naughty, very undisciplined—amixture of tiger, monkey, flea, and grasshopper. When Iwould grumble at him in class, he would do a jeté up onto the barre, forcingyou to look up at him standing there as you gave the correction. Then, he'ddo another fancy jeté down. It was very unnerving."
The company in Cannes lasted until 1943. Because of the war, Besobrasovaand her dancers endured many hardships, the worst of which washunger. "There was hardly anything to eat," she recalls, "except olives, mimosa,and carnations." They were saved, she says, by a strange coincidence.The Aga Khan came to a performance one night and, afterward, camebackstage. He had recognized the name Besobrasova on the program andwanted to know if she was related in any way to the Besobrasov who hadbefriended him many years before in St. Petersburg. This man, he told her,had been the president of the balletomanes of the Maryinsky Theatre and,many years ago, had given the Aga Khan, then a young prince, his first ticketsto the ballet. The experience had begun his lifelong passion for dance.Besobrasova confirmed that she was indeed related to this man. He was heruncle.
Delighted, the Aga Khan immediately asked what he could do for her,and throughout the war, because his cars had diplomatic immunity, hebrought her badly needed supplies from Switzerland: tulle for tutus, chocolateto eat, and vitamins for her dancers. At one point, knowing how exhaustedthe company was from hunger, he offered to pay for them to take avacation in the mountains. There it was possible to obtain food, and Besobrasovaremembers knitting and mending clothes for the peasants in returnfor butter and cheese.
In 1943, as the war intensified and the Germans moved south, Besobrasovadissolved her company. She moved to Paris and began studying withtwo famous teachers: Egorova and Gzovsky. "I worked with her in themorning and him in the afternoon, and between them I had to walk milesand miles because, due to air attacks, there was no public transportation."
She remembers Egorova with particular fondness and believes her greatnessas a teacher lay in her wonderful musicality, as well as in her ability tocover in one year all the classical vocabulary. "You wouldn't see it if you onlyspent a week or two with her," Besobrasova says, "but her classes encompasseda huge amount of material including several steps rarely used inclasses today, like temps de cuisse, which she'd give with a variety of accentsand always with a strong focus on vitality." Besobrasova remembers thatEgorova gave a certain grande pirouette combination "which was really aman's step" every day in order to build strength in her students. (See"Grande Pirouette Exercise" on p. 286.) Egorova was also, she says, adamantabout developing strong backs. "We'd do a stretching exercise with one legon the barre in which we had to maintain both arms in 5th position aboveour heads throughout, even when we pivoted to face a new direction. Youhad to really concentrate on holding your back and keeping your armsaligned with your ears if you wanted to do this without losing your balance."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Art of Teaching Balletby Gretchen Ward Warren Copyright © 1999 by Gretchen Ward Warren. Excerpted by permission.
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