American Dancer Soars at Mariinsky
Keenan Kampa, the first American to join the legendary
Russian company, has just wrapped up the summer season.
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“I thought I was done with that variation. It makes me so
nervous! Everyone dreads it.”
Keenan Kampa, a 24-year-old
Mariinsky Ballet dancer, was talking about the Queen of the Dryads role in Don
Quixote that she recently danced at the theater. The Italian fouette series at
the very end of the difficult variation makes for a tough finish, especially
when dancing in a heavy tutu on the raked, or slanted, stage of the Mariinsky
Theater.
You wouldn’t know it, though, judging from the effortless
performance Kampa pulled off — and the crowd’s enthusiastic response when she
flitted off stage.
Speaking to The St. Petersburg
Times on a bench in Teatralnaya Ploshchad last week at the end of a hectic
season, and with the Mariinsky’s classic green façade in full view, Keenan
described her path to becoming the first American to join the Mariinsky Ballet
one year ago.
As a talented pre-professional ballet dancer who was
finishing a home-schooled education in the Washington, D.C.
area in 2007, Kampa wasn’t sure what her next move would be.
“I wasn’t sure where
I was going to go the next year. I thought maybe college, or trying to pursue
dancing.”
Then, while
participating in a Kennedy
Center program for young
ballet dancers in the area, Kampa’s path became clear.
“Once a month,
visiting companies gave a master class and I just got really lucky. There was
someone from the Mariinsky there on tour, and they saw me in a class. At the
end they just invited me. It was so unexpected.”
A few months later, Kampa was on a plane bound for a country
she had never set foot in to begin studying at the famous Vaganova Ballet
Academy of the Mariinsky,
formerly the Kirov.
“It was a complete
shock. It’s a culture shock, everything was different, especially back in
2007,” Kampa said of first arriving in St.
Petersburg.
While Kampa may describe her discovery as luck, it was certainly
much more that got her through the academy’s grueling program. Out of the 11
female Russian dancers who were part of her class, Kampa said, only four
remained by the end of the two years, along with a few other foreign students,
the others having been cut from the academy’s end-of-year exams.
Linguistic and
cultural barriers added to the physical challenge, with Kampa thrown into the
all-Russian environment with no time to get her bearings.
“The first year I didn’t speak at all,” Kampa said. “I
honestly didn’t talk.”
While it all took
some getting used to — for both Kampa and the Russian instructors and students
at the academy — eventually she found her voice, and a deep connection to her
associates.
“By the time I left it was bittersweet because I had already
become attached to a lot of people and it felt like a family. I made a lot of
good friends,” Kampa said.
After graduating from
the Vaganova Academy
in 2010, Keenan returned to the United
States to dance for the Boston Ballet. While
there, Kampa surprised herself with how close she had become to the Mariinsky
and St. Petersburg.
“I never thought I
would say that,” said Kampa, “But I had fallen in love with Russia, and I
really missed it here.”
After two years with
the Boston Ballet, Kampa received the unexpected offer to come dance for the
Mariinsky Ballet, making her the first American to join the ranks of a dance
troupe that is universally regarded as one of the best in the world.
Kampa’s experience
dancing with both American and Russian companies lends her a unique perspective
on the world of professional dance. As Kampa describes it, Mariinsky dancers
are not so much the workhorses of over demanding directors, but intensely
focused artists striving for the highest levels of virtuosity. While the
workload was initially a shock, Kampa found that she had gotten used to an
environment where ballet dancers strove for another level of excellence.
“One of the things I was really frustrated with at home was
the [labor] union,” Kampa said. “There are so many rules. You can’t work more
than six hours each day, or if the studio’s too cold you don’t have to dance.
Here the dancers will work until midnight, just because they love their art so
much. They love it. They respect it so much that they want perfection.”
The differences in style between American and Russian ballet
have also provided an interesting counterpoint: In the U.S., the focus is more
on bringing out a dancer’s individual character.
“While they want
their dancers to look good collectively on stage, especially when dealing with
the corps de ballet, a lot of times they really push individuality and artistic
freedom, and want to see what you have to offer as a dancer. Here they want
that, but there are boundaries because there’s such a specific style.”
The emphasis on port de bras, the movements of the arms and
the precise lines that are so specific to Russian ballet, have proved one of
the hardest things for Kampa to master, despite her three years at the school.
“It’s something I constantly have to be aware of. I have to keep working on the
Russian style.”
Additionally,
American ballet includes much more contemporary influence than the more
classical Mariinsky style but, as Kampa noted, the Mariinsky has expanded its
repertory in recent years. Kampa said she was surprised, for example, by the
inclusion of works by William Forsythe and 11 Balanchine ballets in the
Mariinsky repertory.
Beyond the dancing,
Kampa noted: “Even the dynamics in the theater among the dancers are
different.”
“In the United States,
maybe because the company was smaller, people socialized a lot together; they
did a lot of stuff outside of the theater. But here a lot of artists come in,
they do their thing, and it’s more like you have groups.”
Kampa, who has four sisters, including a 13-year-old that
her parents adopted from Kazakhstan
at the age of six months, said that after four years in Russia, the
hardest part about being away from home is being without them.
“I think I could live
anywhere, it’s just my family I miss,” Kampa said.
Despite the amount of
time Kampa spends in and around the theater — she lives in Mariinsky housing
located next to the concert hall, where her next door neighbor is an opera
singer — she still finds time to explore the city and has seen things change
from when she first arrived as a student barely out of high school.
“The city has changed
a lot. I always tell people you couldn’t take coffee to go back in 2007, and
there wasn’t Wi-Fi.”
St. Petersburg has become like home to Kampa:
The self-professed Zenit fan was going to a soccer game that very night. In her
off time, she likes to ride her bike around the city with her headphones on,
enjoy vegetarian food at Samadeva and play basketball at New Holland
Island, where sometimes
her enthusiasm for sports carries her away.
“I threw a basketball
into the lake — by accident — so I might be on probation,” Kampa said.
For a dancer from America, where
frequently only balletomanes make up the audience, it would seem like a dream
come true to dance for packed houses night after night at the Mariinsky. Ballet
occupies a privileged place in Russia
when compared to Kampa’s home country, as here it engenders a deeper
appreciation from the general public.
But with the long hours of rehearsal and endless pursuit of
the highest levels of technique and artistry, Kampa said, it can be easy to
lose sight of the public beyond the stage lights. When leaving the theater
after a recent performance, she was treated to a rare sight: The crowds
dispersing after the show, no doubt still aglow from that particular magic that
Kampa had helped create.