The Desire to Dance is More Important than Natural Talent

The Higher School of Economics boasts several dozen dance studios. One of the oldest is the Sona Hovsepyan Dance Company, which has been operating at HSE since 2007. Correspondents for HSE News visited a modern jazz dance class at the studio, and heard first hand from students about how they manage to combine hobbies with their studies, and what future doing dance opens up for them.

Dance studio head Sona Hovsepyan calls her troupe a ‘big tree with many branches of development’. One branch involves amateur dance groups that HSE students are involved in. They study modern jazz dance, hip hop and tap dance and everyone is welcome.

‘If you want to dance well, you really do need some natural talent – flexibility, coordination, a sense of rhythm, but it is much more important to have the real desire to do it and that you take it seriously,’ Sona Hovsepyan says. ‘If you really want to learn how to dance, it’ll work out. I get students who’ve never danced, and then they achieve results that no one could have expected. We’re training dance groups now for the Festos student arts festival, which will take place in April. The students who will be representing HSE at Festos are students who came to me in September and couldn’t dance at all, and now they’re dancing. Two people from the HSE Lyceum are getting ready to enter the Russian Tap Dance Championships.’

While everyone may have heard about hip-hop and tap, modern-jazz is much less well known. It developed in the late C19th – early C20th in the United States and Germany. It is built on rejecting the dance canon, adopting new themes and expressing human feelings through movement.

‘I came to the studio last November, before that I had only studied dance as a child,’ said Evgeny Potapov, a third-year computer security student at HSE who is learning modern-jazz dance in Sona’s studio. ‘And then there was about a decade-long gap. Of course modern-jazz dance is not like ball-room dancing. You have to place your feet and carry your body differently. In ballroom dancing you have to keep your spine straight, like a pencil, and in modern-jazz your body needs to move like a snake.’

‘I’ve been with Sona’s group for a year now, and before that I tried all kinds of things. But I like modern-jazz, the focus on your flexibility, using dance to express different states of mind and human emotions,’ Anastasia Burzak, a History of Arts student at HSE said.  Darya Savon (Advertising and Public Relations) however finds expressing emotions through dance to be particularly challenging. ‘I particularly like that we’re not learning the foundations of dance, but interesting, skills, movements taken from a variety of different dance styles, and there is a lot of focus on improvisation. Honestly, that’s what I find hardest. I remember the movements easily, but using them to express something personal – that’s quite a challenge for me,’ she said. The second branch of this dance group is formed out of these amateur classes – a professional group, including four HSE students as soloists (Polina Tikhonova, Anastasia Torbeeva, Ekaterina Chernova, Ekaterina Rubtsova).

 

Ballet ‘The Taste of Pomegranate’. Extract

‘The group’s repertoire includes several different shows,’ Sona Hovsepyan eplains. ‘In autumn 2014, the group performed Human Voice, based on a Jean Cocteau melodrama, in Paris. Last year, we performed The Taste of Pomegranate, a story of lost humanity ripped away from its roots, at Theatre Luny (Moon). Together with the well-known accordionist Arseny Strokovsky, we pondered the secrets of femininity in the show Dark Femininity, and won the grand prize at the Klyuchi festival. In late March tutors came from New York to give students several free master-classes. This is a joint project with the United States Embassy that we launched this year,’ Sona said. ‘One of the key points in development for any dancer is to have the opportunity to learn from different experts, to absorb different styles and types of dance. When I started out I remember that I spent five years going to master-classes, having one-on-one tuition with teachers from Europe and America. And now the students also have this opportunity. And that’s wonderful because it also expands their understanding of dance.’

Can you take dance seriously and also study? ‘The question of how to do both dance and study really shouldn’t come up,’ says Anastasia Burzak. ‘Because no one will really spend all their free time on dance. I love dancing, it’s really hard work and the source of great joy.’ Darya Savon is equally confident that combining dance and studies is doable. ‘Of course it can be difficult, for example, I had to change the time for an interview about an internship, because we had a master-class. But if you really want it you can find a way out, moving things around, do some things earlier. Dance really doesn't get in the way of studying’ she says.