I picked up the current, December issue of Dance Magazine, and was astonished to read Joseph Carman’s article “Passing on the Magic,” which features extensive remarks from Susan Jaffe concerning her new position as coach at American Ballet Theatre. Discussing influences on her coaching, the only teachers/mentors Jaffe acknowledges are acting coach Byam Stevens, and Irina Kolpakova, who coached her at ABT from 1989 until Jaffe retired from performing in 2002.
This is by no means the first time that an interview/profile of Jaffe has completely ignored the long and profound influence of Elena Tchernichova on Jaffe’s career. But from 1982 to 1990 (Jaffe worked with both Kolpakova and Tchernichova in 1989-1990), I watched, sometimes on a daily basis, Tchernichova groom Jaffe from a promising but unpolished aspirant into a top-flight ballerina. I saw her work with Jaffe on the big issues, the fine points, and everything else in between of roles, technique, style, expression. I vividly recall many individual rehearsals of theirs.
To be sure, there were other young ABT dancers of equal talent who did not get this type of help and attention, even some whom Tchernichova would have liked to have worked with but could not get Baryshnikov and Charles France to accept.
Jaffe and Tchernichova’s relationship was undoubtedly a quasi-parental one laden with all the possible emotional freight that that entails. Inevitably, perhaps, a slow but inexorable estrangement opened up between them. The fact is that many dancer-coach relationships, even ones less emotionally charged than theirs, do not go on forever.
Surely, however, enough time has elapsed that Jaffe and/or the journalists who chronicle her can give credit where it is due.