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Maya

There are ballerinas of silence,
 
Ballerinas like snowflakes; they melt
 
But she’s like some kind of infernal spark.
 
When she perishes, half the planet will be incinerated!
 
Even her silence is frenzied, the roaring silence of expectation,
 
The actively tense silence between lightning and thunderclap...
 
She is tortured by her own gifts—
 
Inexplicable even to herself, but nothing to joke about. . .
 
 
What can be done with this weightless creature in a world of ponderousness?
 
She was born more weightless than anyone.
 
In a world of heavy, blunt objects.
 
Better able to fly than anyone—
 
In a world of clumsy immobility. . .
 
The splendour of genius amidst the ordinary—that’s
 
The key to all her roles.
 
She blazes brilliantly; it is brought on by her boiling blood.
 
This is no ordinary mythical fairy.
 
She suffers from a lack of spark, fire and light
 
In this half-way world. . .
 
She cannot bear half-measures, whispers, and compromises.
 
Her answer to a foreign lady correspondent was cunning.
 
“What do you hate most of all?”
 
“Noodles!”.
 
Yes of course, noodles are the most repulsive of all things:
 
A symbol of standardisation, of things boiled to mush, of commonness;
 
Of subjugation, of anti-spirituality.
 
Wasn’t it about noodles that she wrote in her notes:
 
“People must stand up for their convictions.
 
Not by using the police and denunciations,
 
But only through the strength of their own inner ‘I’.”
 
And further: “I don’t particularly respect people who live
 
By the maxim: ‘If you don’t repent, you won’t be saved.’”
 
 
Maya Plisetskaya doesn’t like noodles!
 
She’s a creator.
 
“I know Venus is the work of the hands
 
Of a craftsman—and I know a craft!”
 
We’ve forgotten the words “gifts”, “genius”, “illumination.”
 
Without them, art is nothing. As the experiments of Kolmogorov proved.
 
Art cannot be programmed; two human qualities cannot be derivative:
 
The feeling for religion and the feeling for poetry.
 
Talents cannot be cultivated by agricultural systems invented by Lysenko.
 
They are born. They are part of the national wealth,
 
Like radium deposits, September in Latvian woods or medicinal springs.
 
Plisetskaya’s lines and movements are also miracles like these,
 
Also part of the national wealth.
 
 
What a feeling Plisetskaya has for poetry!
 
I remember her in black, sitting on a sofa:
 
She looks as if she’s put a wall between herself
 
And the rest of the audience.
 
She sits in profile, leaning forward.
 
Like the famous statue with a pitcher in the park of Tsarskoye Selo
 
Her eyes are switched off.
 
She listens with her neck.
 
With her Modigliani neck, with the curve of her spine, with her skin.
 
Her earrings tremble, like nostrils. . .
 
A woman in grey kept folding and unfolding her arms.
 
She talked about the role of arms in ballet. I'm
 
Not going to pass on what she said. Her arms
 
Flashed and swam under the ceiling—only her arms.
 
Her logs and torso were no more than little vases
 
For these naked, flashing arms. . .
 
 
She is the most modern of our ballerinas.
 
Poetry, painting, physics have their time in terms
 
Of style—but not ballet.
 
She is a ballerina who lives in the rhythms of the Twentieth Century.
 
 
She should dance not among swans, but among cars and jets,
 
I see her against the background of
 
The pure lines of Henry Moore and the chapels of Ronchan...
 
Her name is short,
 
Like those of other girls in tights,
 
And as thunder-like as that of a goddess
 
Or pagan priestess Maya. 

 
 
Dance Poetry
A comprehensive anthology
Edited by Alkis Raftis
Copyright 2012

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