I do not believe in coincidences. That my life and dance have been intertwined within me since before my birth is completely obvious to me. And not just dance, but the theater of dance. As long as I can remember, the world of theater has been my world. I see the theater and its dance movements everywhere: in the city street, in the quiet rural evening, in the passersby on the road, in the flight of autumn leaves falling, in the rustle of the wind, and in the frozen architecture.

In one of my interviews, I said that I see music. The journalist who was interviewing me either didn’t understand or thought I was showing off. But it’s the truth: when I hear music, movements, scenes, and action are born in my mind. That’s why I often have to turn off the music in the car when I’m driving, to stop the dance.

The first dance I remember was the dance of a duckling and a frog. Perhaps that’s when my grandmother read me “The Tale of the Ugly Duckling Tim.” I made up the dance myself and performed it for my mother and a guest in the big room of our apartment (we had already moved into a new apartment in the rapidly developing Preobrazhenskaya area of Moscow). The dance was accompanied by the sounds of the duckling and the frog, made by me. I immediately received a number of critical remarks. I thought I had invented all those movements, but it turned out they already existed and had French names—even the frog’s jumps had a name!

I remember feeling hurt. It was hard for me to understand that my mother—a young dance teacher and emerging ballet critic—and I were destined to receive critical reviews of my work for the rest of my life. Later, I learned that my mother’s guest that evening was Elena Nikolaevna Sergievskaya, a renowned teacher from the Moscow State Choreographic School. Apparently, she highly appreciated my little performance, as she later played a role in my admission to the Choreographic School. Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I was just five years old.

From my parents’ stories, I know that the first time I was backstage at the drama theater was at six months old, at the play my father, a young director, directed. I was brought to the ballet studio, or rather, carried, not long after. That is my life; the life around me is my theater.

Before I entered the Moscow Academic Choreographic School, I grew up like many other boys from the ’60s. When I was four, we moved from a communal apartment to the new, developing area on Preobrazhenskaya. The five-story buildings constructed there were called “Khrushchyovka” by the people, after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchyov. Then we swapped our “Khrushchyovka” and my grandmother’s room in the communal apartment for a larger one in a neighboring building. And it was there that my parents’ close-knit theatrical world settled.

Like all my peers—boys and girls of the Soviet Union—I went to school at seven. In 1967, a new, just-built school № 372 opened in our neighborhood, and we were its first first-graders. Even today, when I visit my mother, who still lives in the same apartment, I often walk around the neighborhood and stop by the school. That year, the first-graders planted little birch trees. Today, there are only a few left, but they’ve grown into large, spreading trees.

I don’t know if the birch I planted as a seven-year-old Kostya is still alive, but when I touch the trees, I remember my school with affection, my friends from class 1 “A,” with whom I learned to count and write under the strict yet warm gaze of our elderly Soviet teacher, Maria Mikhaylovna. I will never forget our first teacher. Thank you so much! May your memory live on!

We got our first “A”s and “F”s; we learned to hold it in until the bell rang to use the restroom; we ran to refill our pens with ink at the desk behind our teacher’s back, just to chat; we learned to write with chalk on the blackboard, sing during music class, draw during art lessons, climb ropes in physical education, make costumes for the New Year’s performance, wash windows in class, make wall newspapers, and rejoice with the entire country at the victories of our state in space and hockey.

We didn’t forget to congratulate our teacher on Teacher’s Day—with a bouquet from the whole class, along with a poem learned by heart. On the way home, we loved to linger on the swings, forgetting the time and our homework. This often ended with the appearance of my worried grandmother with our dog on a leash.

We were children of the neighborhood—my friends and I. The friends I fought with and laughed alongside during recess, kicked a ball in the summer, and a hockey puck in the winter. We would pull glass tubes from the lamp factory on the Khapilovka River out of trash bins and spit through them at each other with seeds from shrubs, staging real battles.

We made keychains from wire we found in the garbage of the under-construction telephone station, built snow forts and stormed them, throwing snowballs at one another (yes, in Moscow, there were snowdrifts all winter long), sailed homemade ships along the spring streams, and hid in the abandoned tower of the Petrovskoye Courtyard. Before our eyes, the historic Preobrazhenskoye village was transforming into a modern city, losing its old, crooked wooden houses, past which, perhaps, soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment had once marched.

We were the generation that helped settle this new district of Moscow and grew up alongside it. Despite the fact that I only attended primary school there before entering the Choreographic School, I still enjoy staying in touch with a few of my classmates, now scattered all over the world. But the greatest joy is when we meet in our native Preobrazhenka—our Moscow.

In 1967, we got a phone in our apartment, and in 1970, a color television. These were very important events! When I was nine, my grandfather from Sverdlovsk gave me a bicycle called “Shkolnik.”

In first grade, I became a member of the Soviet children’s organization “Oktobryata.” I joined the Pioneers in Red Square, by the Mausoleum of the great leader.

Studying at the district school was boring. The time I spent with my parents at their workplaces—in training halls, the theater, and the circus (my father had moved on to become a director at the State Union Circus)—felt like a journey into another world. A world of mysterious work and magical results. I breathed this world in, absorbing its mysteries along with the sweat, tears, and joy of those around me. I wanted to be part of it.

As a child, I didn’t fully understand how to enter it. Watching the external side of this labor, I longed to be a part of it. I wrote my first script at the age of seven. I staged my first play—officially, with a poster for the district club—at the age of 11.

To be continued.

©️Konstantin Uralsky