Iana Salenko: The bitter taste of coffee and glamour

“I attained 24 having it all: a successful career in ballet, material wealth, fame. Inevitably I was wondering what’s next. My husband came with the answer: a child. Two years after I had to start over, to come back on the stage, to relive the emotion and the difficulty of the beginning. In life the rhythm repeats”, Iana Salenko tells me, special guest of the show La Sylphide, played on the stage of the National Opera of Bucharest a short time ago.

How small is such a great ballerina! The smallness that I was discovering in her is synonym with delicacy, with fine features, with dimensions which impose through the chill that pervades them and not through the sum of the centimeters on the vertical or horizontal. Iana’s spark subsists in the eyes. She talks with admiration about her work and with the voice full of emotion about family: “I don’t believe in friendship. I am a woman, I care about my family. That doesn’t mean I’m not an extrovert, I don’t pretend, I can talk sincerely about anything with anyone, but for me friendship has a more profound meaning. I had friends, but at a certain point, everyone went their way. Now I have the family.”

5 minutes of glamour

The famous Ukrainian ballerina believes in luxury, that element which beyond taking your eyes is a persistent memory. Creation is a process of which few people are genuinely capable and for that one must search, try and experiment, apparently with no connection between these actions.  I know that dance is very difficult to analyze, you only have the memory of the moves which disappear in a moment. Maybe that’s why I consider myself a creator of emotions. This is what I create through dance. I also know that emotions fade away, but tomorrow I wake up again and I start over.” She loves classic ballet as much as she loves contemporary ballet. Timed or free moves, the visual effects they have on the spectator is increased by the intention of the moves’ execution. Far from a constrained modesty, she confesses that the glow is the thing that maintains the life of an artist, the assertion of oneself and the recognition of their own identity. “I believe that those five minutes of applause at the end of the show are a gift. They fill you with energy. In my case, for example, is hard with two jobs: mother and ballerina. I sometimes get to sleep only for a few hours a night, I wake up, I dance, I sleep for a few more hours; those minutes of glow are worth the whole effort.”

The body of today in the yesterday’s mirror

At a first look you would say that she is 20 years old. When she starts to talk you realize that life experience comes with a special charm which manifests on the stage as well as in the conversation. She is aware that everyone has a different body and a unique mentality. I want to know what kind of dialogue Iana has with her body, how she was talking yesterday and how she talks today. She smiles, looking for the answer by remembering the hours spent training hard. “In the first phase you think a lot about your body, practically, then you discover it as an instrument of experiencing the technique you learn at school. You are focused on the correct execution of the moves, on their accuracy. Through time you get to know yourself, to know your body, to take over it. That’s how you get to a level of freedom when you don’t think about the body itself, but about the emotion you create with its help, about the emotion of the dance.” She doesn’t want more, she is self-sufficient and for her is enough to dance with passion, faith, intensity on the great stages of the world. She doesn’t want to be choreographer or director, she wants to be woman, she wants many children to whom she would dedicate the time that these hard jobs require. “Women feel freer nowadays, but also more masculine.” I don’t deny it, taking into consideration that I grew up with four brothers, always surrounded by men. For this reason, to stop my tears in the difficult moments, I used to tell myself that men don’t cry.”

The bitter taste of coffee

We raise our cups of coffee simultaneously. Iana Salenko throws a glance at the empty saucer as I ask her what she likes about coffee. I find out that not the coffee is important, she could trade it anytime for water or tea. Not even the specific bitter taste or its color, but the ritual of the conversation for which the coffee acts as a pretext or catalyzer. I put down the pen with the enthusiasm of a person who got the answers to their question. In a few hours, Iana Salenko was about to get on the ONB stage in the role of Sylphida. Before getting out the door I want to find out what is the message that this show sends her. “La Sylphide talks about people’s imagination. I always had the impression that somebody else is better than somebody.”

Translation by Cristina Maria Tanase