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板凳
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发表于 2022-3-17 11:20:30
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You would notice her on any street, in any room in the world. Even here, in downtown Moscow, where half the women look like supermodels and the other half are merely very pretty; even here, in the gilded lobby of the offices of the Bolshoi Ballet, where dancers drift weightlessly across the inlaid marble floors. When Olga Smirnova appears, you know that she’s quite unlike anyone else. It isn’t just that she’s beautiful, though she is; with her long thin limbs, wide and raking cheekbones, and huge almond eyes, she looks like a runaway from Roswell, N.M., a lovely extraterrestrial who landed among us. But more than that, she carries the mysterious self-possession of someone who’s simply better at what she does than anyone else, a sense that she’s wrapped in her own dimension.
Smirnova is better at ballet, and one day soon she may be the best. At 22, she’s been dancing more than half of her life, and it shows, in her bearing, in her quiet (“dancing is a silent profession,” our translator told me), and in the bruises visible beneath the straps of her shoes. On Oct. 18th, she’ll be performing at the Stars of the 21st Century in New York, and New Yorkers can see what the Russians saw, a skill and grace and soulfulness for which they very quickly cleared a path.
She was scouted at her graduation from St. Petersburg’s Vaganova school and coaxed down to Moscow, where she spent exactly one day in the corps de ballet before being offered a series of high-profile solos. Within the year she’d been promoted to dancing leads, first in “La Bayadère,” then in Balanchine’s “Diamonds,” then in “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” This sort of thing doesn’t happen outside of movies about princesses in disguise.
You might think the speed of her ascent would leave Smirnova slightly breathless and giddy, but of course ballerinas are nothing if not poised. Instead, she offers a muted expressiveness that’s like watching water ripple over the face of a pond, and an almost spooky responsiveness. Though she speaks very little English, she reacted to my questions before they were translated, in some cases before I’d finished, and once or twice before I was sure what I was going to ask. Above all she is focused, and takes nothing for granted: “I wasn’t prepared to make the move to Moscow; it was very unexpected,” she said. “As a matter of fact I was preparing myself for something much worse, getting used the idea that bad things might happen to you. It’s been quite the opposite.”
I suggested that she was living out the fantasy of half the world’s little girls and asked her how she felt about it: she averted her eyes and laughed. “It never occurred to me,” she said. “As for myself, I have my own ballet idols, who I hope to become someday myself.” An example? “Diana Vishneva,” she said promptly, referring to the last Vaganova prodigy. “She is my favorite. But as a matter fact you can always find something to learn from any ballerina. Especially when you’re at the very beginning of your professional life.”
Smirnova’s trip to New York will be very brief — three days to get halfway around the world, perform and get home again, with no time off for sightseeing. It doesn’t seem quite fair. Perhaps, I suggested, she should play the diva, just this once, and demand an extra day. She laughed again. “I wouldn’t mind that at all!” she said. “But one of my dreams is being fulfilled: I always dreamed of seeing New York, and even more of performing there.”
It seems likely that a lot of her dreams are being fulfilled, and very quickly. Someday, I said, people are going to want to know what it was like. Is she keeping a diary? She turned her head away and smiled privately. “Yes, I’m keeping a diary,” she said. “But it’s for myself.”
Correction: October 16, 2012
The name of Smirnova's favorite ballerina was misspelled in an earlier version of the post. Her name is Diana Vishneva, not Diana Vishnova. |
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