Mikhail Messerer
Ballet Master

12 May 2008
Church of Scotland Hall, London WC2

 On behalf of the members of the London Ballet CircleAllison Potts welcomed Mikhail Messerer and his wife Olga Sabadosh.

In September 2007, during the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Sadler’s Wells season, members had been privileged to watch company class given by Mikhail, who originates from a very distinguished Moscow family with a long tradition of producing outstanding dancers and teachers for the Bolshoi Ballet. 

MM:  My father (Grigory Levitin) was a circus performer who used to ride a motorcycle and car on a Wall of Death. My mother (Sulamith Messerer) was a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow - she danced there for some 25 years. 

Many of my mother’s brothers and sisters were involved with the arts.  Her eldest brother was a dramatic actor who worked with Stanislavski.  Her sister Elizabeth also was a drama actress. Another sister (Ra Messerer) was a silent film star and another brother (Asaf Messerer) was a dancer with the Bolshoi.  He was also well-known and he performed with my mother and together they were among the first Soviet dancers to be allowed to perform abroad in Western Europe: in Paris, Scandinavia and Berlin, which they did to acclaim.  At the time people in Europe thought that under the Bolshevik regime ballet no longer existed but my mother and her brother showed that it was still very much alive. 

The second generation of my family is also involved with the arts.  My cousin, Boris Messerer, is a well-known theatre designer who has created over 100 productions in Moscow and St Petersburg.  You may know his production of Carmen – it’s the one with a bull’s head in the background.  I also had three more cousins who were dancers at the Bolshoi - the Plisetskys: two brothers, Aleksandre and Azary – Azary is now a ballet master with Maurice Béjart’s company - and a sister, Maya Plisetskaya who you may have heard of and who is still very active.  Her husband is Rodion Shchedrin, the composer of the Carmen Suite and many other ballets and operas.  I have another cousin who danced at the Moscow Stanislavsky Theatre and who became a teacher there and did a lot to bring it to the international stage with many of the dancers there being his students.

AP:  Not only was your mother to become a Prima Ballerina with the Bolshoi but for three years she also held the Soviet swimming record for 100m crawl.  What an amazing achievement.

MM:  She wrote her memoires a few years ago which, unfortunately, were only published in Russian but in that book she recalled being taken at the age of 16 to seaside resort popular with the artistic community where she saw for the first time a young man swimming in the sea using the crawl style.  She didn’t know what it was so asked him to explain it and show her how to do it.  She loved it so much that when she went back to Moscow she researched and found a coach to teach her the crawl – just at the same time she was about to graduate from the Ballet School.  He told her that the crawl style was the most demanding style but she still wanted to be shown how to do it.  He explained then she jumped in the water and swam to the coach’s amazement – he didn’t know she was a ballet dancer! – all of this was happening in the River Moscow.  The next year she won the championship of Moscow then the championship of the whole of the Soviet Union – all in the space of one and a half years.  At night she would be dancing with the Bolshoi ballet company in solo roles then she would swim at night in the only covered swimming pool which was in the public baths in central Moscow and, after everyone else had left, the sport swimmers would be allowed to use it.  Then in the morning she would go to class and rehearsals.  She felt that the swimming gave her core strength.  She only gave up swimming with great regret when she was made a principal dancer with the Bolshoi and she could no longer combine both swimming and dancing.  She was still swimming at the age of 94: she would go twice a week to a London Leisure Centre and swim there.

AP:  The Stalinist regime had a major impact on your family.

MM:  My mother’s sister, Ra (Rachel) Messerer, who was a silent movie actress, married Mikhail Plisetsky, a prominent member of the Bolshevik Party. He worked as Soviet Consul General in the Arctic Norwegian isle of Spitzbergen – which is a coal mining isle.   As a prominent party member he was arrested and shot in 1938 and soon Ra was also arrested, for being the wife of ‘an enemy of the people’ and she was sent to the Siberian Gulag.  When they first came to arrest Ra she was seven months’ pregnant so they did not arrest her at that first attempt; they arrested her later when her youngest son, Azary, was born.  In my mother’s book she says she was performing Sleeping Beauty, dancing the role of Aurora, with her brother Asaf performing the Prince when, in the intermission, somebody came to her to tell her that two children were waiting for her at the theatre’s stage door.  She understood immediately what had happened, the names of the children were Maya and Aleksandre.  She understood that something must have gone wrong because her sister would always come to watch the performances and would never send the children to the show alone.  So she told Asaf that something terrible must have happened but Asaf said ‘Come on, this is our entrance, we have to go’.  She then says she can’t remember anything about that performance but the moment she was off stage she went to her dressing room where the two children were waiting for her.  She asked them ‘Where is your mother?’ and they told her ‘Mother told us to go to see you because she’s been urgently called to go to see our father in Spitzbergen.’  She took the children to her house – she lived next to the Bolshoi - and Maya continued living with her and Aleksandre was sent to live at Asaf Messerer’s house where Asaf’s young son Boris was also living at the time.

My mother made sure that Maya had everything she needed and when Maya was 13 my mother made up some choreography for The Dying Swan especially for the unique body that Maya had and taught it to her. 

My mother did not ever stop trying to get her sister out of the Gulag.  My mother was one of the first people in Soviet Russia to receive the top honour of the Government Award which helped her get to Siberia and meet with her sister.  We complain about trains (here in the UK) but to reach Siberia the train journey took many, many days.  She convinced the prison guards not to send Ra on labour duties because she had a young son she was feeding.  They were hardly giving Ra anything to eat and so it was hard for her to feed her very young son. My mother got a unique permission for Ra to receive food parcels which my mother would then send to Ra saving her and Azary’s lives. Eventually my mother even succeeded in getting Ra and Azary completely released and they were allowed to move to Moscow just before the war started.

AP:  Your mother was such a national hero that in 1961 she was invited by Russia’s Ministry of Culture to go to Japan to form a Russian ballet school.

MM:  Yes, she was first invited in 1959 and it took about a year and half to get permission to go to Tokyo.  Today it is well-known as the Tokyo Ballet company.
 
For her work in Japan, in 1996 she received from Emperor Hirohito his country’s highest civilian award – The Order Of The Sacred Treasure Gold Rays.  In 2000 she also received an OBE for her services to Dance.

AP: It was your mother who decided to put you into ballet school.

MM:  Yes, she thought I had good feet.  At the time it was rare for a boy to have good feet.  Once I went to the Bolshoi School I loved it there.  It was a very prestigious profession for a Russian man to be a ballet dancer.  It was one of very few professions that would allow you to see the world and to go abroad.  Travel was mainly only for diplomats and artists.  I travelled to the West a few times to: Australia, America, France and many other countries – even before my defection.

AP:  As a young boy, who were your ballet heroes? 

MM:  There was Nikolai Fadeyechev who is still around.  I still think he was the best prince of all times.  As boys, we liked all the Principal dancers who we saw.

AP: When you joined the Bolshoi company, what were your earliest roles?

MM:  I did everything.  I did the pas de trois in SwanLake; I was also in the pas de trois of The Little Humpback Horse with music by Shchedrin.  It involved two men and one woman.  It was considered technically a very advanced role.  One day my partner did not show up for the performance and I had to do both male solos in the pas de trois and had to try to carry the girl on my own! 

The next one was a ballet called Mozart and Salieri where I danced the role of Mozart.  There is another one which is still there which is calledCipollino. It is based on a children book by the Italian writer Gianni Rodari, this book is well-known in Russia and it has been very well promoted there as the author was a prominent Communist. The choreography is by Genrih Mayorov – now the artistic director of the Bolshoi School with music by Karen Khachaturian (nephew of Aram) and I danced the main role of Count Cherry. 
 

AP:  What were some of the highlights from your performing career?

MM:  Because there were many of us in the Bolshoi company I took every chance there was to dance elsewhere in Russia.  As an example, I went to the city of Perm when I was 19.  I had heard there was a genius girl graduating from the Perm School, Galina Ragozina-Panova.  She was 18 and I was 19 and she was my first partner on stage and I was her first professional partner too.  There was another girl Liubov Kounakova who was one or two years younger than Panova and eventually she became a principal dancer with the Kirov Ballet and is now a prominent coach with the Kirov Ballet.  Many of her students will be known to you, for example, Veronika Part of American Ballet Theatre.  If you saw the video Sleeping Beauty, the 1970s production, you will have seen Liubov there as Lilac Fairy.

But early on I decided that I wanted to be a teacher and I went to study at the Higher College of Theatrical Arts in Moscow to become a teacher.  I studied there for six years which was a difficult job as I was still dancing at night and rehearsing each morning but you have to find time to study. In Moscow I studied with fantastic teachers including my mother’s teacher Ms Gerdt who was still teaching at the time.   In order to receive our teaching diplomas we had to do some nine months of professional teaching in a company in Russia and that was a great experience for me. But I also continued to dance for a long while. However I was the youngest ever to graduate with a teaching diploma – I was in my 20s – when usually people would go to the college in their 40s when they were about to finish, or had already finished, their performing careers.   

AP:  1980 was a year of great change for you and your mother.  Talk us through what happened.

MM:  My mother was teaching at the Tokyo Ballet which was quite usual for her as she taught there for many years and kept on being invited back.  By coincidence, Bolshoi Ballet went on tour to Tokyo while I was working with the company as a dancer.  While we were there I met my mother and we decided to stay in the West.  But we couldn’t decide on the spot. 

The Bolshoi Ballet went to tour Japan and we went to the city of Nagoya.  Two or three days after we left Tokyo my mother called me at my hotel in Nagoya but, of course, we were afraid of the KGB listening in on our telephone conversation so my mother couldn’t tell me very much but I could tell by the intonation of her voice.  She told me to come to her in Tokyo and I could tell that she had made up her mind about wanting to go to the West.  So we took the opportunity while both of us were in Japan at the same time. 

After a show I left my hotel in Nagoya and as I was going downstairs, there was the KGB man and he asked me where I was going so late at night, carrying a small plastic bag.   I said I was going to the… grocery store to give back some milk bottles for a refund.  It sounds ridiculous now but at the time we were given $5 a day to do everything like eat and buy presents, so it sounded plausible to get refund for bottles which were worth about 5p each, so the man let me out of the hotel and I then made my way to Tokyo.  However, for a Soviet young man to travel from Nagoya to Tokyo was an issue.  Nowadays the signs in Japan are in English but at the time this wasn’t the case.  So I had to make my way to Tokyo by finding the right train from Nagoya.

AP:  The process involved with you coming to the West demanded that you had one last meeting with your fellow countrymen who had the task of trying to persuade you not to go.

MM:  Yes, the Japanese wanted to make sure that we were defecting of our own volition and that nobody was pressing us to do it. 

I was very much afraid of meeting the KGB and was very worried what they would do to me physically.  The Japanese said that everything would be taken care of and they told me I would be sitting at the end of a long table.  I told them that the table had better be very, very long!  We had been listening to the Western radio, the BBC’s Russian service, and at that time recently (in 1978) there had been the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov who had been killed with a poisoned umbrella tip to his leg while he was waiting at a bus stop at Waterloo Bridge and had died within just a few days.  So who knew what could happen.  But the Japanese said that they would body search everyone so my mother and I met with two KGB officials from the Soviet Embassy.  Of course they tried to persuade us to go back.  They said we didn’t know what we were doing and only defecting for big bucks.  They said ‘Don’t do it.  If you go back, we will forgive you.’  But I knew what that meant.  I said to my mother that we should not try to explain to those gentlemen about artistic freedom if all they could see was big bucks.  So we told them that we were going of our own volition.  It was an unpleasant end to the process of defection.

AP:  You arrived in America at Kennedy Airport and were instantly offered a job at the New York Conservatory of Dance. 

MM:  My mother was offered a job as a teacher at the American Ballet Theatre and I was offered a job to teach at the New York Conservatory of Dance.

AP: At the suggestion of Anton Dolin you stopped off in London and our President, Sir Peter Wright, watched one of your mother’s classes and said ‘London is very much in need of you’.

MM:  My mother was teaching a class at the American Ballet Theatre in New York and Anton Dolin, who had known my mother from previous meetings in Japan as he also worked for the Tokyo Ballet, said to her ‘Now that you are a free person, why don’t you come to England?’  Sure enough, two or three weeks later my mother received a letter signed by Leonie Urdang who had a ballet school in Covent Garden.  Leonie said she was a friend of Anton Dolin and he had suggested our names and that she would like to invite us to teach master classes at her school.  For a while we couldn’t find the time to go because we had had invitations to stage La Bayadère in Tokyo, so we went back to Tokyo first then some Chinese people saw it and wanted us to restage it for the Chinese company in Beijing.  There was also an invitation for me to dance in South America with Nina Novak.  But on the way back from Beijing we decided to stop over in London and Leonie met us at Gatwick Airport – we thought we would stay for a week or so but we loved it so much that 27 years later I’m still here! 

AP:  The list of people who attended your mother’s classes reads like a “Who’s Who” of ballet as it includes people like Nureyev, Marakova, Sibley and Guillem. 

MM:  When my mother was teaching her first class at Urdang, Peter Wright came to watch her class and he talked to me after the class –he probably thought I was my mother’s manager!  He said that he would like to offer my mother a contract with his company - the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, also with the Royal Ballet,  and with the Royal Academy of Dance.  So my mother received three contracts - Sir Peter was speaking for all three organisations.

Dancers from the Royal Ballet would come to my classes at Urdang and I guess they mentioned my name to somebody in the Royal Ballet management probably saying that I could give not too bad a class so I was asked to come to do an audition to teach company class.  I had to teach a class at the Covent Garden Studios which was attended by no less than Ninette de Valois, Sir Fred (Sir Frederick Ashton), Kenneth MacMillan, Norman Morris and the rest of the leadership of the company.  I had to teach a boys’ class.  It was a very difficult audition but I passed it and got a guest teaching position with the Royal Ballet.  Unfortunately, at the time I did not want to stay in London permanently because at the same time I received a number of other teaching engagements, for example an invitation from Maina Gielgud, the Director of the Australian Ballet, to go to Australia.  Also there were some dancers here from La Scala and they arranged for me to go to La Scala to teach and there was also and invitation from Ballet Béjart which was in Belgium at the time - Béjart invited me to teach his company there.  So I did not want to be a permanent teacher with the Royal Ballet but a Guest Teacher.  I first began working with the Royal Ballet around 1981-1982 and even have been fortunate to travel to so many countries with them such as America, Russia, China, Korea, Greece, Mexico, Argentina and many others. 

AP:  Even after you had moved to the West, it did not mean you were entirely out of the reach of the KGB.
 
MM:  In New York the FBI had provided bodyguards to my mother and me for the first few months because the KGB kept telephoning us.  No matter how often we changed telephone numbers, they would still find us and telephone us and say ‘Look, we are going to break your legs unless you return to Russia’.  And they found us again just as we moved to London.

AP: So it would have been quite reasonable for you to have expected never to work again in your homeland. 

MM:  Absolutely – I had stopped thinking about it.  It was like I had landed on a different planet in a different solar system.  It felt like I had landed safely but my spacecraft was burnt on landing and there was no way ever of going back to Earth. There was no point of even thinking about going back.  Then suddenly it turned out that the spacecraft worked after all and it was a Russian Aeroflot 747 that took me back of my own volition in 1993 after Perestroika.  I was teaching in Athens, Greece, and in the street I bumped into an old friend of mine from Russia, Dmitry Bryantsev, who said he was now the Artistic Director of the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet – the second company in Moscow – equivalent to the English National Ballet here.   He said ‘It’s all different now.  Why don’t you come and teach for us? Many people even with a really political background have come back to Russia. Don’t you read the papers?’  I said ‘Yes, but I don’t trust what I read in Russian papers!’  Eventually I was convinced it would be safe to go and having completed a number of other commitments and when I had some free time I went only for one week to the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet and I wasn’t myself until I left Russia – but nothing bad happened. Going to Moscow felt like travelling back in time, seeing all the people from my past that I used to know.  I never expected that this would happen so quickly – in 50 years maybe, not 13 years.

I went back many times after that. But that initial trip is so important to me – I met my future wife Olga, she was a dancer with the company.  We now have an 8 year old daughter, Michelle.

Later I was invited to teach at the Kirov Mariinsky Theatre Ballet.  It is considered to be the cream of Russian ballet and it is a great honour to be invited there.  Later on the Bolshoi Ballet invited me to be a guest teacher.  Russia changes a little bit, back and forth. 

AP:  Alexei Ratmansky, the Artistic Director of the Bolshoi, then invited you to restage your uncle Asaf’s ballet Class Concert.

MM:  Yes, Alexei invited me to take the Bolshoi’s company class when they were here at Covent Garden three years ago.  He watched my class and said ‘By the way, I have another question for you.  How much do you remember of your uncle Asaf Messerer’s ballet Class Concert? Would you know anybody who would remember it?’  I said I had restaged it for the Royal Ballet School here in London and it was a great success.  It was danced by a very young Christopher Wheeldon and by Darcey Bussell who was 17 years old.  I had a video of it and Alexei asked to see it so I showed him the video and then he asked me to restage the piece for Bolshoi. 

AP:  I understand that notation is not widely used. 

MM:  Notation is not used at all in Russia.

Recently Class Concert won a nomination for Russia’s most prestigious theatrical awards - the Golden Mask Awards - for the best production, competing with drama and opera.  We did not win but Class Concert is very popular indeed.  And without notation if the piece is not shown for a month or two the dancers forget so much of what I asked them to do that I go back to check.

AP:  Had the Bolshoi’s technique changed over the years?

MM:  Their technique had improved a lot compared to what it had been like in the 1980s and 1990s - when they came here I was embarrassed to be called a Russian teacher because, in my view, they were performing so badly.  Nowadays they have improved and it is a pleasure to work with them.  It is not perfect yet - there is a lot to do.  When my uncle staged this ballet in 1959 he had so many stars in it.  But they do have very good dancers in it today. Technique has changed as well.  It is more sports-like, there is an influence from sport. 

AP:  Is there a discernable difference for you between Bolshoi technique and Royal Ballet technique?

MM:  When I first went to teach at the Royal Ballet, Ninette de Valois was there and it was interesting to see that the demands she made of her dancers and the corrections she would make were very similar to the ones which my old teachers made.  I wouldn’t say there was an English school or a Russian school, there was a good school as opposed to a bad school. 

Nowadays we have videos and even YouTube where you just enter the name of the dancer or of the piece you want to see.  Yesterday it may have been performed in Australia but you can see it today in London and you don’t need to fly or take a boat to Australia to see something interesting.  You can download videos and watch them and repeat them and watch them hundreds of times to see how best to approach a particular step – so they all influence each other and there is less distinction between national styles but I’m not sure that is such a good thing.  But on the other hand, the techniques have improved too.

AP:  Tamara Rojo has spoken about her recent visit to the Mariinsky Ballet where she made a guest appearance in its production of SwanLake – an opportunity which you helped to arrange. 

Tamara said that she had found the experience very interesting because she thought Russian ballerinas felt a greater sense of artistic freedom with Russian works than she was allowed to have in London with those same pieces.  She believed Russian ballerinas felt a greater ownership of their roles which encouraged greater freedom of interpretation.  In London she felt she was required to perform in a more prescribed manner.

MM:  Yes, I agree. There isn’t a word in Russian that would be equivalent to the word discipline. They have to use the word DISCIPLINA which is foreign in more than one respect… The closest Russian word is like ‘order’. Yes, British dancers are much more disciplined. They do what they are supposed to do whereas the Russians may have a more creative interpretation. 

It had been announced that The Mikhailovsky Ballet (ex Maly Theatre) from St Petersburg would be making its UK debut at the London Coliseum from 22nd July. Over 200 artists would be appearing in a new version of Spartacus, led by Bolshoi principal dancer Denis Matvienko. The company would also perform Giselle and a mixed programme including the Grand Pas from Paquita, Divertissements and a rare opportunity to see Marius Petipa’s one-act comedy ballet Le Halte de Cavalerie.

MM:  They asked me to stage two small pieces for the last Gala performance at the Coliseum. Spring Waters was choreographed by my uncle Asaf Messerer in 1953 and the other piece - I staged it some while ago for a Royal Ballet School in-house performance - Ocean and Pearls from the old version of The Little Humpback Horse was choreographed by Gorsky in 1914. The Gala will be taking place on Sunday 27 July at 3 pm.

I would like to be involved in teaching the Mikhailovsky dancers the movement of arms, the proper position of feet – things which I learned at the School and of which I was subsequently reminded by Ninette de Valois, including musicality and movement of the body – so I will stage, teach and coach for them. 

Question from the audience:  Was it inevitable that you would become a teacher? Was there anything else you would have liked to do?

MM:  At the age of 10 I went to ballet school and became a dancer.  Usually when dancers have finished their performing career some are fortunate to become choreographers - I did not have any inclination to choreograph.  But some dancers become teachers.  I knew from an early age I would have to do something else as I always felt too narrow in the frame of a dancer and teaching was a logical thing to do and I knew that the sooner I began the better. 

Question from the audience:  Do you think the Stanislavsky will return to London?

MM:  Yes, it might happen in a year or two.  A new Artistic Director has been just appointed and will start in September – it is the ex dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet Sergey Filin.

Question from the audience:  Given the broad repertory of the Bolshoi today, if you were 20 now, would you stay with the company?

MM:  As a young man of 20 nowadays in Russia, it would be unwise to be a ballet dancer.  You don’t get paid enough and you don’t get any perks.  We used to get highly paid; we were travelling abroad; we were allowed to buy motor cars and country houses.

The law has just changed in Russia regarding conscription.  So, as a boy, the minute you now graduate from the ballet school you go to the Army for two years.  Many boys would not go to ballet school anymore because if you do something else you may get a reprieve from Army service – say if you study as a lawyer – but not as a dancer, with a very few exceptions.

The repertory of the Bolshoi is much more versatile.  Alexei Ratmansky has done a fantastic job.  He has brought good things from the West and kept good things from old Russia.  For example he is about to restage an old Soviet ballet Flames of Paris.  He has also redone The Bright Stream – the ballet that was forbidden to be performed in Russia for a long time. 

Question from the audience:  If you were allowed to add something to the Covent Garden repertory, what would it be?

MM:  It is a very versatile repertory.  They do have everything and it is impossible to perform each season everything that they have – and they have to take care to breed new works.  But they don’t have Don Quichotte any more and it hasn’t been performed for many years.  They had two versions and in my view both versions were not right.  They had my dear friend Misha Baryshnikov’s version and Rudy Nureyev’s version but it was not suitable. Baryshnikov’s version was a big hit for ABT but here it was not suitable. 

Question from the audience:  What is the hardest thing to teach professional dancers?

MM:  To put in their feelings.  And it is not always the best dancers that can do it.  Even in class I demand a certain amount of emotion.  I was recently at La Scala – one of the many companies I guest teach for – and there I remember two or three dancers who perform and they practice this in class. 

On behalf of the members, Allison thanked Mikhail for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk and closed the meeting by wishing him every success in the future.

Report by
Allison Potts
© The London Ballet Circle 2008