“During one of the daily classical ballet classes at the school in Ukraine, the teacher made us repeat many times, still on the barre, the preparation for an exercise, those initial chords where we move an arm gently together with the head, to signal that we are starting a sequence. In this case, it was a sequence that never started because the teacher made us practice this preparation throughout the entire class.

At the time, I thought this preciousness was a waste of time because there were so many moves, tours, jumps to practice and improve technically. And there we were, repeating to exhaustion that simple preparation that didn’t even require effort or special skill.

Years later this memory came back. By then I had realized that there is something else that makes a dancer different from another, beyond technique. Something inexplicable, something subjective, but that the audience feels, preferring some interpreters to others. That’s because, for many times, I watched performances without being able to take my eyes off a particular dancer. I also wondered about my own performances and why some seemed to get a better response from the audience than others.

It was when I began to meditate that light was shed upon those issues. Meditation triggered new reflections on my dance, especially concerning being on stage. I was gradually able to understand my master and the lesson where she taught us that every movement must be performed with maximum presence, never automatically. Dance is an art that happens in the moment, demanding surrender and totality.

And to my happiness, in NY, I experienced and started studying diverse methods of Somatic Education. Based on self-knowledge, they consisted of different approaches toward the same objective: to bring more awareness to movements and greater mastery to the body. These practices, along with meditation, had a huge impact on my dancing.