A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  That evening, I was putting on my costume when I heard a frantic knock on the door. Someone from the camera crew feverishly explained that I had to get ready right away for a live interview in four minutes. As quickly as I could, I pulled on my pale blue tunic and tights. When I slipped on my left boot, which belonged to the pair I had painstakingly broken in, it suddenly burst on the side seam right on the heel. Every dancer has his or her own way of breaking in shoes. Some, like myself, prepare their shoes days before a show. This was my one pair for the filming. The pair that felt most comfortable. I had no choice but to switch to shoes that were stiffer and not broken in. In rehearsal, I would have been given the time to fix the problem. But no matter what, the curtain always goes up as scheduled; especially if it’s a live performance being conveyed to audiences around the world.

  * * *

  WITH THE MUSIC for my entrance nearing, I stretched my left leg in the wings and prepared. When the time came, I leapt onstage just as I had done before. I jumped. I jumped again. Then, as I pushed off my right foot for a double saut de basque, I felt a sharp strain in my right ankle. There was no stumble, no trip of any sort; the audience would not have noticed. But I knew immediately what it meant: I had sprained the inner part of my foot.

  Everything became crystal clear. The pain of the sprain, with a sold-out Bolshoi Theatre and countless people watching live in cinemas around the world, forced me to focus inward. I could not, would not, reveal what had happened. So I danced, thankful for the adrenaline that kept me going and masked the pain. When I eventually went offstage and waited for my next entrance, I told no one what had occurred. There was nothing anyone could do. It would only engender chaos and create an unnecessary negative energy throughout the entire company. I performed each painful leap or step as I had rehearsed them. I didn’t hold back. In the third act variation I jumped just as high as I had before and executed turns with the same force. I concentrated on the goal of finishing what I had set out to achieve and what everyone around me expected. But I could barely step onto the foot during curtain calls. No one suspected anything had happened until I was hobbling offstage after our bows.

  When reality set in, I took this as a sign. My gut told me I had hit my limit. My limit of pressure, of expectation, of mental and physical focus. I needed a rest.

  It’s hard to imagine now how I even got through the pressure of that month, from the initial preparations of Beauty to the two high-wire performances.

  My ankle sprain was temporary and kept me away from rehearsing and performing for only a couple of weeks. But what I had gained through those pressurized weeks of rehearsal and on the stage was permanent. The heightened stress had taken me further into my dancing and pushed me into another realm of artistic fulfillment. This was a peak in my life as a performer. I felt I was on the cusp of understanding the meaning of life. The pressure that I overcame during the lead-up and eventual performances of Sleeping Beauty was something I needed even more of. I had gotten that first dose of an addictive drug.

  Because once I had faced the pressure, experienced it, and gotten through it, I craved another hit.

  CHAPTER 31

  After a brief trip to New York where my sprain healed, I returned to Moscow. The city was more familiar to me now, but Muscovites would at times try my patience. I didn’t have the pushiness of most Russians. When others told me to assert myself, I found it unnatural. Russians conducted their lives, at times, in a way I couldn’t comprehend. I couldn’t relate to the curtness of the deli clerk who was annoyed at my request for sliced meat or the waitress glaring at me because I didn’t have a reservation.

  The foreign daily life. The loneliness. They were aspects of the challenge I had professed I so needed. Consequently in my life outside Bolshoi Theatre, I had no choice but to lie in the bed I made.

  Taking the Metro to the chiropractor, miles outside the city center, I would sit on the loud, hollowed-out train with its brown plastic benches and look around in fascination at the evening commuters. The women in the furs. The men, with their brusque macho air. The young women with their long blond locks and sky-high stilettos, even in the winter snow and ice. I was sure they could sense that I wasn’t one of them.

  Globus Gourmet, a grocery store across the street from my apartment, was often the true test of my patience. The Russian way of shopping and of “customer service” was altogether different from anything I’d experienced. Shoppers asserted themselves through the aggressive use of the metal shopping carts; just as travelers did at Domodedovo Airport. They would press forward in the checkout line, blocking as many people as possible from moving in any other direction. I could never countenance the inability of Moscovites to stand in a single-file line. Damn it! I’d think, get off my ass and wait your turn! Instead they would ease closer and closer without making eye contact. With no choice but to push forward myself, I would make my way up the line to the cashier and silently hand over my various items. Rarely a smile from the checkout clerk.

  One time, as I attempted to swipe my credit card, it was declined. I swiped again. Declined again. The woman behind the counter looked at me stone-faced, annoyed.

  “Ni Rabotaet,” she said. Doesn’t work.

  “Da, Rabotaet (Yes, it works),” I said.

  “NYET! Ni Rabotaet! (No! It doesn’t work!)”

  She swung the machine around, rolling her eyes, and tried it herself, touching the card as if it repulsed her. When, for a third time, the card didn’t work, another clerk came over, pressed a button on the cash register and the card was accepted. The first clerk glared back at me. Never would she apologize or take any responsibility.

  At times like this I would think, You’ve chosen this life. These things are passing moments. And you will come out stronger.

  * * *

  IN TIME, I learned to acclimate. I became more practiced at that Russian hello with its curt nod and possibly the merest shadow of a grin. Nothing like those effusive American greetings with smiles, teeth, hugs. Going back and forth between the two countries was like living two lives. In that sense, I did feel like a “double agent,” as Stephen Colbert jokingly accused me of being. In one life, my New York life, I was at ease, traversing the streets of a city I knew well, socializing with friends, speaking my native language, and living a full, busy, chaotic, stimulating existence. In Moscow, though my dancing life provided all the stimulation I could wish for, the rest of the time I was the reserved, quiet, focused dancer. No one truly knew me, and I truly knew no one.

  Of course, I was acquainted with a few people there. I could see that some of the other dancers were slowly warming to me, as some would even practice their English in passing. Others were not welcoming.

  There was Nikolai Tsiskaridze, for instance, a longtime Bolshoi Premier dancer. I was fifteen when I first met him, and he had taken an avid interest in my dancing. When we were both performing on the Kings of the Dance tour, he would laughingly call me “my Adonis” and “my little baby.” So I had assumed we were friends. But he no longer treated me as such when I came to Bolshoi, passing me by in the hallways with barely any acknowledgment. When I was home, I learned that he had spoken to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. “I like David very much,” he had said, “and respect him as a dancer, but [his dancing at Bolshoi] is an insult to the entire Russian ballet, a demonstration of indifference to the rich Russian tradition and culture.”

  In fact, I could appreciate why anyone might criticize my position at Bolshoi: an American joining their revered theater, bypassing the school that hones the dancers and upholds traditions of the company. But all I could do, now that I was ensconced at Bolshoi, was remain diplomatic. Keep smiling, work hard, handle the pressure, and do my job.

  * * *

  MY FIRST DAY back at Bolshoi, I had a rehearsal for Swan Lake with Sasha in which everything seemed to click. We fed off each other’s energy. His corrections. My applying them. The cabriole derrière, one of my weakest steps, needed special attention. To
execute it, the working leg is thrust into the air while the underneath leg follows and beats against the first leg, sending it higher. The landing is then made on the underneath leg. All of this happens in about two seconds. An intricately complex two seconds, analyzed to death by Sasha and myself. He told me to propel my first leg high up in the air before I even took off for the jump. This allowed me time in the air to properly execute a double beat.

  He was pushing me far beyond what I thought I could do. He asked for two double tours in a row in the coda (something I never thought possible), and in my double tour to arabesque he gave just the right correction to land it on the spot, absolved of hops, which ruin the effect of the landing. Each time I applied what he said, I found myself frozen in shock over the newfound feeling. A rehearsal like that one was enough to outweigh all the discomforts of the move to Moscow.

  * * *

  THERE WAS LITTLE comparable to dancing Swan Lake with Svetlana in the theater where it was created. I was conscious of being a minuscule addition to the ballet’s long lineage at Bolshoi Theatre.

  One particular moment is embedded in my memory. Prince Siegfried finds himself between two rows of swans at the lake as he searches for Odette. As I made my way through the swans, I noted that I was walking through one of the most celebrated Corps de Ballet in the world, thirty-two perfectly synchronized Swans, with Tchaikovsky’s Act II music rising from the orchestra pit to the stage, the same stage and the same pit for which the ballet and its music were written. I had never even imagined being surrounded by such history and beauty. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to be there; I simply felt I was lucky enough to have been invited to experience it.

  * * *

  MY FIRST SEASON with Bolshoi, 2011–2012, was also my first full winter in Russia. Dull gray clouds blanketed the city. The nights became longer, easily edging into early afternoon and late morning. Fur coats were worn everywhere. The first snowfall came at the end of October, just when I was preparing for the opening of Sleeping Beauty. No one seemed surprised by such early snow, but everyone’s mood changed.

  I noticed that people grew more and more solemn. Their faces dropped and an internal spark seemed to fade. The grayness of the days became all-encompassing. It’s dispiriting to see the sun disappear by four in the afternoon or to wake up at eight thirty in the morning and look out your window at a pitch-dark world.

  The dancers risked becoming vitamin deficient in those short winter days and long nights. Sasha told me to keep eating vitamin-rich foods so I wouldn’t lose the energy needed to keep dancing at peak level. He had danced through many a Moscow winter in his career, and knew full well what charged a dancer’s body in weather like this. I listened to what he told me, eating red meat and kotletki, the delicious breaded chicken. The three canteens at Bolshoi Theatre served fresh food at a next-to-nothing price. The recipes had been, I was told, unchanged for forty years. Typically simple Russian cooking. Meat, potato or cucumber salad, soup, kompot (a pureed juice made from cranberries or cherries). I’d hoped the food in the canteen would keep me rightly fueled, and it did.

  * * *

  MY OFFICIAL INTRODUCTION to the infamous Russian winter was a trip to the U.S. Embassy to renew my passport. I had allotted one morning only to run this errand, a task I assumed would take no more than an hour. It was –25 degrees Celsius (–13°F) as I charged out of the subway, face down, leaning into the frosty wind. It is a running joke with friends that I go out in the depths of winter wearing just a thick sweater and scarf, no coat. So, typically, I had moved to a city synonymous with icy winters without adequate protection. I didn’t do furs, but I definitely needed a warm coat. I’d wrongly assumed I was equipped to handle this journey with gloves (too thin), a hat (too thin), and my new winter coat (stylish, but again, too thin).

  Moscow streets are notoriously large and deceiving. A small distance on a map can turn out to be miles on foot. There is no way of crossing the many lanes of traffic. You must always use underpasses, which can throw off your sense of direction.

  Soon, I began to panic when I realized I had been walking for fifteen minutes in the wrong direction. I raced back to the metro station as quickly as I could, regrouping and trying my best to thaw out a bit. Again I looked at a map to try to direct myself, puzzling over street names written in Cyrillic. I had gotten used to street signs in an entirely new alphabet, making distinctions by the way the first letter was written. But at times, this being one of them, I completely lost my sense of direction.

  After figuring out which way to go, I charged back into the frigid wind. I had never been so cold in my life. My toes tingled with what I feared was the beginning of frostbite. I had no sensation in my limbs. My gloves were so ineffective that I took them off, pressing my fingers close to my palms, trying desperately to regain feeling. My eyes watered so badly I felt like I was crying. My nose was dripping so constantly that it wasn’t even worth the effort of wiping it.

  At last, in the distance, just before losing all hope: an American flag. I bolted toward it as quickly as my numbing legs could manage. Inside, I collapsed on a chair, unable to focus on matters of official business. I could hardly breathe. I needed to thaw my nose, my toes, my fingers, my ears. Finally I was able to stand up and find a place in the long line. When I got to the front I was still so frigid I couldn’t feel my fingers and was unable to take my passport out of my jeans pocket.

  * * *

  YET APART FROM the grayness and bitter cold of Russian winters, there is a romantic side to those long months as well. I knew about this Russia from novels and movies, and now I experienced it firsthand. I found the beauty of Moscow as I walked through the streets in the black of night, bundled up as I went home from a dinner or a performance. You could almost hear the silence through the frigid air. What snow there was would be soft and pillowy on top and frozen underneath. I will never forget that distinctive crisp crunching sound the snow makes when you walk down the street, or the soothing hum of heating systems in the buildings I passed. On bitterly cold nights, walking home from a restaurant, that crunch became etched in my memory.

  * * *

  AS EACH WEEK marched on, my body would be brought closer to deep fatigue. By my day off, which came on Monday, I would feel overcooked, dried up, and in desperate need of rest. I couldn’t plan anything on this coveted free day. I would be incapable of errands, lunches, whatever might force me out of the apartment at an allotted hour. The only thing I wanted to do on a Monday turned out to be the ideal curative.

  The banya is a traditional Russian sauna. Perfected over hundreds of years, it provides a mindless utopia and by far the best way to cure overworked muscles and exhausted brains. I was introduced to the banya by Semyon Chudin, a Russian Principal Dancer who joined the company the same time I did. He became one of my dearest friends at Bolshoi. He had gone to the banya for years and swore by its time-tested remedy.

  Semyon brought me to the best banya in the center of Moscow, Sanduny, a vast bathhouse spread out over the whole of a long city block just five minutes’ walk from Bolshoi Theatre. Since 1808, Sanduny has been Russia’s most luxurious and renowned bathhouse. Its carved and domed ceilings, elaborate gilt work, stately columns, and vast rooms are stunning works of art that give the sense that you’ve gone back in time to the profligate era of the tsars. Though it’s grand, it also shows its age: the worn cornices, with their varying layers of colors peeking through, betray how many times they’ve been painted over.

  A bell on the wooden exterior door sounds your arrival. In the spacious entry hall, there is a large winding staircase and an attendant in a small glass booth waiting for you to pay. The ground floor is cheaper and more barren, with only the necessities of hot sauna and cold plunge on offer. The pricier upstairs area has the sauna, a large heated pool edged with Roman statues, a cold plunge, and waiters attending to your orders in a vast room with rows upon rows of large red banquettes to lounge on. Semyon and I would check our coats and head up the marble stai
rcase. At the top of the stairs, we pushed open an outsize, heavy door into the main room with its red banquettes. We would find an empty space and a waiter to take our order: a green terry-cloth towel (to dry off), a red sheet (for the sauna), a felt hat (to shield our heads from the extreme heat), plastic sandals, and morse. We always started with morse, a puree of cranberry juice, served freshly squeezed in a large stein, full of pulp and always chilled. The other men frequenting Sanduny drank large beers to wash down their food. Semyon and I were in recovery mode so beer was never part of our routine. But beer with your friends at the banya is a true Russian pastime.

  Sanduny was and still is a social hub where Russian men come to socialize and solidify business deals. Like Americans suited up for a power lunch at the Four Seasons, Russians clad in green towels and white felt hats make an amicable deal over beer at the sauna.

  Once we installed ourselves, we got undressed. Nudity is not an issue at the banya. Russian men and the attendants all walk around completely nude, chatting and laughing with their friends without any sense of modesty or embarrassment. Because of our ballet physiques, Semyon and I stood out next to hairy-chested Russian men with enormous potbellies. As Semyon introduced me to some of the attendants, I naturally became known as the American.

  The sauna was an education in Russian culture. You could take in the heat of the sauna and sweat everything out, then plunge into the ice-cold wooden baths, and finally immerse yourself in the large swimming pool. Or you could purchase a bunch of fragrant oak or birch leaves called venik. These leaves, which can also include eucalyptus or juniper, are soaked in a bucket of water, then used by a naked attendant to stroke and tap and beat you (mercilessly) from head to toe. It’s an extreme and sometimes painful measure. I rarely did it, but when I did I felt that my entire body had been given a new blood flow.