Thoughts of a dancer

Garbuzov Vadim

Там же в машине. Мы поравнялись с джипом. В нем пара лет сорока. Бородатый мужчина с выпученными глазами выглядит немного озабоченным. Вадик наделяет его голосом:

– Martha, do not look at them! Just pretend you do not see them!

Passages on searching sponsorship in Toronto with Nadiya.

– Where is your coach?

– Right now, he is using an opportunity of making $60 an hour.

Dancing boss. We anticipated first real chance.

– We are dancers, and we know that you too… We are looking for sponsorship…

– How did you get into the building?

Bank president secretary. Leave before security throws you away.

We enter every door in a high-rise. How did you find us? Oh! We searched on the web, in Yellow Pages…

Delegation from Holland. So much garbage here. This room is bad. We are not from Holland, but we have been there.

We walk into the Hershey Corporation of chocolates knowing we are not going to get any sponsorship, but feeling hungry and in hope to try some chocolates. We do not tell it to each other but know it in our minds and recognize each other’s look. As we go in there, many important people go around waiting for the meeting. We see the receptionist and Vadim starts telling her the speech we learned by heart forever and used for thousands of times in other companies.

«We are Canadian Champions… looking for sponsorship». While he is speaking, he looks at the dish of chocolates on the left side not concentrating on the receptionist. In the middle of the speech, he totally starts telling the speech to the chocolates as if they were to sponsor him. The receptionist interrupts him: «You can help yourself».

Vadim and Nadiya approach the important law office. The receptionist listens to them and calls to the manager: «There are to people from, sorry, what is your organization?» – «Ballroom dance association». – Bowling association. So, they are looking for your funding.» We hear very angry response on the phone. She with embarrassment that we are listening, turns to us, makes a nice face and says: «You can drop off your promotional materials, pamphlets and flyers so committee can look at it at their meeting next year?»

We have so many business cards with notes «call next year», «call in two years»… So, we imagined what could happen in 10 years if they suddenly call us back when the sport gets popular, they start to get interested in it, and we already drop dancing by then.

Vadim Garbuzov around 2002

Note on judging criteria in arts

In Bratislava we did fine – 2 in St and 3 in Lat and decided to try Adult Standard after good Youth and were 8th out of 33. I did not see so much corruption before. We, thanks to God, were in good position, by points we are first in Austria Youth in all 3 programs from today. But in general, at this competition, they left the best couple in semi-final, the semi-finalist couple they made first and second couple they made fourth. Horror! And they say Ukraine is politicized. I regret that it is hard to achieve in dance fully honestly. You can be best, but the other can easily say that marked you down because he is looking for other criteria in dance. Who will accuse him for that? It is also bad that in our business there are no exact criteria of victory as in run or long jumping. They can define for real who won. But the art is all like that. I, for example, do not see what is so good in Mona Lisa. These are all intricacies of our job. An artist can find the beauty in ugliness and make it still better. We, people of art, bust use our artistic intuition as opposed to scientists, where only calculation works. One should not enter the dance vocation with IQ lower than 100. It is all silly when they say that he just dances. If he achieved something, if he amazes people and they long to him, then he is not simply dancing, but uses full-size his brain, constantly finds out new things and works with his body not less than some athletes. I say it not about myself, but about art as a whole.

Vadim Garbuzov, 10 September, 2004

Personal thoughts

Nobody can achieve perfection; the path is endless and ongoing. The closer we get the smaller our movement towards perfection becomes. The changes that we make become towards improvement are more petite in size.

At the level of the top three couples in the highest categories, we don’t see a big change in their performance from year to year in Blackpool. It’s the couples that have a long way to go to the top that can make a huge improvement from competition to competition in the duration of one week sometimes.

Having achieved a very high level we will witness only small changes in the dancer’s overall performance and they themselves (dancers) don’t know if it’s for the better or for the worse.

Vadim, Saturday, 9 October, 2004

Siebrand world Latin trophy 2005

In the dancing world, apart from the traditional competitions couples attend at their own cost, there are invitational competitions paid by the organizer. This competition is one of the veterans in the invitational world. It’s been around for about 20 years and many of the greats of the competitive dance scene such as Marcus and Karen Hilton have attended this event.

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