attitude
Be Welcome.
Here it is all about dance - contemplated from many different angles - and about looking at things differently.
Be Welcome.
Here it is all about dance - contemplated from many different angles - and about looking at things differently.
Copyright: Boris Nebyla
Starting work on this page, questions started intriguing me. Demanding questions. Questions about my very own motives to do it. A funny, challenging and very interesting process began to happen within me. The first reaction was a simple “I do not know” because I was not really sure of the answer. I just “suspected” it.
My life has always been somehow related to dancing. To begin with, there were those marvellous Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers RKO films on Brazil’s afternoon TV when I was a child, then one day Nureyev came to Rio. There was (of all things) Finnish folk dancing every Saturday in the countryside and my fertile imagination... One day The Royal Ballet was on tour in Brazil and I had the chance of meeting Sir Anthony Dowell and I decided what I wanted to become. During the following years, I had the privilege of watching Béjart, Baryshnikov, Fonteyn, Makarova, Stuttgarter Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, the Bolshoi, Alvin Ailey, L’Opera de Paris and so many other companies.
As the years passed by, I became a dancer and eventually left Brazil. To quote “A chorus Line”: “I found the glass slipper once and then it fit and then it broke…” That is a fact of life. A dancer’s life is not very long. But not one day passed by without being connected in some way to dance.
Copyright: Boriy Nebyla
One day, while reading the newspapers in the morning and sipping some tea, I began to think about the way our world has so drastically changed during the last decades; about how much hatred is being spread around in the name of religion and because of nationalities, politics, skin colour, sexual orientation, beliefs… How susceptible we all became to these issues. All of a sudden it occurred to me that in a ballet class here, in the Opera House, there are around 30 nations represented, I don’t know how many shades of skin colour, shapes and colours of eyes and hair, different religions, different customs, ways of thinking, languages… Of course, some people may not like others – but never for one of the above-mentioned reasons. Never because of Ignorance.
A ballet class represents all that is being missed everywhere – and the “icing on the cake” is that everyone is working TOGETHER with one mutual goal, in perfect unison.
I had found what I had been wanting to express for weeks: Dance is an attitude.
To quote the gifted choreographer Patrick de Bana: “Peace to the world through Art”. While you are making art you are helping the world dream, be peaceful, breathe, think critically...
Welcome to “Attitude”, my dance platform.
Ricardo Leitner
Vienna, May 2017
Copyright: Ashley Taylor
After having stopped dancing my relationship with "the ball" had been quite an oblique one.
When, back in 2010, Manuel Legris took over the direction of the Vienna State Ballet and began quite intensively to broaden and change the repertoire of the company by giving all his valuable knowledge to it, my interest in Ballet (which had been in a sort of “Aurora’s sleep” for some years) was awakened.
Indirectly he is the responsible person for this Ballet-platform.
Being a direct witness of the “Legris era” in Vienna, when the whole Ballet world turned into this city’s direction to observe and watch more closely what was happening here, is immense luck. And a great pleasure.
With all his enthusiasm, “savoir-faire” and love for dance he not only changed the company, putting it into the international Ballet world but also turned many dancers, which may have had “ordinary” careers, into brilliant Stars of the first magnitude.
With my deepest and sincere Thanks to you, Manuel.
Ricardo
