Holmes in rehearsal with Dvorovenko and Belasarkovksy at the ABT premier of Raymonda in May, 2004.

After I did Corsaire with ABT, Kevin McKenzie suggested a full-length Raymonda for our next project. I said I'd love to as Raymonda is very dear to my heart, but what an expensive undertaking! A month later I was in Norway coaching the Swan Lake I'd done for Oslo Ballet when Dinna Bjorn told me she was going to Helsinki to become Artistic Director there and that she'd love for me to do a Raymonda for them! So I proposed doing a co-production with ABT. Dinna and her team from Finland and Kevin and the ABT gang all flew in to Boston, where I was still Artistic Director at the time, and we got the ball rolling. Sharing all the sets and costumes made the production much more economical. Better still, the Helsinki company has an incredible facility that can make everything from hats to chairs. And I'd be able to make refinements to the staging after Finland for the New York premiere.
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I already had a background in Raymonda, which is why I love it so much. My first teacher Lydia Karpova from St. Petersburg taught me its grand adagio and character dances when I was fourteen. Then I danced Pas de Dix -- Balanchine's take on Raymonda -- when I first joined Winnipeg Ballet. When I was Director of Research for the Royal Academy of Dance in London I worked with Karsavina and had asked her many questions about Raymonda. For this project I talked with Dudinskaya, my teacher and second mom in St. Petersburg, about how I should approach it. She thought I should make it more compact for today's audiences but still retain all those wonderful Petipa variations. Mine is two acts instead of three. She also said, "Be sure they don't slow down the tempos! Keep them up!" That was very helpful because it gets boring otherwise. I'd been to Harvard for notes on Bayadere and Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker, and I went back to see if they had any on Raymonda. Lo and behold, they did. So I analyzed all the Stepanov notes and any videos I could get my hands on. Then I worked with Ormsby Wilkinson, conductor for National Ballet of Canada, to make all of what I wanted for the storyline work with all the wonderful Glazunov music. I worked with designer Zach Brown to make lightweight costumes for the dancers, as the typical heavily lined costumes make it hard for the dancers to move. When I was in Belgium staging Bayadere I was able to get to Helsinki to see their second run and make some tweaks, like slowing down the mime in places to make the storyline clearer. For example, when Abderakhman, the Saracen knight, presents this beautiful jeweled necklace to Raymonda, the Lady Sybil, the head of the house intervenes, "No, we must place all gifts at the feet of the White Lady, the protectress of our house." He looks back in defiance, "No! I have no such beliefs," and he violates the ways of the household. At first, I had positioned the two quite close to each other. Then I opened them up so the White Lady becomes part of the scene and you understand the action better. It's a story ballet after all!
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The biggest challenge in putting on a full-length ballet is getting enough time to rehearse it -- getting the corps de ballet together, for instance. Also, today's companies often want a different cast each night, so you have to teach the same roles to all those dancers. They're just aren't enough hours in the day. Keeping the ballet alive for today's public is another challenge. People today have short attention spans. Introducing more male dancing with bravura technique and big jumps is one way to keep things lively. Heightening the sensual aspect of ballet -- but doing so in good taste -- makes it more exciting.
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I tried to keep much of the traditional Petipa choreography intact, particularly for the group scenes. Petipa used buttons of various shapes, sizes and colors like chess pieces to help him choreograph. I found myself doing the same thing with rhinestones on the ballet buttons and moving them all around in relation to one another. The Stepanov notation can be very difficult to read. Fortunately many of the variations have been passed down and I had learned some of them as a young dancer in St. Petersburg. They're plenty challenging as originally choreographed. I conferred a lot with Dudinskaya before she died when I was there for her 90th Jubilee. There is one variation where Raymonda moves across the floor with a series of changements en pointe, but I had seen Kolpakova do it with entrechat quatres. Dudinskaya herself did it with entrechats even though changements were true to the original. In one scene I modified the choreography of the White Lady. I hadn't seen her costume until the night before the performance and they gave her this huge, flowing cape like Batman's. I gave her bourrées so she would appear to glide from one position to the next, indicated in the Stepanov notation. Male choreography is a another story altogether. ABT has so many excellent male dancers that you can embellish the male choreography and bring it up to the level of their technique. Remember, Petipa wasn't choreographing for the male dancer. Most of the time men just walked around in little high-heeled shoes. In Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, it was Sergeyev who choreographed all the male variations.
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Raymonda's choreography is very challenging, even by today's standards. They may have been less concerned in Petipa's day about precise positions and placement than we are now, but they only gave the roles to dancers who were strong enough to do them and the training in St. Petersburg was very good. They just did it. Now we're very preoccupied with perfect turnout and placement, but sometimes lose the joy of dancing the steps and the details in the head and arms. I spent many hours --- and so did Irina Kolpakova -- with the head and the arms and the subtle movements and nuances like head inclinations and the eyes. The dancers today do it more or less intuitively but don't always get it right. It rarely comes naturally because that part of the training isn't there for the most part, so I had to choreograph it for them. That can be very time consuming. One dancer in Helsinki had that schooling and it was already in her body. She was the exception. If you have a corps de ballet that's systematically trained it can take half the time to set a ballet. When I first staged Giselle in Boston it took me hours just to nail down the first step and the proper movement of the arms! One dancer would do this. Another would do that. It's cost-effective to have a company school that trains dancers in that detailed manner. The legs here in America are strong and sharp and extended enough to do the steps; it's just the coordination with the upper body that can be lacking. Every once in a while, you encounter a natural dancer who coordinates the entire body intuitively. They must have danced in a previous life. That's rare. Most of us need to be schooled in that.
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I was so fortunate to have fine schooling, all of which I bring to bear on my work today. I started with a teacher from Germany, Heino Heiden, who had been schooled in the Soviet technique -- very precise, very particular. Then I went to Lydia Karpova in Vancouver. She was the old Russian style Preobrajenska and all that. She had studied with Cecchetti but didn't like what he did with the arms. So she used Cecchetti legs and Fokine arms, much like Vaganova did. In London I studied with Errol Addison, who had been with the Diaghlev company, and others. And in New York I studied with Doubrovska at S.A.B., and Balanchine was around all the time. I don't know what people are talking about because those classes were very similar to what I'd had in Russia! In Russia I studied mainly with Dudinskaya and every day privately with Dudinskaya and Pushkin. In those days the school and the company were in the same building, so the students could peek in and watch rehearsals and so on. I think that makes a difference. Classes were so difficult back then. You had to do a double turn on pointe and then stop and hold the position! When you tell dancers about that today, they say "You're crazy. That's not possible." But you see someone like Komleva, who's very strong, and suddenly you say "Okay! That is possible to do!" But people also don't realize that simply standing correctly is the most important thing from which everything else follows. When I walk into a class I can see right away by the way they're standing who can dance and who can't.
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Classes today are easier. I think that's because the dancers have much longer days and have to dance so many hours that they can't keep it up. Three hours of rehearsal is one thing, but with six hours you just can't keep it up. You're always saving yourself rather than working full out, so the conditioning is not as good and you don't develop the strength and stamina you would with more challenging classes. If you give a class with lots of high demi-pointe like we did in St. Petersburg, the dancers' calves kill them because they're just not used to it. Also, a lot of steps just aren't covered in the West because they don't have the time. Dancers have to be taught to do those steps when they get to the stage. In Raymonda, I'm teaching steps they would have known with the training I received. Of course they do it because they're good dancers, but it's harder for them and takes longer.
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I think greater attention should be paid in the classroom to the coordination of the head, eyes and arms with the rest of the body. This ought to be addressed in the schooling from Day One. Of course in some schools teachers are taking great care in this regard. But if training were more readily available to teachers in this area, it would benefit both them and their students, and I think they'd welcome it. We really do not have a training system in the U.S. for teachers. I think we should have teacher training. Of course then the question arises as to what system to use and the debate ensues. We need discussion among master teachers about what they think is lacking and how to best address it. Dancers are pretty smart and pick things up quickly when they have a strong base. That base of working from the center with a strong stomach and back and squareness of the body applies to every training system.
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It's the responsibility of instructors who've had great teachers like mine to pass on as much as they can from one generation to the next. That's honoring and building on and continuing the great tradition of Classical Dance. I'm collaborating at Jacob's Pillow with a great teacher, Tatiana Legat, who's not teaching more only because people think she's too tough and old-fashioned. In fact she has a wonderful sense of the tradition and her students love her. It hurts the profession to shy away from tradition and tough training. I wouldn't be here without them. Of course the art form evolves, but one must respect and honor the tradition. A dancer who wants to advance professionally must seek out the best schooling and the finest teachers this tradition has produced.
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