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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

I'm a sucker for dancers

By: Doug Speirs

Posted: 05/14/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Being a classy, PBS-watching columnist, I decided to spend the weekend soaking up culture, because my wife is tired of watching the NHL playoffs.

On Friday night, for instance, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet invited me to get off the couch, drive downtown and conduct a highly cultured Q & A session before a performance of their season-closing show, Pure Ballet.

So there I was, a newspaper columnist the size of a large kitchen appliance, parked on a little stool in front of hundreds of devoted ballet enthusiasts, while perched on the stool next to me was the beautiful, and much smaller, Carrie Broda, the beloved blond ballerina who danced in her final shows this weekend after 14 seasons with the RWB.

The first hard-hitting ballet-related question I fired at Carrie was whether it was true that while your standard ballerina subsists largely on a diet of low-calorie wood chips and diet celery, she enjoyed nothing more than a big feed of Kraft Dinner with cut-up wieners.

Carrie politely explained that, yes, she is pretty fond of KD and wieners, but stressed she was not in the habit of eating something heavy like that before going on stage, which made a lot of sense to me.

Then -- and I'm still not sure why I thought this was a good idea -- I started asking a bunch of nosy questions about how it felt to be hanging up her pointe shoes and stepping away from a career and colleagues she loved so deeply. Always Mr. Sensitive, I even asked whether her final performance with the troupe would be like the famous last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, wherein Mary and the other cast members clung to one another in a giant emotional huddle and refused to let go.

Thinking how witty I was being, I casually glanced over at Carrie and -- uh-oh! -- that's when I noticed tears were slowly trickling down her cheeks as she looked out at her adoring fans.

"Awwwwww," is what the audience said en masse.

"Yikes! What have I done?" is what I quietly thought to myself.

In the end, Carrie got her revenge when she and dancer husband, Alexander Gamayunov, whose rippling stomach muscles could easily deflect bullets, performed a farewell pas de deux so powerful and so moving even hardened newspaper columnists in the fifth row became misty-eyed.

"What's wrong with you?" my wife demanded as I sniffed quietly in the dark.

"A bug flew in my eye," I grunted, frowning in a manly way to convey the concept she shouldn't be so nosy.

Speaking of emotions running high at cultural events, on Saturday night I helped judge Dancing with Celebrities, in which six local personalities were paired with seasoned dancers in a glitzy ballroom competition in support of Society for Manitobans with Disabilities/Easter Seals.

The winning celebrity was Gail Asper who, along with dance partner Brenda Gorlick, was a force of nature in a very sparkly dress. The gala ended with a heart-rending performance by SMD's inspiring All Abilities Dance Group, many in wheelchairs, who strutted their stuff, faces shining with pure joy.

To say there was not a dry eye in the house is like saying the Titanic sank after taking on a certain amount of water.

The cultural point I'm making -- and for once I am making one -- is that you should all try dancing like no one is watching, or at least watch someone else dance like no one is watching.

You should probably bring along a big box of Kleenex, too.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 14, 2012 A2

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