Winds of Change - Ch 3

In the Arms of the Bolshoi

A few times in my life, I have fallen completely and suddenly in love. Once in Israel, looking past the Bahai gardens toward Haifa, when I first locked eyes with a tall, dark-haired man in Salem, and, before either of those moments, in a place surrounded by music and velvet.

My brother Bill and I were inseparable as children. Only 18 months apart, we went to the same church, attended the same events, and carried the family expectation of musical excellence as we sang and performed our way across small church stages all over Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Our interests diverged as we grew into awkward teenagers, but Mom’s dream about continuing our family musical legacy forced us together, whether we wanted to or not.

We were a spectacle with freckles and glasses.

I didn’t think we were all that exceptional, but families who sing together have tight harmonies and matching vocal styles, and when they had us sing together, we were surprisingly good. We weren’t artists or storytellers; our medium was song.

One year, someone decided that we would compete in our church’s tri-state musical competition, singing a contemporary Christian song made famous by musical legends Sandi Patti and Larnell Harris.

We were not Sandi Patti and Larnelle Harris.

We were just Billy with color blind fashion sense and Heidi with crippling stage fright.

Still, somehow, we pulled it off and won every competition we entered. Our reputation grew with every round of applause from church ladies with beaming faces. For all that we differed, Bill was reliable, and I always felt safer when we were together on stage. I always felt more able when we stood side by side.

Over that year, our voices carried us all the way to center stage at the Billings, Montana Talent Show. This prestigious event, held in front of a crowd on the velvet draped stage of the Alberta Bair Theater, has become a memory, blurred through distance, of self-important people in suits and too much makeup.

He wore a black suit jacket and a smart, mint green bow tie while I once again put on the low-waisted floral dress with puffy sleeves, pushed up my glasses, and gave my self-bleached, oversized bangs another blast of extra-firm hold hairspray.

The music swelled and, microphones in hand, we sang our way through lyrics that had been performed too many times to carry meaning anymore. Our voices blended with the kind of ease that comes from practicing the same notes over and over again. The faces in the crowd were blobs overcast by lights too bright, and the unrelenting pressure to make them feel something through our song.

The applause was loud. Louder than we deserved, as we bowed and exited, stage left.

After our performance, a reporter, shadowed by her camera operator, interviewed us. It was as close to America’s Got Talent as we ever came. No idea what we said, just a vague recollection of lights and the sound of voices asking questions that other people seemed to answer.

We were glad when the attention finally faded, and we were free to relax. Relief is what I remember most as the reality sank in that our tour was over. Easily, we returned to something more normal, ignoring each other in the halls of our small high school.

It wasn’t until two years later, when my choir director gave me a couple of tickets to the Greater Billings adult classical chorus performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the famous “Ode to Joy”, that I stepped foot into the theater again.

I’m sure it is no great surprise that I enjoyed the comfort of our upper balcony seats far more than the pressure of the stage under the heat of high-wattage bulbs.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that two evenings at the Alberta Bair, the extent of my experience with professional theaters, had left me woefully unprepared for a Sunday afternoon matinee at the Bolshoi in Moscow, Russia.

In a bored monotone, the tour guide informed us that we were to see Swan Lake performed by the Bolshoi Ballet Company. I was prepared to be entertained. I was not prepared for what came next.

Seventeen and uncertain, I took my seat in the balcony and waited in the darkening auditorium.

The curtain raised, and I leaned forward, utterly captivated.

I wasn’t sure what to focus on first or where to keep my attention once I started. There were elaborate sets, the roar of an orchestra, and men and women in elegant costumes, gracefully filling the stage.

If you don’t know, Swan Lake is a love story warped by deception and, depending on the arrangement, ends either in triumph or tragedy. Created by my favorite Russian composer, Tchaikovsky, the tale is of a prince who falls in love with a princess cursed to live as a swan by day and a woman by night.

Like all fairy tales, fantasies, and paperback epics, curses are broken only by true love, fidelity, and plucky teenage girls who didn’t know they were the key to saving the kingdom.

Forgotten and dropped on the floor, the glossy program written completely in Russian was intended to be my guide — I can’t read or speak Russian.

Unable to read ahead and forced to try to draw my conclusions without any information beyond my senses. I followed this bare awareness of story through the rise and fall of music, set changes, and emotional expression unfolding in powerful leaps and sweeping turns, the dancers in the back a blur of feathers and precision.

The Prince, in his white costume, leapt across the stage in an almost careless display of talent and grace—his powerful form spinning and weaving through the narrative with breathtaking ease. The Princess, willowy, with arms raised high, hands poised, arched the long, pale column of her throat, and surrendered to the music as she moved across the stage.

The Moscow-based Bolshoi Ballet Company is an elite and world-renowned troupe comprised of artists who have spent their entire lives fixated on the goal of being the very best. Unprepared for their brilliance, scenes came and went as I struggled to keep up.

Glued in place, eyes wide, the story played out in front of me in a sensory experience that filled my whole mind and accelerated my heart rate. This was power unlike any I had ever experienced.

Power, embodied by beauty or skill. The kind of power that ripples through you, unapologetic and transformative. Transcendent.

Aleksandr Vetrov was the Bolshoi’s lead male dancer in January 1992, so it’s no surprise that a girl from Pompeys Pillar would be carried away by the brilliance of either him or his understudy.

I couldn’t read the program to know for sure.

Whoever he was? He was magnificent.

Where the Alberta Bair was a modern edifice to the arts that served our Montana culture well, the Bolshoi lives and breathes as a part of the history of the artistic world globally. Marble columns and a peaked portico starkly contrasted the classic Russian onion top domes and the harsh concrete of Soviet brutalism.

In 1776, the United States was finding herself after a brutal war. Rebels and aristocrats gathered around tables and composed documents, building a brand-new representative republic.

In Russia, an empire in place and enjoying lives that had moved from simple existence to creativity, there was room for art, songs played in concert, and stories told with details that demanded concentration and conscience.

Empress Catherine the Great granted Prince Pyotr Urusov a license to organize a theater in Moscow and, behold, in 1776, the Bolshoi was born.

In the face of Napoleon and Hitler’s aggression, the theater remained. Through fires, wars, and political unrest, she stayed constant. A queen with her pillars and velvet, massive chandeliers, and soft sconces lighting up the box seats that angled over the orchestra pit.

She has held court to nobles, royalty, dictators, and presidents alike. They flocked to her with their jewels and silks, tuxedos and shiny shoes reduced to mere accessories compared to her splendid, sweeping staircases and glittering crystal. She was resolute. A testimony to enduring and to beauty. A flicker of hope through the centuries.

On that cold afternoon at a matinee performance, with all that she was, she welcomed me in my long, drab coat, smudged glasses, and country-mouse denim skirt.

And I have loved her ever since.

Final notes played and faded as the Princess fell into the Prince’s arms and the evil black swan lay, vanquished, at their feet.

The lights came up slowly, the curtain descended, and polite applause sputtered into the sparsely filled auditorium. As though waking from sleep, my family and fellow tourists struggled with heavy coats and handbags as they rose to their feet.

To be fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were waking from a nice Sunday afternoon nap.

I tried to explain what I’d felt, what I’d seen, but the words that came out were the gauche phrases of a child, nothing worthy of what I had experienced. The feelings were too big. The experience was too new to be described with mere vowels and consonants.

Mom made sure we all knew that she’d only come because it was part of the tour and had found it boring. Since no one else seemed as affected as I had been, there was little conversation as we walked down the wide hallway, into the marble lobby, and real life.

Without looking back, I moved quietly through the doors, out into the gray, snowy afternoon, and onto our tour bus.

It wasn’t until several years later, when an invitation came to attend another ballet performance, that I realized how deeply impacted I had truly been.

I couldn’t make myself go.

In all the years since that moment, I’ve refused to attend another ballet for fear of the specter of criticism and dissatisfaction that might arise. Who could compare to her? Who would dare?

I didn’t want to compare another company to the dancers who’d stolen my heart in their paste jewels and oil-based makeup as they danced in opulence while their world shuddered and politicians rearranged their chairs to form a new world from the pieces that remained.

It feels disloyal to the moment. Unfaithful, even, in a peculiar way.

Art, music, story; what a Russian way to pass the time while one regime folded into another.

With every memory of that afternoon, I remember another facet.

The empty chairs and the tired edges of my seat. The creases in my program and the sparseness of a poorly staffed space. I remember the dismissiveness of my tour guide amid the complaints of Americans more interested in the next meal than learning about the place we were standing.

I remember that Moscow didn’t look as bleak as I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and watched from my window. The streets blended together. Small cars and large delivery trucks cut in and out of traffic, but it wasn’t all gray and bland. Not just exhaust and exhaustion.

The buses kept passing, their passengers stoic, sitting shoulder to shoulder on hard seats. The lines were still winding past the corner.

Before, it all felt hopeless and painted in shades of sadness. But something had changed.

I had changed.

Something new had bled through the cracks and infused my perception of this world I found myself in, and Moscow, in the grimy slush of January, suddenly felt beautiful.

Art, music, story: What a beautiful way to live.