We got tickets to see the ballet on Saturday, they were performing Romeo and Juliet which I’ve seen a couple of times. It was at the Mariinsky theater, which is beautiful inside (you might remember them as the Kirov). It was a little weird for me to go to the ballet again since I hadn’t gone since I had to quit almost four years ago now. I mean, when I visited my friend Alex from NBS (National Ballet School) or when I visited my friend David in NYC I’d see part of class or something, but yeah… The Mariinsky is incredible, a little small by today’s standards I guess, but lovely. The Grand Hall is especially cool. I sat in box 8 with a bunch of Spanish women and a group of people from Japan maybe, who unfortunately were only able to enjoy the ballet by a) snapping pictures of it all the time or b) filming it with their camcorder. Kind of annoying since they were sitting directly in front of me. I basically stood or kneeled on my chair the whole performance.

It’s silly, but I even felt semi nervous before the performance started, remembering what it was like to be backstage, spraying water on the heels of my pointe shoes so they didn’t slip off, crunching resin under the boxes, adjusting hair pins, making sure my ribbons were tucked in properly, rehearsing steps in my head. Romeo and Juliet is not as demanding or impressive (I think anyway) physically as some other ballets—it’s all about expression. The music is excellent (who doesn’t like Prokofiev!). The last time I’d seen it was in Toronto, performed by the National Ballet Company of Canada (as students we got basically free tickets to the ballet all the time). That was good, although the pillow touting scene (the super dramatic Montagues and Capulets music that most people would recognize) was over the top. Perhaps the best rendition is the Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev one in a video I have, which exemplifies what this ballet is about—something Fonteyn could still communicate despite her wrinkling fingers and low extensions with the kind of girlish timidity this Russian ballerina lacked at the Mariinsky.

It was surreal to be in this theater where Nijinsky and Pavlova and the like had danced, where Petipa and Fokine had set ballets, and where basically what we think of as ballet was created and performed—and which later migrated across Europe and to America. A substantial portion of my early training was with a ballet teacher who had been a principal, ballet master, and choreographer with this company. My first pointe shoes were actually Russian (grishko). You can recognize Russian pointe shoes from a mile away (the shank does not break tightly under the heel like is more popular in America, but the arch kind of slopes and breaks lower on the top of the foot), not to mention the fact that you can also hear them a mile away (their boxes are very hard).

In this little gold jewelry box of a theater, I couldn’t help but feel like my dancer past and what I am now had somehow collapsed upon each other in time, as if I were living some alter existence that had inadvertently crossed with another…as though the trajectory of my current life had arched back for a moment to touch something that had been, could’ve been, and ultimately wasn’t. I guess I expected that I would feel a strange when seeing again what was the heart and seed of something I had spent so much of my life on, so much of my energy, so many sacrifices, injuries, and sublime joy. Not only is it as if I’m tracking my own blood back to this part of the world and perhaps even to this city (my great, great uncle was involved in the 1905 revolution here), but as if I’m also tracing something back that goes beyond blood.

Coming from Maine where ballet is nearly nonexistent, where 2-3 hour trips to ballet teachers each day were required, from dancing Balanchine (a mutation of Russian technique) in sticky mirrorless studios, from making my way to NBS—the port through which so many Russian émigrés first arrived and where I got to train in the same studios (A/B if you’re an NBSer reading this)… to finally this place. It’s as if I’ve been making my way here for a while—tracing my love to its source. It sounds silly and ridiculous, and maybe ballet is often a bit silly with all these dying maidens and lovesick princes, hopping around in skin tight clothes, and spinning strangely on their tip toes (Zach and I had a heated argument about why he hates ballet). But what is great about ballet is that it is such a primal and physical form of communication and expression, yet so ordered, civilized, controlled. Its beauty and life is fleeting—it is not something you can preserve so easily like a painting or a poem—and I think that is what gives ballet its allure.. What constitutes beauty in ballet is also such a fragile and transient thing, yet while it lasts it is one of the most moving things I have ever seen and experienced. But perhaps it is something you have to experience for yourself.

While watching the ballet I thought how maybe if things had turned out differently I would be coming here for different reasons and thinking different things like Romeo’s thighs are too fat, his knees not hyper-extended enough, the costumes are dingy, the sets mediocre, Juliet seems listless, etc. It’s true that the Kirov is not what it was—due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, funding problems, fires, inability to keep talented dancers long, etc. But that’s ok. This was the Kirov for me, and perhaps it still is.