From the moment I left for St. Petersburg, I thought that I would return to Kazan as a ballet master. And that I would teach, of course, at the Kazan Ballet School. From the first day, that's what I dreamed to do.

As soon as I learned something new, I wanted to take it to the school. I thought: "Our school is already great, so if I bring in new knowledge, it will be even better." Then I completely changed my profession, but the desire to return to school never went away; on the contrary, it only grew, because … I had discovered many new techniques, new methods.

The Kazan Ballet School was my first workshop. It may seem like I talk about St. Petersburg a lot, but throughout my life I also recalled the Kazan school quite often, because I studied there for eight years. We studied a lot, from morning to evening. This is where I learned my craft, and I'm grateful to it. It taught me to dance and gave me a profession.

Sometimes I think if I hadn't had the opportunity to go abroad and if my son had chosen to be a dancer, then I where would I send him? I dreamt to send him to our school, if not for the full eight years, then at least for four years. They teach you how to work there. You come and do the same things every day. You learn to work. Actors ... some of them ... lack this this attitude. But a ballet dancer has it: you train no matter what state you're in. Hungover, sick, it doesn't matter. Because that's the attitude in my head. It's like brushing your teeth. At first, in childhood, you probably needed the self-control, or someone to motivate you, or a teacher yelling at you, but then it all gets absorbed, from when you're ten or eleven to eighteen, right when your personality is forming, you get used to working like a horse.

Is this a path that is consciously chosen at the age of ten or eleven?

Well, there's there are always girls who are stubbornly, like, "I just want to be a ballerina, that's all there is to it." I see that often. For guys, either their mom or dad makes them.

But for me, it was more subtle. We went to the ballet. We had to see at least one or two ballet performances at the Nureyev Festival—it was just a weird rule we had—and one or two operas at the Shalyapin Festival. We walked around from time to time, wearing astrakhan hats, very ceremoniously. During the intermission, dad took me to the orchestra pit and said: "That's a clarinet, etc." During the performance, he would explain the plot: "So he fell in love, something happened, then this happened ..." Just to I didn't sit there and get bored. And I would study ahead of time: "Who composed of Giselle?" And if I got the right answer, I'd be proud. Those are some of the techniques that dad used.

That's a great way to do it. Very rare. Explaining, motivating ... "Nureyev! He's a genius! He bought an island by dancing ballet, sort of. He completely reformed ballet!" Just the stories about Nureyev were so inspiring: "He got into school at the age of eighteen!" I entered the school a year late myself. People usually enroll at the age of ten, but I entered at eleven. And Nureyev at eighteen. It was with a lot of very hard work. Well, you can see it in the photos later. It was a powerful motivator, on the one hand.

Dad was at that age, he probably thought he'd die ... That was his biggest worry: I needed a profession that would bring in bread. Well, as it were ... he probably figured that a dancer could at least somehow feed himself dancing, even if just at banquets. When I was in the fifth grade he just blurts out: "Ulym [son], you have two options. Either you'll get into ballet school … Let's see if we can do that." And that was in October, too ... he was impulsive. I would be starting with a delay of one year and one month. He probably found out about it late himself. "Or, in two years you'll go to the Tatar–Turkish lyceum to study."

When the lyceum opened, my dad taught there, too, so I had a kind of motivation to go there. For me, the deciding factor was that boys and girls study separately at the Turkish lyceum. For some reason, the presence of girls was very important to me. Really. So, I chose ballet. Intuitively ... my temperament is not such that I can sit for long classes, learn languages ... there's movement in ballet. And in your free time you can misbehave.

And girls too. In the fifth grade we had a simple dance ... called a Suvorov dance. They put me on with a girl I was in love with. I was having a great time, of course. I couldn't take my eyes off her. And they praised me: "That's how you need to dance with your partner," they said Everyone else was just moving, thinking about how to move, but I couldn't take my eyes off her.

In regards to misbehaving, I could be pretty wild, too. For that, the biggest influence in my life was probably Selet [educational children's summer camps]. For one thing, it was a Tatar environment. Secondly, I met Timur [Suleimanov, first deputy minister for youth affairs of the Republic of Tatarstan], and this was a turning point. After returning from camp, I began studying in a completely different way, both general education and dance. Somehow, influenced by Timur, I realized that you can study well and still be a normal guy. Those used to be ... two mutually exclusive things for me. Guys who study well are kind of insane. Timur taught me discipline, so to speak. Even if he's very mischievous, he knows how to do it right.

Another conversation I had sticks out in my memory, even before that, with Nadir Bagaviev [rocket designer and founder of the Bagaveev Corporation, now living in America]. He considered himself a genius even back then.

It seems like a simple conversation, but that thought was absorbed into me. And it grew ... In my first year, I started doing break dance. That is, I thought, of course if you're a genius of the body, you shouldn't limit yourself to only one genre. And you can't be arrogant. Ballet dancers can't do half of what street dancers can do. First, all the details are different, and secondly, they've just never tried it. They train for eight years to do other things.

Why did I choose break dance? I saw one performance. On a video cassette. Someone said to me "listen, we saw one guy, he does modern dance, and he looks a kind of like you." It was Flight of the Bumblebee. I watched it and fell in love with it. A one-minute video (I had no idea about contemporary dance or modern dance). I watched it and couldn't figure out: what's this guy doing? There were some classic movements, but his body was soft. He could make his body both hard and soft. He stood on one hand, did some moves. Nobody had taught me to stand on one hand. And I began to analyze it: what do I need to do to stand on one hand? I needed to sign up for break dancing.

So, I signed up for break dancing to so I could repeat this performance, as well as I could. And I repeated it, and was a hit. It became my calling card for a very long time. And at the school too. I even participated in the Nureyev Festival as a student with. Maybe that happens now, but back then it was unprecedented. Nadir's words blew up like that, yeah.

And break dancing began to work for the benefit of the school. A choreographer came to stage The Snow Queen. I was given the role of the Troll. It was the perfect role for me. It was such a great first experience, a live choreographer, and not just a repeat of what was staged a hundred years ago. You have this choreographer talking to you, asking questions, like "What can you do? Can you perform tricks that aren't done in ballet?" And this is just the moment you've been waiting for, it's ... when you can do something, you want to share it, but there's no opportunity, and all the sudden you're given the opportunity. So, I began to show him, and he used it all in the Troll's monologue. It was a very interesting experience. But for some reason the school didn't analyze it.

The teachers saw the choreographer's work, saw the result, saw that something very interesting comes out of it ... a combination of movements that don't really fit together. But somehow ... they never analyzed it.

Well, the school system is just like that; they don't talk to you too much. It's kind of ... Eastern. A bit like in the Shaolin monastery. The teacher speaks, criticizes you, you endure and listen. You get used to it after a while.

My colleagues told me that a few years ago Vladimir Vasiliev, a famous dancer, came and said to the ballet dancers: "I'm going to put on music now ... please, just improvise, dance however you want," to the artists at the Opera and Ballet Theater. He put on the music, I think it was Bach, and if I'm not mistaken, it lasts about twenty minutes ... And for twenty minutes not a single person even moved ... They didn't take a step.

Those kinds of peculiarities persist. If we solve these problems, I mean, if we add some more progressive views to the technical base, that would be great.

For example, the basic stretch. Well, as a technical point, of course, stretching is very difficult at school, but a person doing yoga can very quickly, in a few months, get a good stretch for themselves. I thought, why not introduce that into the educational system? Just two or three times a week; fine, just twice. It can't hurt, for sure, but there will be a lot of benefits. Why not tell the dancers about drama theater? Why not teach them to act like in the theater? Why not talk to those artists?

When I started studying in St. Petersburg, I was even a little hurt: "Pina Bausch danced in the seventies, and now it's 2012, and we were never told anything about her." For eleven years I was deprived of this knowledge, for eleven years now ... I had lived in the Soviet Union, and suddenly the Beatles appeared and there was jazz, and now you can dance like this and dress like that ...

Although before that, even when I was 18, Iskander Khairullin said: "Check out Pina Baush."

"Who do they think they're fooling? I can see with my own eyes: no pirouettes, no jumps, they didn't show any stretches; what are they walking around for?" That is, it was like a conveyor belt for the creation of a kind of consciousness. I came out from it with my perception expanded, but it was by accident ... an exception. My father was probably of a slightly different sort ... for eight years, he had always motivated me, talked about Nureyev, took me to museums ...

When I returned, the school was the same; nothing had changed there. I went back to school. They immediately hired me to teach acting without even discussing it. I graduated from college with honors and was considered a good student, but they hadn't seen me in six years. In six years, my views on the world, on art, on dance had changed ... They gave a course to teach, and they didn't even stop in to check on my classes; they just came to the exam. And ...

They were in shock. That's not to say that they were angry. They weren't angry. They were just ... "What was that? What have you done?" I tried to explain what we were doing for a very long time; I had an answer for everything. "Why didn't you use the program?" they asked. I said, "well, I went through that program and, in the theater, it wasn't particularly helpful. Like, if it turns out you need it, an elder and more experienced artist will show you what you need to do anyway: 'do it like that brother, do it like this here' When you start at the theater, you learn all over it again."

Well in our workshop, as they said: "we may not give you any specific knowledge, but we teach you to learn. Be flexible." And, because they had given me a folk-dance course to teach, I decided to work like that too.

I know folk-dance ensembles—they're in a dying state. They have no growth; they live only in the past, what used to be. They may disappear any day now, and only the very best ones will remain.

And hundreds of people will need to look for another job. They'll need to be flexible. Maybe they'll have to dance in videos, maybe, I don't know, master contemporary dance ... Therefore, we tried so hard to work, and it was all so difficult. Two classes a week: I went in and talked; one lesson is just talking. Another day, another lesson. And in a week, we start over. Because the rest of their days are spent in that educational system.

And the students needed each other—I understood that; otherwise, I would have to be with them twenty-four hours a day. In our Theater Academy it was like that: all teachers had the same philosophy, and all the sudden some guy named Nurbek can in and began to preach his own philosophy.

So they were in shock, of course, the teachers at the school. If I were to say that they didn't understand me, that might sound pompous ... but they probably didn't understand me. Only later did I begin to think: he who rules, his is the religion. In fact, if I feel like I've found some kind of truth, I have to try to make it (achieve it) myself. I can try, without forcing myself into their framework, because that's unpleasant for them and for me.

And ballet, especially classical ballet—in particular Russian classical ballet—it is built on form ... sincerity isn't of particular significance. These two different views probably came into conflict.

One of [Russian author Boris] Akunin's lectures touched on that: culture can be taught, but art cannot. That is, culture is what was once art; it is art that is limited by certain frameworks, canons, to which society has agreed and is ready to accept. When a form of art achieves a certain amount of popularity, it turns into a culture. But art itself it cannot be for the masses; it breaks the cultural boundaries of certain people, lifts them up to another level. Therefore, it cannot be taught. So, art schools, in the end, train people to serve culture.

Yes. And you know what gives rise to resentment? If we continue on from this division, then we find a situation in which what is already considered culture around the world is still art in Tatarstan. Some of what I do may still seem risky. It is risky, for Tatarstan. Global culture already went through it as far back as the beginning of the 20th century, and in the 1960s there was a new wave. For example, the famous Russian choreographer Eifman. Well, not ethnically Russian. He served Russian culture despite the fact that he's Jewish. He was considered very modern here. They offered him a job in America, but he turned it down, and I know why. He puts on biographical ballets, like Tchaikovsky, which is something new for Russian ballet, but for foreign countries there's nothing new about. Secondly, Tchaikovsky is for us, a very important character in Russia. That is, he's strongly associated with Russian culture. Now I think, when I go abroad, that which is art here (if we go by Akunin's criteria) has been culture there for a long time ... They have their own methods ...

Yes, and that's also a scary thought: the fear that someone else's culture will come in and push out our own. Perhaps these attempts would not have been so frightening if they had not existed in other places around the world at all. Trying not to let something in from the outside is akin to trying to survive, closing yourself in a cocoon. Like, we're better off not changing anything. We will keep what we have, and we won't change according to what others are doing ...

If you look what has happened around the world, this model leads to defeat, in my opinion. Russian ballet chose this tactic, sure ... and it led to defeat. Because there are classics that we are proud of and boast about abroad, and there are contemporary original works that no one has seen. That is, your average good dancer at the Palais Garnier works 50% on the classics and 50% on the modern dance. And for us, the classics are in a dying state and we have no modern dance. Therefore, this model has been shown not to work. At least, for ballet.

When was the last time Russian ballet made a splash in the world? Grigorovich, in the 1970s, staged Ivan the Terrible. After that, there haven't been any choreographers working with such large forms. Well, there's Ratmansky, but he works more with postmodernism ... with a kind of mockery of the past. He went in that direction, and he too is in America now. Even he's considered a shocking choreographer here, although nothing he did was particularly risky.

There has to be a lot of failure. That's the price. But out of it all, we'll come out a half a step forward. And if there is a critical mass, if we make a lot of mistakes, then maybe we'll be ready to say something new on a global scale.

And if we don't understand, and go down the wrong path? There's no guarantee.

The only guarantee is that you will die in the end. So, there is hope in opening up, even if there is risk. And here we have no risk, but there's no hope either. What hope can there be in preserving the past?

Maybe ballet lacks an explanation of what it has to reveal? To create a demand for another kind ballet? Maybe different kinds of artists and people who aren't artists at all still don't quite understand the kind of ballet which you and other ballet artists have really mastered?

Maybe. Ballet is a very closed system. If you want to understand it, you can. When I started studying at the conservatory, I began to understand it better and a thought occurred to me. It was one of those ideas that remain an idea and never goes any further: a TV show with, like a gopnik [Russian chav] dressed in leggings explaining the meaning of ballet to other gopniks. Back then there was still no YouTube. I was thinking of producing a show for the Yashlär Tuktalyshy [Youth Stop] TV show on TNV [TV station in Tatarstan]. Because there were a lot of gopniks in ballet ... there were a lot ... at one time. Now it seems to have begun to change; it comes in waves. In Soviet times there were also a lot of gopniks. Children from orphanages. Revdar Sadyikov, for example, grew up in an orphanage, and he was a great dancer in our theater. Well, there was such one wave. And when we were studying, it was children of the 1980–1990s, after all. Then, before my eyes, everything began to change. You can tell, in fact, by the hairstyles, by how they talk, by their interests. Another generation started showing up.

There are people in St. Petersburg that are explaining what ballet is. Bogdan Korolyok is a great guy. He's an awesome ballet specialist. At one time, before I left the conservatory, he was my artist. He's a dancer himself, and he ended up working with my performance. Well, it was Ildar's performance, and me and poor Bogdan were preparing it. We tortured him. But we learned many things, and for Bogdan it was an important moment.

Ildar Musin was born in Uzbekistan: his parents had moved there and, when by the time he was in school, they moved back, to Almetyevsk. He went to music school there. Then he came to Kazan and enrolled to study as an opera singer, and he studied at the theater school at the same time.

We met in St. Petersburg when I was applying to direct a ballet and he was going to be an opera director. We were roommates in the dorm, and he was the first to transfer from his university—he went into the Theater Academy. I studied at the conservatory for another year. He told me everything he had learned at the academy. Then I transferred too, but we were still roommates.

Now he's receiving a spiritual education. During vacations he returns to St. Petersburg and leads master classes.

We have a mutual friend named Aydar, and Bogdan says to him: "If everyone worked like that, then classical ballet would never have died." We worked very scrupulously, using psychology, teaching them to think on stage ... We conducted such an experiment with Ildar. The day of exams was approaching, and Bogdan still was unable to really grow into his performance. The master said to me ... it was the same choreographer who had come to Kazan to stage The Snow Queen, where I played the Troll when I was studying, named Polubentsev. He respects me as a performer and influenced my growth. He knows me well. He says, "come on, Nurbek, go perform this number yourself." I say "nope. I didn't come here to study as a dancer." Sure, I could go out and, well, dance really expressively, and the audience will like it, some of them anyways. When you've been dancing since the age of eleven, of course you know what you need to do. But I wanted something else. I said "no, I'm not going out. It'd be better for Bogdan to perform as is then for me to go out and deceive the audience." So, Bogdan did it. It was the winter semester, my last ...

Now Bogdan popularizes classical ballet. He can talk about it in a beautiful and fascinating way. You can find his lectures on YouTube and he has articles published in magazines.

After that you entered the Theater Academy?

Yes. There was a very big competition, and we were told "we don't know how to make actors out of you." That was a shock: how can that be? We tried so hard to act, and now they say that. Only later do you begin to understand: it turns out, they're just very, very sincere people. And diligent ... hardworking. Sincere and honest. You can't get anywhere without such a teacher, probably.

Mentoring has also been a very important thing in my life. As a child, when I would go to a new school, or a new teacher would come to class, I prayed that they would be kind-hearted. For me, that was somehow super important. And my prayers, thank God, were always answered. I've always had the nicest teachers.

Baybulat [Baybulat Batullin, film director and Nurbek's younger brother] and I both took gymnastics. I took it for a long time, but Baybulat couldn't, because he had a tough coach. I had a nice coach, so I worked a little harder. Maybe ... my results weren't as great as if I had a tough coach, but Baybulat refused to go at all. We have a video of him refusing to go to gymnastics when he was six or seven. We were still living on Yamasheva Street then. Dad had a big camera, which we set up with a tripod. The two of them were sitting on the couch talking and I was filming. I have this recording somewhere: "Okay, we're starting our conversation. Why don't you want to go to gymnastics, son?" Baybulat gives his arguments, and dad gives his thoughts ... In the end: no more gymnastics. Dad had some interesting methods.

When I was studying at the Academy, all three masters were supporters of student-centered pedagogy and had a grasp of psychology, so they taught us in a very comfortable manner.

We were told "the four years that you study are for expanding your boundaries, and the amount that you can expand them will be your tool.

During that period, did you feel that there were any national restrictions?

I lived in a national environment. Being a Tatar was natural for me. I did think about it at one point. When I studied in St. Petersburg, I had a classmate who had learned the anthems of different countries by heart, and in order to replenish his collection and pay me a compliment, he started looking for the anthem of Tatarstan, but couldn't find it, so he sang that song ... "Tugan yakka yul totamyn, tugan yak, tugan yak ..." [a popular Tatar song] and wherever the r sound was supposed to be, he pronounced it like ya, like with a French accent. When he was done, I said: "Thank you, that was great. Why do you pronounce r's like that?" He said: "Well, that's how you pronounce it." That's my own speech defect, though; it doesn't sound like that in the Tatar language. I still think about it as an interesting case.

And after that I realized, for my classmates, for most of them, I was the only Tatar they knew.

So that's what stuck with them: Nurbek is a Tatar. When you say Tatar, they think Nurbek. Most of them.

That's when I started to think about how conditional our elements of ethnicity are. My dad often told me: "Religion isn't an indicator of nationality." That was his theory. Because his village had been connected to a Christian village. There was a church at one end and a mosque at the other. So, since childhood, he grew up tolerant of religion. I felt the same way, and theoretically that's how I thought, but this ... fear or embarrassment of another religion ... a kind of xenophobia, fear ... I remember when I was overcome by this feeling of fear. It was in church of Tatars who had been converted to Orthodox Christianity, the Tikhvin church. When I went in there, I felt like I was betraying Islam. I started talking to myself. I said, "what did dad always say, all my life, and here I am, feeling uncomfortable in a church." And when I realized that all religions have one root, the dissonance disappeared ... at least it seemed like it. Well, anyway, on the surface it went away. Maybe it remains somewhere deep inside me, something that I can't understand myself.

At the Academy, for example, I was embarrassed to go out naked. On the one hand, all restrictions are … illusory, of course. We're just used to it. And you always need to try to get out of your zone of comfort.

I mean, being naked is natural, on the one hand. Some tribes still go naked, for example. And those tribes, those societies, there's no sexual violence, say, no vulgar looks ... Jacques Fresco talked about it in one of his interviews. He was such a romantic person. He died not too long ago. And he lived with those tribes as a teenager, and he says they go naked, and guys don't look at girls with lustfully. And in our culture ... like, in a movie ... the camera operator pans up when a female character appears ... well in popular films ... up from the legs, hips, breasts, to the face. Even if you had no such thoughts in childhood, it's gets absorbed into you, so you look. You get used to goggling, he says. And when you start thinking about it, that framework kind of goes away. In St. Petersburg, I defeated that embarrassment, for example, but in Tatarstan it came back.

I think that through criticism, these rules return. Society defends itself through criticism, as it were. Criticism drips down and drips down, eventually awakening your doubt. I came back thinking I wasn't going to pay any attention to criticism. I had known that there be some, but you start paying attention to it anyways, thinking perhaps there's some ... grain of truth to it.

On the one hand, I grew up in a Tatar environment. My dad, after all, every time we drank tea, would tell me some Tatar saying or a story about some person, and I grew up directly absorbing songs at our family meals. On the other hand, there seems to be some truth to it, because I know less Tatar literature than Russian literature, or in comparison with world literature. Not knowing it at all, though, would be stupid.

For some reason, that ... worried me. Like, Dostoevsky, for example, or Tolstoy, they created this image of peasants as godly, divine, but drinkers. Mired in laziness, sure, but godly. And you start to believe it: he's sincere ... he may never even sober up, but his soul is pure. You … how can I put it? Turn it into an archetype.

But you'd get the impression that Tatars don't have such sad villages, even if we try to look objectively. It's a different mentality. At least it was. And this gave rise to a kind of cognitive dissonance. My answer to it was that maybe Tatar literature doesn't have the same sincerity. That is, Russian literature recognizes Russian shortcomings. And by recognizing these shortcomings, it becomes stronger, so to speak ... If we're talking about literature. And this also affects theater, because Russian theater is, after all, a very literary theater.

On the other hand, my dad was born in 1938, and he said in childhood there was one drunkard in the village, that is, someone who was considered a drunkard. The collective consciousness gave him the role of drunkard. But he was like a drunkard on payday, or something. He drank once a month, in general. He drank and then walked down the street telling the truth about everyone ... The next day, he'd have a hangover, and that's it. Well, maybe he kind of ... idealizes the village. He says people started drinking after the war. There was a big change, he says, after the war.

Therefore, the reluctance to show, for example, scenes with drunkenness, these ethnic boundaries, in the theater may be an echo of a former mentality that is now being lost.

Longing for our departed image?

Yes, but it's not only a problem in theater. In our workshop, for example, the worst thing you could do was to "show." You're not allowed to show. If you start showing, you're acting. If you're acting, it's a lie. We don't want lies, either on stage or in real life. This is the philosophy I returned with.

And then, like, of course, you have theater acting. If I said that theater acting is inherent to Tatars, that would be a very big compliment. Tatar theater falls between two chairs. It has neither theater acting nor realistic acting. Of course, that's not only a problem of Tatar theater, it's a problem inherent to the system. Hiding behind the name of Stanislavsky ... and, honestly, introducing contradictions into his system: it's the same for Russian theater. That is, it's not a problem of the ethnicity of the theater, but the education system.

After all, our course was assembled at the Russian Youth Theater in St. Petersburg, so I know all the ins and outs of theater.

Therefore, I was either going to die trying to change the big ol' St. Petersburg Youth Theater or I would return here ... Well, not that I thought that I would die, of course, but I definitely had the desire to try to change it. And from the very beginning I had a fixed goal: return. Well, first and foremost I had to return as a Tatar ballet master. That's how I imagined it, dreamed about it. I wrote about projects connected with the music of Mubai and the music of Alfia apa [aunt Alfia] in my diary.

After leaving ballet and graduating from the Theater Academy—before I even got my diploma—Renat Ayupov [chief director of the Kariev Theater] called me. "After you finish your studies, will you come work at our theater?" It was like the universe was offering me a job, and you can't turn that down. So, I agreed.

I had been ready for that, and I was strong at that time. Compared with today ... I had a kind of spiritual strength in me. I knew what I would be returning to, what's in Kazan, what's in the Tatar Youth Theater. I was ready for the stress. The effect of St. Petersburg lasted one or two years. The actors told me that it was impossible to make me mad, that I was so calm. I was calm because I understood why someone was crying, why he was nervous, that he needed help. And then I would close my eyes to it, like ... I didn't have the energy left in me to worry about someone else's grief. That might sound scary, well, after saying it out loud, I guess it does.

The actors would ask me every week: "you're not leaving? Aren't you going to leave?" For some reason, at first, they were afraid that I would leave. For about half a year. In the second year, they calmed down and began skipping classes when they realized that I was not leaving.

I understood many things there, what works and what doesn't work. I understood that repertory theater cannot be changed. I understood the artists. I talked to them. On the one hand, they're very eager for a new job; on the other hand, they're afraid to leave the repertory theater, because it's still very difficult for actors to make a living working freelance here.

In addition to this, our audience isn't very discriminating. Old ladies sit there, commenting. "Oh, he looks nervous, he needs to drink magnesium," says one. I mean, she doesn't think that the actor is acting. This puzzled me. I look at the audience, then at the stage, and then I remember my years of study.

For one thing, the viewer hasn't seen any other art. And even they have, they won't be able to really assess it. Here [Greek–Russian conductor, musician and actor Teodor] Currentzis has an interesting anecdote on this topic when he was talking about highly artistic music. He says he left the theater in Perm late (after a banquet I think) and was carrying very expensive French wine. Well, if you really understand wine, you'd know it's really expensive. And a bum, he says, was sitting on the curb and he decided to treat him. The homeless man tried it and said: "not as good as Cahors." If you're used to drinking Cahors your whole life, then good wine seems bad.

And then another question arises: for what kind of audience do I want to work? Should I lower the bar to the level of the viewer, or do I want to grow? A dispute about this arose during while getting ready for a performance.

In addition to little old ladies (I was being pissy. I mean the audience as we imagine them), there are professors, literary critics, writers, other artists, and audiences who understand art. Only for some reason they aren't presented as audiences.

Then we tried to stage Tañ vakyty [a Tatar play] separately from the theater, in the Moskovskiy Cultural Center. Despite the criticism of my work, it was an all-new experience for the artists. They went out without makeup; they saw themselves beautiful. They didn't have to pretend to be someone. It's a psychologically gratifying, and I wanted to share that feeling.

You can't get by without acting in real life, but the stage is a zone of freedom granted by Allah. There we can try to cast off rules and canons, so that we don't cast them off, don't test them, in real life. Because if you start testing them in real life, you create chaos or ... you can do damage to your health or life. There's a theory that when the state begins to repress the theater, take away its freedom, then the theater extends to the state, and the state itself becomes theatrical, with parades and book burnings; these are all very theatrical actions, costumes, marches, rhythms. Theatrical techniques are introduced into real life. That's why it's not a good idea take away the freedom of the theater. Theater heals society. It's a form of psychotherapy.

I've been working freelance since September, but I still work under the initiative of other people. I'm kind of a non-freelancer like that. Always unripe, avoiding the moment, as it were, to try to keep up. That's what Ildar says to me. I had the idea to go to Spain to study with one teacher. He said: "What, you don't know enough as it is? It's time to start to working." And it's true. I sit here and tell you what I've already learned, and I can't even fully put it all to use. It's probably me trying to escape my responsibilities.

What I'd like to do is narrow down my field to only dance, and create my own system, a system of education ... If I organize that, then I can relax. Maybe I'll get a student, then another ... And then, perhaps, I'll end up with a small troupe.