Read Online The Sugarless Plum: A Memoir by Zippora Karz - Free Book Online

everything changed for me. The level I’d been placed in gave me the opportunity to study with the greatest teachers in the world. My main teachers were Suki Schorer, Alexandra Danilova, AntoninaTumkovsky, Muriel Stuart, Helene Dudin and Stanley Williams, who had been Peter Martins’s boyhood teacher and Sheila’s favorite when she observed classes at SAB. Each one of them had been personally chosen by George Balanchine, and each of them was unique. They had different backgrounds, different training and different styles, but they were all at the highest level of their art form, each working in his or her own way to help us achieve Balanchine’s vision. As I watched them and learned from them, it was as if the entire history of dance had come alive for me in the classroom.
    One of my favorite teachers was the former NYCB principal dancer Suki Schorer, a petite fireball of energy with short blond hair who always came to class in a basic leotard with a colored skirt. Balanchine had recognized her talent for teaching when she was still a dancer in his company, and had asked her take new company members aside and instruct them privately. Then, when she retired, she became a full-time teacher at SAB. Suki had a lot of inspirational words of wisdom, one of which was the line Balanchine frequently used with his dancers: “What are you waiting for? The time to rest is in the grave!” Another, which she used to motivate us when we were holding an arabesque, with one leg high in the air behind us and the opposite arm reaching to the front, was: “What do you like, diamonds? Ice cream? Reach for it!”
    Because I was still having trouble doing multiple turns and high jumps, I loved the fact that she focused on transitions—getting into the jump or landing from it—rather than just on how many turns we could do or how high we leaped. Suki helped meto stop obsessing about my weak turns and jumps and start giving equal attention to the dance as a whole.
    The ultimate teacher for the Zen of dancing, however, was Stanley Williams. In his mid-fifties, slender, with thinning gray hair, Stanley taught class like a pipe-smoking Buddhist monk meditating. He always directed the pianist to play just a few notes, slowly and quietly, like a soft drumbeat, even when we moved fast. He didn’t say much, but what he did say was profound.
    One of his brief pronouncements that really affected me was “technique is timing.” I took this to mean that instead of attempting to dance steps, as I had been doing, by using brute strength, it was more effective, though in some ways more difficult, to let the music be the force that carried me. Stanley’s approach to teaching was very different from Suki’s, but it was sublime and it worked. I was turning and jumping better than I ever had.
    Stanley was also known throughout the world as the paramount teacher of male dancers. In addition to Peter Martins, the great Erik Bruhn had studied with him, and Rudolf Nureyev credited Stanley’s classes with lengthening his compact muscles and called him “a true genius.” I remember watching Nureyev in Stanley’s class, working at the barre between Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Martins. As a fifteen-year-old, I knew I was witnessing something great, but looking back today I recognize the extraordinary moment I was present for—watching as potentially the three greatest male dancers of all time took a class together.
    Like groupies at a rock concert, the girls at SAB crowdedaround the two doors of the studio to watch all the gorgeous men in black tights taking the advanced class. Baryshnikov and Peter Martins would be joking with each other one minute and trying to outdo each other with multiple turns the next. I was especially thrilled that when Peter was in class he’d sometimes give me a wink to let me know he remembered me.
    But it wasn’t just the men who were gorgeous. All the City