The New Neo

[NOTE: This is part of a series I’ve done. So far I’ve featured dance teachers Stanley Holden and Finis Jhung. There are plenty more I could write about.]

Last night I was musing about the changes in dance in my lifetime, a topic I’ve written about many times and which boils down to the sacrifice of art to gymnastics. Three of the most astounding ballet dancers I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen many – are Violette Verdy, Carla Fracci, and Galina Ulanova, all of whom I’ve written about and all of whom had a transcendent essence that could not be captured on film. Verdy was the most fleet and musical dancer I’ve ever seen, Fracci the most charming and other-worldly – like an old ballet lithograph come to life – and Ulanova the best at naturalistic believability with a gossamer and fluid technique to support it. There’s no one today anything like them. The entire aesthetic that trained and elevated them is gone.

But I remember, and so do a lot of other people who aren’t young.

Which brings me to a dance teacher I’ve known: Natasha Boskovic. At the ages of fourteen and sixteen I attended an arts camp in Canada at which she was the ballet mistress. I spent many hours under her tutelage every day but Sunday, and even some Sundays when extra rehearsals loomed. She was a colorful old-world figure, with a cabin of her own that included a trunkful of memorabilia and old costumes, and many scrapbooks with wonderful clippings from around the world and marvelous photos of her with famous people in the ballet world of the 1930s.

Natasha had a Slavic accent (it turns out she was originally from Yugoslavia, although I was unaware of it at the time). Her favorite phrase when exasperated was German, however: “Gott in Himmel!” – and considering her task, which was to teach nearly every day and organize a huge end-of-summer dance production with students whom it would be kind to call amateurs, she had plenty of cause for exasperation. But most of the time she was wonderful to us all, although demanding.

Natasha was somewhat crippled, like so many of my early ballet teachers. She wasn’t young but she wasn’t very very old, nor were the rest of them. Dance had injured them way back when, and the injuries never quite healed. This was the case for Natasha, whose partner had dropped her several times (that’s what I recall her saying, anyway), and she had danced through the injuries and paid the price. Now she couldn’t really demonstrate steps but instead indicated them – and of course used the French nomenclature that every ballet student must learn. Sometimes she had one of the more advanced students demonstrate. But her own legs never went higher than a couple of inches off the floor, if that, and she walked with a limp.

One day she was engaged in teaching a friend of mine the Russian Dance from Act III of “Swan Lake,” the ballet we were performing that summer. The third act features dances from around the world, and the Russian variation is one. My friend was having trouble learning the style, which should appear effortless but was hard to pick up, and Natasha got out of her chair to demonstrate.

She hardly bothered with the feet, which didn’t feature pyrotechnics (and the dance was not on pointe; it was meant to be a character dance of the folkish variety). She was showing the arms, head, position of the body, and style.

But first she did the most extraordinary thing. I remember it still, very vividly. She turned on a spotlight inside herself.

I have never seen anyone do that before or since. Suddenly she glowed, although nothing external to her had changed. She radiated some tremendous power that was charismatic and enchanting and made you forget whatever was missing with her feet, or her considerable age. It was riveting, and no one – including the near-professional dancers in our midst – could begin to imitate it.

I have searched online for a video or photo of Natasha and can’t find even one. I doubt photos could capture what I’m talking about anyway. I did find some videos of more recent dancers performing that Russian Dance, but they’re not worth watching. They’re stiff and strange – at least to me – and they dance on pointe which I’m pretty sure was not the original way the dance was done. They strike pretty poses and wave their arms around, but it is nothing – and I mean nothing – like the transcendent artistry I saw in that room on that day.

Here’s the best one I’ve found. This is probably from the 1980s – I see Princess Diana is in the audience – and the dancer is Russian and not all that young. So it’s a bit more old-fashioned than other renditions you’ll see. Some even eliminate the obligatory handkerchief.

Please note the little hand waves that begin at 1:38. They were incredibly hard to perform naturalistically, and Natasha was especially masterful at imbuing them with charm. At around 2:58, note the funny hand rolls that make little sense; in Natasha’s version this was a forceful clap with the hands a la folkdance tradition:

Some years later when I was in my early 20s I attended some weekend classes at Natasha’s New York City studio. The classes were large and featured everyone from the likes of me to professional dancers, attracted by her knowledge and in particular the fabulous combinations she gave in the last half of the class, more like little ballets. I recalled that she had a notebook full of them to which she sometimes referred, but usually she did it completely from memory.

I was there in the summertime, and summer in Manhattan can have heat that’s brutal. Summer in Manhattan in a dance studio could be especially brutal – no air conditioning, ventilation only on one wall, and a room full of sweaty dancers. One day it was so hot that even before the class began we were all sweating. I took a moment, while we waited, to go into the hallway for a little more air.

As with many New York dance studios, this one featured a long long climb “up a steep and very narrow stairway.” At the bottom, I saw Natasha, but she didn’t see me because I was partially hidden by the door. She climbed very laboriously, a few steps at a time, looking alarmingly worn and tired. She frequently stopped to rest and get her wind back, and I believe she may have muttered “Gott in Himmel!” a few times.

I stepped back even further but I could still see her. But then, not many steps from the top, I saw her turn on the floodlights within again, just as I had years earlier. I ducked back into the entrance to the studio as she swept in, a huge smile on her face, looking twenty years younger and glowing from within, as the students applauded. Only I had witnessed the spectacular transformation.

Natasha Boskovic died just a couple of years later. Here is her obituary in the New York Times; it’s short. But in my memory she looms large.

The summer we did “Swan Lake,” I danced a few roles and among them was the Neapolitan Dance, another ethnic offering in Act III. She loaned me an old costume of hers for the occasion, a beautiful thing and easily the most wonderful costume I’ve ever worn, with satin appliques on a wide skirt. Here I am at sixteen:

RIP, Natasha, and thank you. You were rare and wonderful.