Start From the Inside

I’ve risen on the foreign culture. There was a Soviet heritage in Ukraine that I partly liked: some movies, cartoons, etc. But I can’t even compare it to American works of art I love since my childhood.

When I was a kid I thought about those movies and books as of creations of people of absolutely another type. For me, they were like aliens who’ve succeeded in creating interesting and atmospheric stories in books or exciting movies. Then I became older and while Russian-speaking countries just started to copy that they’d seen at the end of the last millennium and at the beginning of the new one, I saw that aliens-foreigners leaped hundred gigantic steps forward. And the Internet helped to see that difference even more clearly.

I’ve chosen to become a professional dancer so I used to watch a lot of dancing videos to learn and to inspire myself, and I must admit that dancers from other countries are incredible. I also think that the difference between their skills and the skills of our dancers is the same as the difference between the mentioned books or movies. That dancers are like robots with the souls of people.

I must admit, the older generation doesn’t take it. My grandmother thinks that we should consume the content that was produced here, in our homeland or nearby (of course, she is saying this in other words). But I and a lot of my peers are fond of foreign culture and, of course, we are trying to copy it. We are filming something, writing thrilling stories, learning to create videogames, dancing like them, and singing English songs. But there’s one problem and I think that until we understand it, we won’t succeed.

We just copy and don’t perceive what moves these art forms forward.

Recently I had an amazing 4-days dancing workshop from Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich. They are amazing. Though I’ve professionally learned dance art for four years and seen a lot of dancers in real life and on the internet, a couple of years before I might think Iratxe and Igor were like those aliens, the level of whom neither I nor other dancers from here would ever reach. Fortunately, I become a little older and I understand that it’s possible. It just requires a ton of work, much more than you’d do just to become a dancer and earn money dancing. More importantly, they even told what else should we do to succeed besides just hard working.

Igor came up with that example just randomly but I still want to note that these are his words (and vivid examples are mine):

Imagine you are filming a movie. You are responsible for a lot of operations, but the main things you are doing are: organizing all those operations so they will combine in an action and making sure that it looks great on the screen. As a viewer, you can see just that picture created by actors, director, operator, and other professional people. Director has made everything for that picture to look great. On the other hand, he knows hidden ways that made that movie to work.

For example, as a viewer, you can’t take a breath following the scene battle. Yeah, it’s spectacular. There are dozens of people in the scene and epic music is playing. But you may not even notice that everything was taken in one shot.

Then you are turning from a viewer place to a director place. You want to make the same epic battle, but you are failing. You don’t know what made this movie so cool and you are just trying to copy that.

The same is in dance. We see a lot of great “robots” that make seemingly unbelievable things. We are trying to repeat but what we get are just failures or, even worse, injuries.

That’s because we don’t understand how those dancers move. We don’t know what’s moving their feet, fingers, head, and all the body. We don’t know whether they imagine something or stay clear in their minds. We just copy the image.

I also must admit that there a lot of examples of people who move abroad and start creating big things. What makes that happen? Is it the change of those people? Or is it the influence?

I also must admit that just the standards of living are different. For example, while Americans are creating their regular great novel we are just struggling to live. And maybe, we physically can’t reach that level yet.

I started with the point that this may be a problem for art. But maybe, looking more carefully, we can find the same things everywhere: our daily life, our approach towards a job, leisure, and relationships.

So, I do want to think about this more in the future, but after I heard that idea just about dancing, I can’t unthink it regarding all other spheres of life. I have a lot of sources of inspiration and now I’m not regretting them. I’m just going to start finding out what inspires them.

If you like something, don’t just copy the idea. Try to build it from the ground-up. Try to understand why do you like it. And then start doing. Start doing not because you want to create something you liked, but because you like creating it and you believe that doing that someday you’ll create something others will love. Our world is built on different things. But the ideas are what moving it forward.

I’m not a native English-speaker. This story may contain all kinds of mistakes but I’m learning not to make them. I like writing and writing in English is the best opportunity for me to gain more readers. I’ll be glad to hear from you not just about my thoughts, but also about my letters and words, and I’ll become better. I promise.