This is Dec. 17th in my dance inspirations advent calendar. Opened already: December 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th
One of the advantages of dance being a silent art is that what two people sense or read in each other, and the ethereal conversation that happens between dancer and dancer, dancer and musician, teacher & pianist is so much more interesting, poignant, fleeting, deep and moving than anything one might say with words. As a musician in class, you often end up reading people and ‘talking’ to them and they with you, with music. You might never actually talk to them, but at some level you’ve had a musical encounter more direct and meaningful than a thousand conversations.
Maybe I read it all wrong, but when I first met Klaus, who was ballet master at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (now subsumed under the Staatsballett-Berlin), I got the feeling that maybe he got a bit tired and overwhelmed by the predominantly English culture that had taken over there. Rehearsals were conducted entirely in English, there were only a handful of Germans in the company, and with a couple of exceptions, most of the foreigners couldn’t be bothered to learn German. As an example of how bizarre that situation was, one pianist there had spent time and money in her native Azerbaijan learning German in preparation for the move to Berlin, only to be berated by one of the anglophone staff because she ‘only’ spoke German (rather than English).