Russian Terpsichore

As the current dancing endeavors yield fewer and fewer challenges and the current choreographic repertoire leaves much to be desired, this excerpt seems apt in describing the woes of the dancer. In David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas", the terribly hard-stricken, and demoralised composer Robert writes to his lover that "the artist lives in two worlds," and I would add, "rarely simultaneously." You are your work, for what do you call a dancer who doesn't dance or a painter who doesn't paint or a writer who doesn't write? Seeing many once glorified esteemed dancers who struggle with the dilemma of no longer being able to compare to their great achievements gone by, I am reminded of that opening scene in Funny Girl: sitting alone in the audience of a run-down theatre watching the blankness of an empty unadorned stage. When Nureyev performed for the last time, critics denounced the performance wishing he had left them with the image of what they remembered him to be. Could his past Romeos, Solars, and Albrechts be his Phantom of the Opera?

“XVI

My goddesses, where are your shades?
Do ye not hear my mournful sighs?
Are ye replaced by other maids
Who cannot conjure former joys?
Shall I your chorus hear anew,
Russia's Terpsichore review
Again in her ethereal dance?
Or will my melancholy glance
On the dull stage find all things changed,
The disenchanted glass direct
Where I can no more recollect?—
A careless looker-on estranged
In silence shall I sit and yawn
And dream of life's delightful dawn?”

Excerpt From: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. “Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] / A Romance of Russian Life in Verse.” iBooks.
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