DANCING ON WATER

Elena was called “the most important behind-the-scenes force for change in ballet today,” by Holly Brubach writing in Vogue in 1980. In her memoir she takes the reader backstage, on stage and into the studio, describing the personalities, the performances, the working methods and habits as well as the policy-making.

DANCING ON WATER is look at ballet life. Tchernichova begins with her childhood in the siege of Leningrad during World War II, her mother’s alcoholism and suicide, her adoption by Tatiana Vecheslova, one of the Kirov’s leading ballerinas, who entered her into the state ballet school. The book brings to life the personalities of her teachers. As a young dancer with the Kirov Ballet, she witnessed the company’s achievements as a citadel of classic ballet, but also a hotbed of intrigue and ambition run amok. As a teenager she began to teach ballet to elementary school students and coached her husband, Igor Tchernichov, who was one the Kirov’s most popular young principal dancers. Coaching and teaching always interested her more than performing. After an injury ended Igor Tchernichov’s dancing career, he began to choreograph for some of the Kirov’s greatest stars with Elena as his assistant. She emigrated to the US in 1976 and was reunited with ex-Kirov colleagues Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Makarova. As ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre from 1978--1990, she coached stars and corps de ballet, assisted Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova. After Baryshnikov became ABT’s director in 1980, she helped him remake the company over the following decade. Glasnost’s unexpected arrival in the mid-1980s allowed a new reciprocity between the ballet worlds of the Soviet Union and the U.S. As director of Austria’s national ballet company in Vienna during the early-1990s, she again engineered the transformation and upgrade of a venerable company. Now working free-lance in Europe, the U.S., and Russia she looks back at the years of the “dance boom,” of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Throughout DANCING ON WATER, Tchernichova describes the physical, philosophical, and psychological processes of coaching men, coaching women, developing young dancers, helping established stars find new possibilities within themselves.
Nobel prizewinner and Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky contributed a foreword to this book in 1991, a few years before his death: this material has never been published and is also attached. Co-author Joel Lobenthal is senior dance critic for the new bi-weekly City Arts and associate editor of the quarterly Ballet Review. His biography of Tallulah Bankhead was published by ReganBooks in 2004 and reissued in paperback by Harper Collins last year.