Becoming a Dancer in a Heartbeat
No experience required when you are truly inspired
Summer of 1975. I was drafted into the Greek army and was scheduled to report. I had decided to go to the army despite all my friends thinking I was crazy because as a Greek immigrant I could have just left the country. None of them could imagine going to the army voluntarily. I was surrounded by leftist artistic individuals (pro soviet). One day I heard that a Russian dance company was coming to perform at the Acropolis amphitheatre called Stanislavsky Ballet Company.
I was very curious to experience Russian culture. It was sold out. Being wild by nature, I climbed a wall on the side of the theatre, evaded the security guards and managed to find an empty seat centre stage, 10 rows from the front. It was one very magical performance. It seemed the dancers were floating 2 feet off the ground. By the end we were all 7,000 of us in attendance that night dumbfounded. Nobody clapped for what seemed to be an eternity. Once we began clapping, we could not stop; my hands became numb, so I clapped harder. I counted at least 30 standing ovations. I did not see a single individual leave the theatre. Usually people would start leaving 30 minutes before the end of the show. This is because there were not enough parking spaces back then. The people that were double parked needed to leave first. After a while they pleaded with us to let them go so they can get some sleep, by motioning with their palms together by their head.
The next day I went to the beach with my Leftist friends, but I did not get involved in their usual pranks on the beach. My attention was on the horizon; I kept looking out into the sea. My mind felt empty and my heart was calm. I did not know the extent then, but my world was about to change.
That same night we gathered at an artist’s house, Vasilis Vlasidis. I was his model at the time. Naked sketches of me were on the walls. (unfortunately, the drawings have gone missing) The full moon was hovering low over the Athenian urban landscape as the moonlight entered the dimly lit penthouse and projected on to the wall like a rectangular film screen.
My friends being very pro soviet were going on and on about Russian art and culture. They asked me about my experience… I did not know what to say… they kept asking me… I could not begin to describe the experience, so I spoke about how the audience reacted; the silence and the standing ovations. My friends then began praising Russian culture and communism. I began to get very uneasy. The more they spoke the more disturbed and angry I became.
Then it all came out; an eruption from a place very deep… I jumped up and yelled out in anger: “who the hell are the Russians? When the Russians were living in caves like bears the Greeks were measuring the distance between the moon and the earth… you want to see real dance? I will show you a Greek dance!”
I leapt up, turned the remaining light off, ripped the shirt of my back and began to dance with my shadow against the wall… my consciousness was in/out of my body. I was fully conscious. I even remember a voice from inside asking me: “what are you doing? You can't dance!” Without a pause I answered: “watch me!” I could see myself dancing as if I was on the ceiling, making sounds the wind, traffic noises, sirens. But I was in my body at the same time, I was viewing it all from the ceiling looking down at myself. I danced like a man possessed because I was. Replicating moves that I saw, and making sounds; after about 20 minutes I let out a scream and collapsed with a loud thud on the wooden floor…
They were dumbfounded the same way that I was the previous night at the ballet. Then they started praising me saying how amazing it was; they were simply stunned. They asked: “what was that?” “That was Greek dance, and I am going to be a ballet dancer” I declared. One of them said: “how can you be a ballet dancer you are bow legged.” “I will straighten them!” I said emphatically. I turned towards the door and said: “Screw the Russians screw communism, and screw you” and with that I walked out.
I went AWOL from the army… did not report and managed to get out on a student Visa… mind you before this time I had never ever danced in my life… not in school dances or anywhere else. I began to read books about ballet, its history and was very impressed by Nijinsky and especially Rudolph Nureyev who also started dancing late; still a few years before me, but he was a good example of someone who achieved the impossible for me.
On my return to Canada, 3 months later, I walked into my first ballet class and astonished the teacher who could not believe that it was my first class. 6 months later I auditioned for the National Ballet school in Toronto and being 19yrs old at the time, I was rejected and became so disappointed I quit dance and went back to Greece. I was able to pay and get my discharge papers via a loophole created by the military during the dictatorship to make money from Greek immigrants. Very appropriately, my status is: “Untrained Marine”.
After a year I decided to try again. I could not get dancing out of my system. In 1976 I returned to Toronto and trained again for 6 months and then to New York in the summer of 1977 where I studied for 1 month at the American Ballet theatre open professional classes. Even Baryshnikov showed up some times to take a class. I did not like him; he was much better in class than he was on stage. I auditioned for Maurice Bejart, artistic director of Dance of the 21st Century and founder of the school called “Mudra” in Bruselles. I filled the application with pure fiction. Ballet experience: 5 years, modern dance: 3 years, can read music, and played drums. The maximum age they would accept was 18 and I was 20, so I changed my birth date from 1957 to 1959.
There were 76 dancers auditioning, they took 4 on a full scholarship I was one of them.
That same summer, I went to back Greece to prepare for the move to Belgium. Bejart’s company, Dance of the 21st Century was performing at the same amphitheatre in Acropolis that I witnessed my first dance performance. I went down to the theatre, introduced myself and told the manager that I was accepted to study at Mudra. He invited me to take class with Bejart himself on the very same stage that I witnessed the magic that made me a Dancer in a Heartbeat just two years earlier.
Ecstasy flowed through my veins in waves as I danced on that very same stage that I witnessed the Stanislavsky Ballet perform just 2 years earlier; Bejart himself conducted the class!
That experience, and the experiences that followed have proved to me that art is something that happens to you. It is not something that you make happen on a conscious level. The conscious mind can facilitate, can evoke and it can nurture the latent artistic instinct to come out and play. This essay is about these three elements: facilitating, evoking, and nurturing the artistic sensibility so you can develop it to the degree that you desire, to the degree that you require in order to bring forth from the unconscious the voice, the colour, the dance, the sculpture, the music, the magic.
Becoming an artist is indeed a magical experience. An experience where the tools you can gain access to and the methodologies you apply can easily be described as magical. This is not as unusual as it may sound. Everyday audiences often describe performances as inducing a magical, otherworldly, hypnotic, trance like experience in them. Many have been transformed by simply being a witness to this level of Art. Some have been inspired to become artists, even though they had no prior desire or need. Some have drastically changed the course of their life because they just happened to be in the audience and had the good fortune to witness this level of art.
I know I was one of them.
