Can a World-Class Ballet Dancer Be Trained in Jerusalem? Part I

If you were to draw a map of world dance, Jerusalem would hardly be among its obvious capitals. But geography, as it turns out, is a fallible guide—especially when it comes to people. In ballet, the sheer will of a great teacher has always proved stronger than any geographical convention.

And so it happens that, for many years now, Nadya Timofeyeva has been engaged in something in Jerusalem that is a ballet school only on the surface. What interests her is not merely how to teach someone to hold their body, hear the music, do a fouetté, or step out onto the stage. She wants to understand what kind of human being all of this ultimately shapes.

That is why our conversation with Nadya went far beyond the studio. We talked about discipline and freedom; about a body that must be listened to and, at the same time, taught to obey; about beauty not as an ornament to life, but as life itself; about generations of teachers who disappear along with the knowledge they carry; about artificial intelligence, which can provide an answer but cannot pass on a living tradition—and about that fragile thing so easily lost today: the direct transmission of experience from one person to another.

Nadya dreams of a school where professional ballet exists alongside painting, music, children, older people, and even animals. She talks about why adults come to the barre thirty years after giving up on a childhood dream. She explains why a poor foundation can take years of painful work to correct. And she tells us why two weeks are not enough to build a new body—but are more than enough to ignite a revolution in the mind.

This conversation brings together Jerusalem, Nina Timofeyeva, Martin Schonberg, and Tamas Moricz; a flowering tree beside an overflowing dumpster; and a spaceship carrying humanity toward the unknown while its passengers quarrel and curse along the way. And then there are two phrases that seem to encompass her entire philosophy: “You have to work” and “Maybe sometimes you have to rest.”

In the end, this conversation isn’t quite about ballet. It is about what happens to a person when, for long enough, there is another person beside them who truly knows how to teach.

                 Nadya Timofeyeva. Photo by Leonid Khromchenko

The 21st-Century Ballet School

Nadya, what should a 21st-century ballet school be? What in ballet education has become obsolete, and what has stood the test of time?

I wouldn’t say anything has truly become obsolete. Saying so would be like claiming that an earlier version of the iPhone is obsolete—it isn’t obsolete; it has simply been updated. What we are witnessing is an ongoing system update.

The classical system was constructed with extraordinary intelligence regarding human anatomy, physiology, and mechanics. The only real danger of this system was when it happened to fall into the wrong hands. In its design, everything was engineered to prevent injury. Any sport—and I would certainly classify ballet as a sport—carries an inherent risk of injury. You are human; you might feel unwell on a given day, or land poorly from a jump. But the system is built to preserve you so that you can dance at least until retirement. Therefore, the system itself has not aged out.

The human body, however, has subtly shifted—largely because rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating have exerted a profound influence on ballet. Every discipline evolves within its own sphere, yet they continually cross-pollinate. Figure skaters and gymnasts, for instance, ought to work at a ballet barre. Dancers, conversely, can increase their elevation using a skater’s training regimen and refine their flexibility through gymnastics.

Then there are modern disciplines like Pilates, which I find has a miraculous effect on the body. The only drawback is that it is remarkably expensive. We are fortunate to have Martin Schönberg, who commands all of these techniques and transmits them to our dancers. Today we also have Gyrotonic—another phenomenal method designed to intensively stimulate the entire body. It blends elements of swimming, Tai Chi, and dance, strengthening the spine while cultivating fluidity. So, no, nothing has become obsolete. Everything is simply in a state of continuous evolution.

When I was coming of age, I learned from what I could witness with my own eyes. I was extraordinarily fortunate: I grew up inside the Bolshoi Theatre. I observed true dancers who devoted their entire lives, their very souls, to serving in that temple of art. Whatever else I could find was on television or VHS; my mother filmed extensively, and I rewatched her tapes endlessly. I immersed my eyes in it over and over again.

Today, children carry the entire world in their pockets—every piece of information that exists. And children today are exceedingly bright. They simply require rigorous guidance to learn how to discern. When you open Instagram, you are bombarded by a sea of content—much of it utter trash—all presented as absolute truth. In reality, everything must be filtered through a master. Any video a child watches should be discussed.

The trouble is that children no longer know how to sit and watch something for an extended period. Yet long-form observation is essential. Once, I would sit and absorb full-length ballets for three hours straight. Nowadays, even at the Bolshoi, productions are occasionally trimmed because audiences no longer possess the time, nerve, or patience to sit through to the final curtain.

A five-second hit of dopamine reigns supreme. Information is overwhelming, and the brain cannot process the influx. This triggers a sharp decay in critical thinking—a crisis hardly unique to ballet. We are gradually morphing into a herd, easily steered and manipulated.

Yet ballet is rooted fundamentally in critical thinking. If you lack the capacity to think critically, you have no place in ballet.

The School and Critical Thinking

You place great emphasis on critical thinking. Why is it so essential to a ballet education?

A huge problem I encountered in America was a complete lack of critical thinking. There, you can’t tell a student: “My dear, with that level of commitment, success is going to have a rather hard time finding you.” You’re expected to say: “You’re so wonderful, you’re such a lovely person, but you know, perhaps if you worked for another five minutes, you’d be even more wonderful.” And, just to be clear, we’re talking about a student who is over sixteen.

This is precisely what I teach children from a tender age: they must learn to embrace constructive criticism. I am not critiquing your persona. I am speaking the truth, explaining: this is unrefined, this is clumsy, this is unacceptable because it violates the rules.

If you add two and two and arrive at five, I cannot tell you it equals four simply out of affection for you. You arrived at five, and that is wrong.

I explain to my students: ballet is not merely dance. Ballet is engineering; it is architecture. A dancer is the architect of their own body. It demands a deep, searching knowledge of oneself and one’s anatomy, aligned with the rigorous canons of the art form—because every body is unique. You are essentially applying a custom update of the classical system to your own physical frame. To do that, you need a highly pragmatic, mathematical mind.

In my view, the finest ballerinas are those who possess a natural affinity for mathematics, structural architecture, and geometry. These cognitive skills foster a true comprehension of the extraordinary machinery known as ballet.

Because what follows—that transcendent quality we call soulful dancing—becomes possible only once the machine through which you operate has been flawlessly constructed. If you haven’t built the machine, your raw talent is of little use to anyone.

First and foremost, capacity for work determines everything. Second comes coordination—which relies on a formidable brain: fast, agile, and sharp. And this must be cultivated from early childhood.

The fact that children today spend their lives hunched over smartphones is our greatest sorrow. I often cannot get a child to look to the right while simultaneously raising their left arm and stepping forward with the opposite foot. You have to rebuild basic coordination from scratch.

Children no longer climb trees. Do you ever see kids running through the streets with a ball today, or vaulting over fences? Hardly. Yet all of those outdoor games used to naturally develop what is now fashionably branded as “fascial training.” Our fascia simply developed because we had a backyard to play in.

And now, when children have free time, what do they do? They sit slouched, their legs invariably turned inward—knees collapsed, heels splayed out—holding a screen twenty, maybe forty centimeters from their eyes. And then we expect these children to grow into healthy adults. By what miracle?

Yes, if they participate in sports, that is wonderful. But sports alone are not enough. We lack the system found in Chinese or Japanese academies, where neuro-coordination is prioritized above all else from the start.

We face stark realities: children simply fail to hear you. It takes immense effort to capture their attention, to compel them to listen—to align their listening with music, rhythm, and physical mechanics. Parents often fail to grasp what we are up against because they see their child only after school: the child leaves, returns, eats, goes to bed.

When we tell parents early on—even at age five—that their child exhibits a developmental gap, that they struggle to process a teacher’s voice, fail to visually track demonstrated movements, or have difficulty sustaining attention, it often falls on deaf ears. Frequently, three or four years pass before parents realize we were right—usually when the issues have hardened into real obstacles. Yet we raise the alarm in the present moment for a reason: go get checked, try this intervention, do that exercise. While there is still time. While the child can still be helped.

Building the School from Scratch

If you were to design a ballet academy entirely from scratch, unconstrained by financial limits, how would you structure the curriculum?

First, I would integrate all general academic subjects within the same institution—functioning as a comprehensive school, but steeped in music and dance. And I wouldn’t wait until age twelve; I would begin straight from kindergarten, perhaps at four-and-a-half or five years old, continuing through the twelfth grade. It should be a single sanctuary where children absorb everything.

It would absolutely require that foundational preparation I mentioned—neuro-gymnastics. For young children, standard exercise like push-ups or running is insufficient. Modern methodologies exist specifically to train neuro-coordination, creating a foundation that profoundly elevates every subsequent stage of learning.

Equally essential is instilling a refined taste for beauty—for painting, sculpture, and great music. Children who are never exposed to classical music in early childhood, during the crucial period when specific neural pathways are forming, cannot grow to love it later simply because it was absent from their world. You come to love what nourished you. This groundwork must be laid at the very beginning.

So many parents work from dawn till dusk. A fortunate few children grow up in homes where classical music drifts through the rooms. The less fortunate are immersed in a relentless stream of stressful news broadcasts. The parents are stressed, and as a result, we at the academy end up laboring like Geppetto, carving everything from scratch. This is why holistic artistic development must be embedded within the educational system itself—and why that system urgently needs reform.

Children are inherently distinct. You will find a five-year-old who possesses the maturity of a ten-year-old, alongside a twelve-year-old with the executive function of a five-year-old. Yet they are grouped together strictly by age. How can one possibly teach them identically?

Naturally, I would construct things differently if I had more studios—though, as always, everything hinges on funding. If I could, I would build a grand castle surrounded by a high wall. Inside this castle, children would enter and inhabit their own world, then step back out into society when ready. They would possess a sanctuary tailored entirely to their growth.

It would feature its own swimming pool and a dedicated physiotherapy clinic. Children would be taught human anatomy from the earliest age—adapted, of course, to a child’s understanding—interwoven with imaginative play.

And, crucially, there would be a boundary placed on the influx of information that children have no business consuming at their age. There is knowledge that is unnecessary for a child, and knowledge that is vital. Left to themselves, they filter everything through a smartphone. How could they possibly know, on their own, what is noble and what is toxic?

(Continue reading here)