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"DIANA VISHNEVA: BEAUTY IN MOTION"
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LIFE (fragment)
Page 8

...As a child, Diana shared her mother’s confidence in her own potential. Beyond her love of dancing, she knew that if she set her mind to mastering a physical task, she would eventually overcome her difficulties and achieve what she was after. Some early ballet pictures taken at the Academy show Diana as a spirited young classicist in a platinum wig and draperies, arms already stylishly in place, her brown eyes lit with an expression of radiant happiness. “I have always believed in what I was doing, and I always wanted to do what was not expected of me,” Diana says. “When I was young, my teacher once said to me: ‘Everything is good, but, of course, your leg is not quite high enough.’ She said it simply, not trying to scold me, but after the school had closed for the night, I’d go into the studio and I did everything I could to lift that leg higher. And the teacher could not believe it later, because it did go higher.”

If her first year at the Vaganova Academy seemed difficult, at times, Diana’s entry into this hermetic world of elegance and devotion to beauty also transformed her profoundly. She now sees a clear line of demarcation, separating her ordinary existence before entering the Academy from her life afterward, when she assumed her true identity as a dancer. As unfamiliar as the ballet world first appeared, she greeted it whole-heartedly as her destiny. Previous times seem strange to her now, and she no longer recognizes the person she was as a small child.

“I was a totally different person,” Diana says. “When I came to the ballet school, I changed radically. Everything changed. I was immersed in a completely different atmosphere, among completely different people with whom I wasn’t familiar.  Growing up in a family of scientists, I hadn’t been taken to the theater very often; and when I was plunged into that atmosphere, I changed immediately. I would not go home if I had free time.  Instead, I would visit my friends or some artistic family.  I was much more interested in that. I even asked my parents to let me live in the dorm, so that I wouldn’t have to go home every night.

“My understanding of myself only began once I stepped over the threshold of the ballet school.  I started taking responsibility for myself, and I became absolutely independent in all my actions and my thinking.
“I always felt like an adult with adult responsibilities, never like a child,” the ballerina continues reminiscing about her younger self. “I never needed to play games. Either I read adult books, or I’d talk to adults. I liked talking to them and discussing topics that were not at all child-oriented.  You know, at parties there is always a children’s table and an adult table, and I would always go to the adult table.  Children were never interesting to me.”

© Robert Johnson