My mother never learned English, but in Russia, the greatest thing was to give a child to the arts. And so they gave me to the ballet.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was serious about ballet for a long time, but my mom got me into tap and jazz and modern and hip-hop, and I was one of those over-lessoned children.
My mother danced; she loved the ballet.
I came to New York to study ballet and English.
After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.
When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.
Every ballet, whether or not successful artistically or with the public, has given me something important.
When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.
I grew up studying dance, taking ballet lessons.
Ballet really taught me so much about the power of movement.
My biggest entertainment in Moscow was to go to the subway and watch people. When American students visited, I watched them; I learned English from them.