Vera Nemtchinova

My teacher was Vera Nemtchinova. By “teacher,” I mean my single foundational teacher in the way that ballerinas who went to the Kirov or the Bolshoi say that a certain pedagogue was “my teacher.” I addressed her as “Madame” until the end, and I curtsied to her after every lesson in addition to the formal révérence exercise that was a part of her class. She was a wonderful, elegant lady, who taught many people over a period of many years here in New York and left an indelible impression on those who were fortunate enough to take her classes. But beyond that, I was lucky enough to have had several years of private coaching with her. I went on to become a principal ballerina and in later years, a coach. I understand, therefore, the responsibility inherent in passing on the knowledge and the care Madame invested in me. I have tried to pay that forward when the opportunity arises with the young dancers I coach. I always say the training she gave me was like military boot camp—that is how strenuous and technically demanding it was. For example, I did barre work in the center, rarely actually holding on to the barre. She made me do fouettés as a child with my arms held in fifth/en couronne the entire time. Straight leg grands jetés landing in arabesque, with a relevé to balance on demi-pointe added after that. She taught me the original Diaghilev versions of all the Sleeping Beauty principal and soloist variations and Fokine’s Chopiniana. It was with Madame, in a private lesson on my tenth birthday, that I tied on my very first pair of pointe shoes and stood en pointe for the first time. I was always nervous before the lessons, for I did not want to disappoint her. She had such a beautiful way of moving. Her port de bras was infused with a weighty grandeur, poignantly tempered by the tremulous caution in movement that older artists develop with the passage of time—something I understand all too well now! My academic balletic education was at the School of American Ballet, but the personal coaching and foundation Madame gave me set the groundwork for everything I was able to do later, and it gave me the ability to appreciate and use the different methods of all my later teachers. It was such a fine foundation that I could have put almost anything over it later and I would have been able to manage.

Madame died in 1984. I grieved, but oddly, I never have felt as though she was actually gone. She got so thoroughly inside my artistry and technique in the process of forming it that she has, somehow, always been with me. When I later met and got to know Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Alicia Markova in England, they both took me into their hearts as though I were a long lost child, such was their high regard for Madame. I was able to relate to them and they recognized her training in me. While there was a cavernous age difference, I found that Sir Frederick, Dame Alicia and I spoke the same artistic language and had the same set of reference points. That was finally, also, perhaps the most marvelous thing about Madame: although there was a vertiginous corridor of seventy years separating the two of us, I never felt it—while we were together, it was as though we were suspended in time and space. That chasm of seventy years vanished during the transfer of knowledge between the two ballerinas. Vera Nemtchinova is one of the few people about whom I would say, as a mark of deep respect and honor from one ballerina to another, that if she stood in a studio, no matter where it was, then there was really and truly “Ballet” in that studio.

                                                                                                -- Katherine Healy

                                                                                                    November, 2010