Word: panovs
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...teenagers. They went to Leningrad, where he found the atmosphere of the old czarist capital intoxicating. As a dancer, he could not help visiting the Kirov school. There he happened to attend a class taught by the late Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, a great master who coached Nureyev and Valery Panov. Not hoping for much, Baryshnikov approached Pushkin (no kin to the famed Russian poet) and said, "I would very much like to be your pupil." Pushkin felt his legs and body and asked him to jump up and down. Says Baryshnikov, "I was like a young goat knocking over tables...
...years Valery Panov was the premier dancer in Russia. His wife Galina was a ballerina of exhilarating potential. Then, in March of 1972, Panov, who is a Jew, and Galina, who is not, applied for permission to emigrate to Israel. Refusal was accompanied by stunning repercussions: Panov's dismissal from Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, his wife's ignominious demotion, and subsequent denial of the couple's right to dance...
...auditorium, the Panovs performed on a small, bare platform. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra played on a raised stage behind them, causing Conductor Robert Zeller to cast uneasy glances across his shoulder to check music-dance synchronization. Temporarily blinded by a megawatt supertrooper rock-show spotlight, Galina lost sight of her husband and missed a lift during the grand pas de deux from The Nutcracker. " 'Where are you, Valery?' I cried to myself," she said later. However, in The Lady and the Hooligan, a Shostakovich ballet, Galina's feathery pirouettes and Panov's dramatic aerial twists...
Their dancing continued to gain in strength and grace. By the time they arrived at the showy display of Riccardo Drigo's Harlequinade, Panov's springy jeté and Galina's whirlwind fouettes (whipping one-leg turns) were evidence enough that for them the two years had been stopped time, not lost time...
Right now Galina is overshadowed by her husband's mature artistry. It was Panov the dancing actor rather than Panov the spectacular technician who stole the evening. As Petrouchka in Stravinsky's tragicomedy celebrating the Russian Punch, Panov combined Chaplinesque humor with a mime's mastery of the mysterious language of silence. A floppy puppet holding his heart and crying real tears, Panov shrugged his shoulders and, with a spineless collapse, fell to the floor in a human puddle. In that single movement he captured all the joy and anguish of the universal clown...