Mrs. Brenda Hotard: The Way Back to Dance Through Tatiana Dakoudovska

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

  

THE WAY BACK TO DANCE THROUGH TATIANA DOKOUDOVSKA

 

This time, everything was going my way in Leavenworth, Kansas. My husband had risen in rank and experience and was delighted with his new position as Chief Executive Officer of the installation. Our house was absurdly large, mainly furnished with “Quartermaster” elegant, traditional furniture. It had maid’s quarter’s downstairs and a large attic reaching back to the preceding century.

Amongst the new neighbors, there happened to be a former ballerina, Phyllis. When we met at the first scheduled “welcome” coffee, I learned that she was teaching ballet through the Army’s recreation program.

I was uncertain how the first class would go—couldn’t find my dancewear—but need not have worried. She was a very good teacher and gave a solid standard class. And… I remembered “how” as soon as I began to move. It felt as if I had never been away from it. After the class, she suggested I take classes from German trained Renate Edwards who had a studio in town and connections with the Kansas City Ballet and the University of Missouri in Kansas City. Meanwhile, I had joined the Theater Club and quickly performed in Blithe Spirit, an Oscar Wilde humorous play and the musical The Boy Friend.

Dennis and Kathy Landsman

Renate Edwards recommended that I go into Kansas City to see Tatiana Dokoudovska, the Russian Kirov Ballet trained ballet mistress. I went to Kansas City via the University of Missouri where Dennis and Kathy Landsman taught. They were husband and wife who had each danced with the celebrated Robert Joffrey school and company, performing all over the United States and abroad. They had also founded the Kansas/Missouri Youth Ballet, which had attracted a positive following. I studied with Dennis for a semester. He introduced me to Madame Dokoudovska, and I began taking classes from her.

Tatiana Dokoudovska, founder of the Kansas City Ballet in 1957

Madame Dokoudovska was a tyrant out to break the will and spirit of any “new” dancer, which I was. From our first encumber, she ridiculed and demeaned me, asking me repeatedly to demonstrate how “not” to execute the art from. I learned over time, after training with the Russian pedagogues, that this was the “Russian way.” It was such punishment that for the first time in my life, I wanted to give up.

Mme. Tatiana with her well-known stick

Tatiana was in her mature middle years with grey hair pulled into a severe bun, thin lips, aquiline nose, and a pinched expression. She began every class getting in front of the class in an upright chair scanning the unsettled dancers, looking for fault. She always used a stick for rhythm and dynamic emphasis—and occasionally to tap an offending body part while making a specific correction. It must have been a relief to the class members when I seemed to be the singular focus of rebuke. She would stand right behind me while I was working at the barre and offer instruction in a harsh Russian accent. The class was way beyond my skill level, and I struggled. She knew my first name and used it harshly rrrrolling her rrr’s—“Brrrrrendah”— a guttural rebuke accompanied by thumps of the stick. It was a physically exhausting class characterized by enough repetitions of an action to defeat the strongest members.

I was rebuked for a stray wisp of loose hair and sent back to the dressing room to fix it while the whole class waited. I was singled out to demonstrate a fault and pivot the faulty design as if on a pedestal, so everyone could see it clearly and learn an important lesson. “Let us watch Brrrrrendah show us her leaning tower of Piz-za,” (not Pisa, unfortunately), and I would have to demonstrate my faulty arabesque with the torso incorrectly aligned.

I vowed after every drive home, sobbing, that I wasn’t going back. And every next time, I walked robot-like to the car and drove the 40 miles into town.

One day, without exploration she asked me to attend a company rehearsal the next Saturday morning. I did so, and she had me understudy a role for an upcoming ballet set by a visiting choreographer for performances at the Kansas City Music Hall. I shadowed that dancer, enjoyed the role, which was like a character or peasant style ballet dance, and felt that I could do it well.

On Saturday, a week before the scheduled concert my “model” dancer showed up with a broken arm. Before I could take in the full significance of it, I looked toward Tatiana, and she gave me an inscrutable smile and a nod. Suddenly, it was possible to actually dance with the company at that very special stage before an audience of knowledgeable ballet enthusiasts.

Dodoudovska correcting a dancer’s makeup

The company members showed me how to do the proper makeup, and I joined them in company warm-up before the performance. I belonged. And I know I fulfilled that role. Afterward, both Dennis and Mme. Tatiana were generous with approval. My cup ran over.

If I had ever needed a confirmation that this dream that had inspired and driven me all my life, through frustration and humiliation, was right, it was that gesture of approval from Mme. Tatiana. I felt that I had, in a sense, arrived at last!

The American ballet was founded by Russian immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia where the Vaganova system had evolved as the ultimate training system. Impresario Lincoln Kirstein brought Mr. Balanchine over to establish the New York City Ballet, and others followed founding the Pacific Northwest Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and so on. I felt that in a very small way, I was a beneficiary and a proponent of that ongoing process.

 

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Brenda Hotard: The Early Dancing Years

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

 

THE EARLY DANCING YEARS

I began taking dancing lessons at age eight. My parents could never have afforded them, but my grandmother offered to pay for my sister and me to study at The Barbara Speake School. Barbara Speake happened to be well trained in the Ballet Rambert and the Sadler’s Wells systems—the two founding companies of the classical ballet in England. Ms. Speake eventually became the most pre-eminent authority of stage projection with a very successful stage school in London.

Ninette de Valois (Picture from the Royal Opera House Collections)

Classes were held at a local church hall within walking distance, and nothing could have prepared me for my response. I experienced an instant affinity and could hardly wait to go again. My sister, on the other hand, did not care for it much and quickly dropped out. However, I progressed joyfully through the levels in the Sadler’s Wells system, which was founded by one of the first great English “Dance Pedagogues” of the art form: Ninette de Valois. I later learned that she laid the foundation of the British ballet tradition embodied by The Royal Ballet. It took less than two decades before becoming one of the world’s great companies, so it was chance that I was entering the ballet classroom in its early promotion. Exciting things of which I was unaware were happening. There was a sense of excitement as classes became available and were being well taught.

At the school, Barbara Speake appeared to take a special interest in me and one other older student named Valerie. I was aware of that encouragement and the joy of succeeding. By the age of nine, I was “en pointe” (dancing on my toes) in pink satin “toe shoes.” Strong and eager, I could do it, and I loved it.

Barbara Speake (Picture from the website of her school)

Ms. Speake also invited me to go to her house twice a week to join a group of selected children from all over the area. They were not necessarily kids from dance; they were from other venues, as well. We were all there for “stage training” in preparation for performing in the popular English Pantomime, which is exactly like musical theater. For example, at the precise time I had to discontinue dance, I had begun to rehearse for the role of Gretel for which I had been chosen in a Pantomime production of Hansel and Gretel. For little acting parts in this adult theatre genre, one needed to be able to speak clearly and enunciate well.

These classes at her house were called “elocution” training and included at least twelve other children. We had to take turns standing up and saying certain things, like (speaking in a clear, distinctive voice:) “Pa, may we go, too?” (Pauses.) And then we would sit down and go around the next time! (We both laugh…) (Speaking in a distinctive voice again:) “That pen is not much good.” (Chuckles…) We would have diction—short sentences—that would test the clarity of our voices, the annunciation, the articulation of the words, expression, and projection, and all the things you need to know if you’re going to put a child on the stage. At that time, I loved doing all of those things!

 

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Brenda Hotard: After WWII- School Life

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

 

AFTER WWII: SCHOOL LIFE

When we recovered, it was slow from the war. The family was still poor. Thank heavens for good schools! My sister and I both excelled at school and loved school. We loved school. I would die rather than be prevented from going to school, so often when I felt like I was maybe sick, I wouldn’t let my mum know because I wouldn’t want to stay home. School was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. My sister was a year ahead of me, of course, and the schooling was excellent in London in those early years. We really were progressed rapidly from the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the early age. That is my impression.

By then, I was definitely always into acting, dancing, and entertaining. I knew that because I was always performing at home. If uncles and aunts would come over, I would perform something—sing a song or do a dance. I found in school—other than the academic part, which was always fun and the fact that I was always, from day one very athletic—that I would be selected to do the narration for any of the major productions that required a narrator. It was always, “Well, Brenda’s going to tell the story.” So I did all the nativity plays—any play or production that needed a principal speaker. And I usually had a speaking role in any play.

We did one about “raggle-taggle” Gypsies, and I remember standing up there. We took that to competition actually, in London. **Announces strongly:**

Away with the raggle-taggle Gypsies, ho!

(We laugh…) That sounds like so much fun! It was fun; it was very fun. It was the tale of a wealthy family’s daughter who was lured away by a gypsy clan passing through.

That was at the elementary school or the grade school. My teachers there were very strongly encouraging my mum to allow me to pursue the arts. Of course, my mum didn’t know what “the arts” really were. My parents had no concept of really “the arts.”

At age eleven, for every child in the English school system no matter where you lived up and down the land (Scotland too, I believe, and Wales), you took a very important set of examinations called the Eleven Plus. Everyone took it on the same day throughout the land. My sister and I had no idea what this was all about really; we were just told it was the Eleven Plus or scholarship exam. We would “sit” and answer all these exam questions and hand this examination in, which was not unusual. We did that all the time, but these were all graded by an essential examining body of the entire land. The standard was uniform and equable wherever you lived.

A small percentage, I guess “the most successful group” if you like to put it that way, were given the opportunity to go to a “Grammar School.” The Grammar School was a school of the highest learning standard and expectation. (We didn’t even really know what the Grammar School was; we didn’t know the meaning of these terms.) Then, you might go instead to a “Secondary Central School,” which would be the next lower category. You might go to a “Secondary Modern School” if you did not do as well on these exams. The Secondary Modern School was something like a trade school. The Secondary Central School was the school in which you could transition up or down if you happened to be a “late bloomer” or become less interested over time. We thought it was a wonderful system!

Well, my sister was offered the chance to go to The Burlington Grammar School for Girls. It had always been a fee-paying school founded in the sixteenth century as a church school. It happened to be a stone-throw away from our house. We were aware of it because we would see these Burlington Grammar School girls. They would have these really spiffy velour hats, and their uniforms were rather nice. We would see them being dropped off by cars. (My parents never owned a car—not from the day they were born until the day they died.)

So my sister got to go to the “Burlington” because that very year, the Burlington was required by the London County Council (the governing authority of all the London schools) to open to eligible grammar school students coming from surrounding areas, no matter what their means. We could ordinarily never have afforded to go to that school. My sister was in the first wave of this new system.

The next year, I got to go to the Burlington as well. So we were both there, and that was when our education foundation really deepened because they offered foreign languages (Latin, some Greek, French, and German) and a curriculum that we could never have imagined. They also offered all manners of sports. There were two specially qualified sports mistresses, and we played every sport in the book (field hockey, gymnastics, tennis, netball, rounders, and all the track and field sports). We had a field day every year in the summer, which was an outdoor event with all the running and track and field events. It opened up a world that we would never have had the opportunity to experience had we not just happened to be arriving at that Eleven Plus when all those changes were happening.

My sister and I have both talked about all this and have said how fortunate we both were to happen to have been brought into this excellent system. It sounds like a college. It sounds amazing! It was just wonderful, and the music… Of course, I was so interested in the music, and the music teacher, whose name was Ms. Godden, and I became very “good friends.” I got to sing a lot of solos, and we did lots of competitive choral work within an intramural network of schools, which were all at one time public schools (the equivalent of US private schools). They were all top-notch schools.

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Brenda Hotard: Time of the War

(Born 1941)

 

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

Parents: Edward George & Vera Margaret

Father’s Parents: Ellen “Nanny Branscum”

Mother’s Parents: Eleanor “Nell” May

Siblings: Joan Margaret, Michael John, Ronald George

Husband: Ernest Paul

Children: Jennifer & Paula

 

TIME OF THE WAR

When were you born?

I was born in 1941 in London during the 2^nd World War. I was the second child in the family, my sister having been born slightly less than a year before I was. We lived in a small brick house in a suburb at 39 Primula Street, W12.

We were in blackout wartime conditions at the time. I am told that my mother went rather suddenly into labor; we didn’t own a car or a telephone, as we were a working-class family. Because of this, my father put my mum into a child stroller (my mum was small) and rushed her to the hospital, which fortunately was a scant mile away. It became a famous burn center for RAF (Royal Air Force) pilots who had serious burn injuries during the war. It is now a famous research center and is still the hospital for burn casualties; it was being transformed at the time of my birth.

My dad apparently rushed my mum in, and the nursing staff assisted her to the delivery. My dad said that there was no waiting time. They took Mummy away, and then they came right back out with her clothes, which were still warm. They were saying, “It’s a girl!” (Laughs…) I rushed into the world, which is somehow very typical because I have been rushing ever since!

I was the second child, and because I had an older sister who was apparently precocious, I learned very quickly by always wanting to be the same as my “one-year-older-than-I” sister. Growing up, we were treated as twins because I was not lagging behind in size or manner. From the start, I was always dancing, making up odd movement phrases and gaits. (We laugh…)

My mum played the radio constantly; she loved music. There was always popular music on the radio. (We had no other access to music.) She sang. She sang everything. She had a very pretty voice, and she knew the words, which is why with any song that comes on the radio that’s of her vintage, I seem to know all the words. I have been asked there is any song I don’t know. Well, if there is any song from that era that I don’t know, it’s because my mum didn’t know it! I just remember her voice, and I remember all the words to the songs. It was during the American songbook era, and “we” don’t write songs like that anymore. It was Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and all the greatest songwriters of the 40’s. Those were the songs that were being played because I was born in ’41, and I was growing up with my mum singing all the time.

That was significant because I was surrounded by music. It wasn’t classical music; it wasn’t performance per-se, but it was beautiful melodies from the great songbook enduring in beautiful words. Have you ever listened to them? Mm-hmm. You have to listen to them. Like in our ballet class—“I can’t help loving that man of mine!” Yes… you hear me sing it. (Laughs…) That’s Gershwin! **Sings**

 

Fish gonna swim; birds gonna fly,

I’m gonna love one man ‘til I die.

Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine…

 

And that’s only the opening little verse, but they are all… Ella Fitzgerald—do you know Ella Fitzgerald? Mm-hmm, and jazz and big band and all the musicals, like Oklahoma. Oklahoma came out then. Show Boat… Yes. Some of the songs in those early Broadway musical theatre productions are enduring today. They are just as beautiful. “Surry with the Fringe on Top”—do you know that one? Oh, yeah! From Oklahoma! From Oklahoma. And of course, the Oklahoma theme (starts singing). The lyrics are so very, very beautiful! We can’t hold a candle to them today.

Anyway, that was part of my up growing, as was poverty. We didn’t think of ourselves as poor; we didn’t know what it meant to be poor, so it was not a negative association for us at all. But we were poor. There were four children in the family eventually. My dad, who had his own little business before the war, lost his business during the war. He had been apprenticed as a carpenter in his early teens. His business was in repairing and making fine furniture. I think he was a master carpenter, but nobody was making and repairing fine furniture during the war. (Laughs…) We were lucky we could save a stick of furniture from the bombs!

So, his business went away. He did not serve in the army because he had a congenital heart murmur. He had had rheumatic fever as a small boy, and rheumatic fever, in those days, was often not diagnosed or treated. It frequently left its sufferers with a heart valve deficiency, so those people with a heart ‘murmur’ were always asked, “Did you have rheumatic fever?” In many cases, the patient did not know or remember.

My father did not pass his physical for war service, so he worked with the Civil Defense, getting people out of burning buildings and saving people from bomb devastation. My sister and I have determined that when I was two and a half (around the summer of 1943) and she was three and a half, something occurred that we remember as if it were yesterday.

She and I shared a bedroom in the upstairs of our very small railway house; it was a brick house that my parents rented from the Railway Company. (My dad didn’t work for them, but somehow, we lived in one of their houses.) We had a front garden—mostly grass and michaelmas daisies—and a very small back garden. About 25-30 feet up a steep embankment from that garden was a railway line. It was the Great Western Railway that traversed South England at its widest dimension from the West Country to the seashores of the East. Trains rattled by all the time as we were growing up. We didn’t notice them much, except during the war.

At that time, outside our back window (our bedroom faced the railway line)… First of all, they had huge barrage balloons hanging in the air. Have you ever seen a barrage balloon? It’s like a Good Year blimp that you would have floating over a ballgame, but these were all gray. They were like huge, gray elephants up there, and they were a screen, a barrier against an aircraft coming in to bomb us. So, we became accustomed to seeing these huge objects floating around in the sky, day and night.

Then, we had an Ak-Ak gun—an anti-aircraft gun on the railway (you could see it), as it would trundle back and forth. There was a siding that it would go into if a train was due, but it was constantly firing if there was some foreign object in the sky. They, of course, would be alerted to shoot it down. So, this was one of my very first memories. I also remember the milk trains carrying supplies coast and on to the frontlines across the Channel. The trains would come down that railway line shrouded in black whispering a muffled clack-clack, clack-clack—very quiet.

Everything was shrouded in black; we were not permitted to use lights in our houses. We had to have complete blackout conditions, so that the enemy would not have a target. All the time? Yes, because we were constantly being invaded from the air. Anyway, it was night, and we were up at the window because the Ak-Ak gun was just so noisy. We were up there looking, and as it fired, it would illuminate the sky. Then, all at once, we saw this black, rocket-shaped object with flames just flaring from its tail. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and it was terrifying for us. We both instantly started to scream loudly. We couldn’t interpret it. You don’t even wait; it was just a reaction.

My mum and dad hadn’t gone to bed, yet. My mum was knitting; my dad was reading the newspaper. I remember all the details of this, and they just scurried up the stairs. The stairs were like this narrow (shows me with her hands). Two people side-by-side could not run up the stairs. They were steep like little cottage stairs. So, they were falling and bumping each other, coming up the stairs, and they grabbed us. They didn’t know what we were screaming about. They grabbed us out of our beds, and just as they did, the whole house shook… This was the very first V1 rocket and had been fired in Germany with a time mechanism to come over London (just where we lived) and then cut out and drop and bomb. It gave us no warning, no whine.

There was a V2 rocket, which came later. They were both just devastatingly destructive to the city of London. But that bomb had dropped in the street next to ours. That’s why we saw it—because it was on its way down. If it had hit a structure along the way, it would have exploded, of course. My mum and dad had no idea what it was. It was all big news the next day.

Then, as a result of that, we—the children of London—were evacuated out of the city of London and maybe some of the other cities, too. (You might know this story.) The people of the countryside and the smaller towns in England opened their homes to take the children of London in and keep them safe during the war. I remember very well. We went to two places; we were miserably unhappy in both of them. Many things that I won’t go into happened in these various homes that are not good memories of that time. Eventually, my mum who came to visit (I think on Saturdays only) decided, “Enough of this. We’re going back to London. We will take the risk.” It was a very calculated decision on her part because there was bombardment danger in London, but she could see that we were not being well cared for and that we were very unhappy.

So, we spent that time between when she came for us and the end of the war in London. We would retreat to an air raid shelter. Whenever it was possible to do so, the yard of each individual house in England was excavated, and an air raid shelter was built underground. It was damp and cold. We would go down there and spend the night because the bombing usually happened at night. Every night? Every night. It seemed the wail of the sirens were always sounding. I’ll never forget that sound and the instant fear that followed. Toward the end of the war, though, my mum and dad stopped going down there because we would all wake up in the morning with puffy eyes because of the dampness. We would all be coughing. My mum said, “You know, it was a choice.” It was always a choice. Either go down there and be safe if you got a direct hit, or go up into your house and not have all these physical reactions.

We had a big, big, huge oak trestle table, so it had great bulges of oak legs and then a single, connecting, strong board underneath. It was very heavy and very thick and wide enough that we could make beds under it. We slept on one side or the other of this trestle. Bombs would be landing; we would hear them. The house would shake. My dad would say, “If this house takes a bomb, this is probably the safest place.” We also had a cupboard under the stairs, and that was another alternative place. For wartime experiences, there are many in detail, but those are the ones that stand out in my mind.

During the war and after the war, food was scarce. We had ration books, so each family could only buy a certain number or amount of anything. Everything wasn’t always available anyway, so we eeked out a pretty narrow diet of essentials. But the government was very wise about trying to maintain the health of the children. At clinics that were dispersed throughout London in every borough (district), essential foods were available and free, such as cod liver oil, which I loved. My mum would go and get a bottle as often as possible. Again, it was rationed and depended on the number of children you had. At that time, my mum had my sister and me.

We had a teaspoon of cod liver oil every day, and we had evaporated milk or sometimes even condensed milk. Have you ever had evaporated milk? It’s sort of like Carnation in a can that has been boiled, and it’s got a slightly different taste from milk. It’s very nourishing. We also had dried egg powder. We didn’t have eggs because all the eggs were being supply-lined to the troops, so we had egg powder, and we had to reconstitute it. I remember so well those three and orange juice. My mum would get a small bottle of concentrated orange juice. I am certain that the reason we came through the war in decently good health as children (with all the deprivation that there was) was that the government provided these essential nutrients through their clinics that were everywhere.

However, we couldn’t get just anything we wanted until about ten years after the war. It took the country an incredibly long time. Maybe not ten, maybe six years. That’s a long time. It took ever so long for the farmers and the crops and the population that it took to run the farms and the factories in the cities—the whole infrastucture. We were just so devastated after the war.

I think having lived through that with my sister, it is easy to see why people who are not bombarded, like people in America, have no concept of what it is like to live through the terror of that warfare with Germany. Of course, it was our second war of the twentieth century against that terrible foe, and the country was on its knees at the end of that war—financially bankrupt. The citizens and all the buildings in London had been bombarded. It was such a difficult thing to build back from, and we could not have done it without the help of America—not only America coming into the war and helping to win it, but also helping us to recover from after-the-war. We were all very well aware of that and have never stopped being thankful.

Our school was a walking distance away from the house, and I remember in some of those very first years when we went to school, we would occasionally be called to the nurse’s office. On this occasion, everyone was filed into there, and we were given something like Ovaltine or hot chocolate powder. It was sweet, and it would be leftover supplies from the war that had been provided by the United States.

To prepare us, the school would send home a note: “Please bring some paper bags.” In those days, we saved every paper bag. We saved everything and anything that was useful and could be saved. Candy, which in England was called “sweets,” was displayed loose in bins or behind glass, then weighed, and poured into a paper bag not much bigger than a French Fry bag. We would take the paper bags into the school, and they would fill them with “this” chocolate powder. I will never forget the taste of this divine chocolate powder because we just didn’t have such luxuries. In fact, I have been searching for that particular flavor for the rest of my life. “Oh, can I taste that chocolate powder? Is that from America?” I wanted to find that fabulous nectar that I remembered from the war! (Laughs…) I never did find it. Anyway, these are funny little things that stay with you through your life.

 

(To be continued in following sections…)