DANCE MAGAZINE - AUGUST 1995

TORONTO'S ACADEMY OF BALLET & JAZZ

Its name -Academy of Ballet & Jazz- does not reflect the energy, the activity, nor the expansive projects of this Toronto-based school. Although it's a professional school with roots in tradition and heritage, it is beginning to forge a new audience for dance on a grandiose scale.

THE BALLET PROGRAM

Nadia Veselova's name means happiness in Russian. Her life has been like a character in a classical fairy-tale ballet. A graduate of famed Vaganova Ballet Academy (as it is now called) in St. Petersburg, Veselova was a student of the legendary dancer Alla Osipenko, a pupil of Agrippina Vaganova, who codified Russian technique.

Despite a few cinders here and there, Veslova began her Cinderella story as an emigree in a modest basement studio in Canada. "Toronto," she says, "gave me my first look at capitalism and its choice of methods in ballet. I come from only one method, the Vaganova method, where everyone in our vast country learned technique in the same way. I was overcome with all the different styles. I tried to learn as much as I could, but found that none of the schools, including mine, could duplicate the day-by-day repetition of classes that I had, for students who live together and are dedicated to dance, except in those few Canadian schools that combine academics and thorough professional training."

It was 1989, and to the neighborhood's surprise, stars of the Kirov Ballet on tour kept arriving by limousine at the school for Veselova's classes. Eventually, her reputation grew as she added special guest-teacher seminars with Vaganova Academy teachers such as Gennady Seludsky and Alla Osipenko. Her ballet faculty now includes Nikolai Riabin (VBA graduate and principal with the St. Petersburg Opera and Ballet Theatre), and Ani Varjabed (graduate of the Choreographic Dance Academy of Yerevan in Armenia). The ballet program now has ten categories, including three levels of the eight-level Vaganova method and a four-part jazz program.
 


Yearly performances are held at the North Shore Performing Arts Center and educational programs for young audiences and parents is a future academy project.

"Our emphasis in the early classes," explains Veselova, "is to instill a love for dance and music, as well as to introduce students to the delight of managing small physical coordinations as their concentration develops.

"What I look for in a pupil," says Veselova, "is a love for dance expressed in the child's face. The eyes are bright. The look is eager. And there is enjoyment in doing a movement. You can see it in the first demi-plie; the first port de bras."

 

THE CHARACTER AND JAZZ DANCE PROGRAM

Character dance, like jazz, rests firmly upon a rhythmic basis and style. As taught by Natalia Otcheretko and Vladimir Soudakov, formerly with Russia's Moiseyev Dance Company, the importance of a good ballet background upon which to build a strong technique and stamina for character and jazz dance begins with the first class. Soudakov's variety of national dances brings the first frame of reference to Toronto's mixed ethnic student population which inevitably leads them to another folk form-American jazz, the universal language of youth.
   

Early jazz training at the Academy is found in the classes of Canadian Tara McDonald, a Ryerson Institute dance program graduate. While style is yet to be mastered, the young students concentrate on isolations, stretches, and rhythmic coordinations. She is long on patience, firm, but gentle. "I was known as a rebel," says Vlad Novitski, the school's fourth-level jazz teacher.

"There I was in ballet school with a love of jazz-not a popular subject a few years ago in Russia. But it got me kicked out of school and into the Leningrad Music Hall program, where teachers from the United States came to teach us funk, hip-hop, and jazz technique-not the cabaret variety, but real jazz. Of course, we started the morning with a ballet class." Vladimir Ivanov (Riga Choreographic School graduate), and Otcheretko complete the jazz faculty. Sound strange? Russians teaching American jazz? It was to be seen. Their superbly trained bodies and experience in performing many forms of dance prove to their students the value of acquiring a solid jazz technique; their excitement in teaching new popular forms gives the classes high energy.

 

AND THEN THERE IS... "Examples are important," says Solomon Tencer, Veselova's husband. "The students must see the best dancers in performance." At a time when big company tours are at a minimum, Tencer's solution is to become an impresario. In 1993 he invited members of the National Ballet of Canada, Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Kirov, Bolshoi, and other companies to perform as special guest stars.

He then formed Theatre Arts Productions International. In March of 1995 he presented a tribute to Rudolf Nureyev by inviting guest artists Darcey Bussel (Royal Ballet), Kenneth Greve (Royal Danish Ballet), Rex Harrington, Margaret Illmann, and Vladimir Malakhov (National Ballet of Canada), Evelyn Hart (Royal Winnipeg Ballet), Paloma Herrera, Susan Jaffe, Robert Hill, and Keith Roberts (American Ballet Theatre), Yulia Makhalina, Farukh Ruzimatov, Islom Baimuratov, Igor Zelensky, and Diana Vishneva (Kirov Ballet) with special appearances by Alla Osipenko, Fernando Bujones, and Nadia Veselova Tencer. It was a gala performance at the O'Keefe Centre with the blessings of the Prime Minister, the Premier of Ontario, the British High Commissioner, and the Governor General. Sponsorship came from Moscow's Yalosbank, and the artistic director was the Kirov Ballet's Oleg Vinogradov.

Despite all the star-power competition, it was seventeen-year-old Diana Vishneva, not yet a graduate of the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg where she studies, who danced away with the headlines in the Canadian press. (Vinogradov also scheduled her to perform Cinderella during the Kirov Ballet's season in June at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.) Tencer's next gala -Stars of the XXI Century- is slated for March 19, 1996, at the O'Keefe Centre.