Over the years, I have had a number of different instructors--some for prolonged periods, some for a few classes--and most of them were reasonably sane. There were a few I’d classify under “raging bitch”, but thankfully my study with them was brief. There are two stand-outs for me insofar as teachers who had a profound effect on my dancing (and my life) because of their own patented brands of lunacy, and there was one who was...well, she was class*, pure and simple. Let’s start with her.
Gloria Mohr was born in New York City in 1932. Her list of credits is too long to repeat here, but the biggest as far as I was concerned was her 10-year stint with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. When I studied with her she was in her early seventies. She was a miniscule woman (she made me feel like a Grade-A hippopotamus) but she was enormous in personality, and joy. Even at 72 she was still dancing full-out--she didn’t just sit next to the stereo and shout and tap her stick along with the music. She knocked out turns and poses and combinations like they were nothing--exercises that at 17 I couldn’t come close to executing as beautifully. She was full of stories of her days with “Mr. B.”, as Balanchine was known to his dancers: how her father and Balanchine spoke French to each other, how she had visited Mr. B in the hospital just before he passed away. She was gracious and gentle and always, always dignified. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 84, having “retired” (as much as she saw fit to do so) two years earlier. I have always thought that if I can manage to be half as vibrant as she was in my later years, I’ll be lucky.
Godspeed, Gloria. I hope Ballet Heaven is full of gala premieres, pointe shoes that are perfect straight out of the box, and many, many fur coats.
Now, let’s move on to the person who inspired the majority of last week’s post. This woman got more improvement out of me in my first year with her than my previous teacher had in...well, a lot of years. Her methods were unorthodox, to be sure, but exceedingly effective. She yelled. She wielded her stick in a startling manner. She threw things.
She was amazing.
Every time I tell people about how she would tape our thumbs in place if we were ‘serial hitchhikers’ or that she regularly lost her voice during heavy rehearsal times or that every so often we dodged a hurled water bottle the reactions I get are priceless. “Are you serious?” “Oh my God, that’s horrible!” “Why didn’t you quit?” The answers, in order, are yes, not really, and I didn’t quit because I’M NOT A QUITTER, KAREN.
The thing you need to understand is that for all her antics this woman really, truly cared about all of us, in and out of the studio. Yes, she wanted us to be the best dancers we could possibly be, but she also knew that we were human--and teenaged, at that. She made us work, she pushed us, but she also made sure that there was time for silliness and sadness and everything else that comes with existing in the 13-18 year old age bracket. She was on our side, but she also wasn’t so far into the ‘friend’ camp that she didn’t still have our respect. So yes, she was a nut job, but she was a compassionate nut job who wanted to see us succeed, even if it came at the expense of a few hardware-store dowels.
And besides, they were only ever empty water bottles anyway.
Last is a man I studied with in college. The first thing to say about him is that he creased his jeans. Like, ironed them so that they had a crease down the front like dress slacks. On purpose.
Jeans.
That should tell you a little bit about his personal brand of whack-a-doodle.
Everyone who danced at UCI came in contact with him for one reason or another. His reputation went before him. He could be terrifying, but it was all out of love (though you generally spent a long time being terrified before you realized it). He had this shriek. It was so distinctive that I can’t even come up with a good comparison for you. You wouldn’t think that a tiny Phillipino man could generate a sound like that, but by God, he did. He looked down his nose at everything and everybody--literally. It’s just how his face was. He had his own dance vocabulary and you had to learn to speak it quickly or you’d fall on your ass (figuratively--though also possibly literally.) Since my dance department audition had been such a massive failure I got placed in level two when I first danced at college, and level two fell under this man’s purview. After my first quarter, he learned who I was (at that point I was more advanced than the rest of the class because everyone more advanced than me had moved up a level) and I became his model.
“E-liz-a-beth Ma-RIE! Front and cen-TER!”
He always called me by my first and middle names, which to this day I find rather endearing.
You may recall some of the terms I introduced you to last week. This man taught almost exclusively in dancer’s shorthand and single-syllable noises. I know I said he had his own dance vocabulary a bit further up, but in all honesty it was less a vocabulary than a babbled series of commands. The ‘Mah-Mah’ exercise I mentioned in my previous post is one of his. He would stand at the front of the room next to the piano, leaning back, looking down his nose, and he would start muttering his instructions—
“Mah mah mah mah mah mah mah, mah mah mah mah mah mah mah, mah MAH mah MAH mah mah MAH, mahmahmahmahmahmahmahmah MAH MAH MAH”
—and flapping his hands around and you knew it meant something, and you hoped you got it right. If you didn’t, that was fine. He’d shriek at you. And after he shrieked about that, he’d spend the whole combination shrieking, “Pli-é!” and “Fifth posi-tion! You younger generation, you don’t know fifth position?! Fifth position fifth position FIFTH POSITION!” and “Po-po IN!” That was your butt, BTW. Your po-po. Also, we were all ‘you younger generation’. Whatever our failing was, it was a result of us being ‘you younger generation’. I seriously wish I had sound clips from his classes, they were golden.
There was a bit of a shuffle between levels two and three for me during my years at UCI but during my senior year I opted to stick to level two for health reasons (read: I was broken). The first day he taught my class that year he beckoned me over to the piano, looked me up and down, and said, “E-liz-a-beth Ma-rieee. You don’t want to be in Ballet Threeeee?”
I said, “No, thanks. My back hurts too much for that any more.”
There was a pause, and then, “Ah-haaaaaaaaa.”
That was more or less how conversations went with him.
I’m going to leave you with a mini-lecture he delivered to us one morning, and though I wish I could give it to you in all its original splendor with the voice and the emphasis, you’re just going to have to be satisfied with my best attempt with textual manipulation.
He enters the dance studio, puts his bag down, nods to the pianist, and looks at the class.
“Good morning every-ooooone.”
“Good morning,” we replied.
“Did you eat break-faaaaast?”
::assorted muttered responses::
“You younger generation, you don’t eat break-faaast? You can eat a pound of caaaake. You can eat a pound of baaaaacooon. You are yoooung. You will burn it ooooff.”
Honestly? After that I always kind of wondered if I could make it through a whole pound of bacon without succumbing to instantaneous cardiac arrest, but I’ve never tried.
*Put it this way: Gloria had a boyfriend. She never called him her boyfriend. He was her ‘companion’. They even listed him as her companion in her obituary. That, my friends, is class.
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