Isabella McGuire Mayes: Life Lessons from Great Teachers
Isballa McGuire Mayes being taught by Natalia Tarasova. Vaganova Ballet Academy, around 2009.
Looking for inspiration? Isabella McGuire Mayes is certainly inspiring – and not just for ballet students and dance lovers. She is a woman with a vision: she wants to help people reach their potential by coaching their bodies and minds. Isabella runs “Ballet with Isabella,” a brilliant ballet coaching website, the associated Instagram account @balletwithisabella, and also hosts “A Dancer’s Mindset,” an intriguing podcast that focuses on a key ingredient for a successful career, especially in the arts: building a positive, robust mindset (you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify).
From Dancer to Teacher
Isabella trained at the Royal Ballet School and then became the first British girl to enrol at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg. She graduated four years later at the top of her class, an astonishing achievement for a foreigner who joined the school at age sixteen. Isabella then danced for several years with St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Ballet. Her turn towards teaching happened unexpectedly, and gradually: after a serious injury followed by surgery, a year off, and a move to St. Petersburg’s Eifman Ballet, she felt that she needed a mental break. Isabella returned to London: “For a long time, I was struggling, very much not sure what I wanted anymore, whether I wanted to go back to company life. I got a bit depressed. I wasn’t quite myself. I didn’t feel that sort of passion for a while. I started freelancing and just finding the love again for ballet. I’m fast forwarding quite a lot – but I stumbled into coaching. And it was very much off and on. But I started to really enjoy it and then slowly but surely, things started to develop for me on that front.”
The Power of Teaching
She had never really thought about teaching before: “It’s interesting, because I had always admired the teachers that I adored. Not just for their teaching abilities, but also their personality. I loved my Russian teachers. I loved the way they were so blunt, they were so upfront, so honest, would just tell me how it was. But as well as being occasionally quite cruel, they would also be just so funny. I never thought to myself: ‘Oh, I want to be a teacher one day,’ at all. However, I stumbled into teaching because I just needed something to do. I needed to put my effort somewhere. I’m not a lazy person or someone who can just sit down on the sofa. My brain is too full of ideas all the time. Someone asked: ‘Do you coach at all?’ and I said: ‘Sure!’ I started coaching and I found that because I’d lost the love for company life and the ballet itself for a while, when I started coaching, that love started to come back. It sounds so strange, but it became quite a cathartic process for me, almost reliving my experiences through all these students by embodying all the coaches I loved and admired. I really do feel everything that I have absorbed over the many years, it just comes out when I teach someone.”
‘Just’ a Teacher?
It took Isabella a while to admit to herself that this is what she wanted to do: “It’s very hard for a professional dancer to suddenly say: ‘I’m a coach now.’ In the eyes of many people, it’s like you’ve failed, or you are not a dancer anymore. So, for me to say that out loud and fully commit to that path, took a long time. It’s almost like grief. It’s almost like getting over something, letting go of something. I’m at this point now where I’m fully committed to what I’m doing. I love it, with all my heart. And I feel like it’s my purpose. I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be at this point.”
Great Teachers: Lessons for Life
Isabella feels like her teachers speak through her. Ballet is an art that gets passed on from generation to generation. If you are lucky enough to study with great teachers, their pedigree becomes yours: you become a link in a long chain of artistic greatness. Great teachers are mentors who possess the gift to shape the whole character of a dancer. They don’t just teach technical mastery but enable students to find their own artistic voice. Dancers start to train at a young age. Over the course of many years, their bodies and characters get shaped. Looking back at her long years of training, what where the most important life lessons Isabella learned from her favourite teachers?
It all starts with discipline.
“I had a really great teacher called Romayne Grigorievna. She is still teaching now, she is in her 90s. I started, I guess, when I was two, but when I was about six, I went to Romayne. With her, I think I just started to learn the discipline of it. I always liked to be told from a teacher: ‘Good work, you are doing that right, well done.’ I really enjoyed doing well at something.”
Try your best in every lesson and don’t waste a second.
A different teacher then introduced Isabella to Zina Mamedova, who was a student at the Vaganova Ballet Academy: “She gave me this lesson when I was nine years old, and I initially was really scared and flabbergasted. She was slapping my feet, making me sweat like I’ve never sweated before. I was just like: ‘WOW, I don’t know what this is!’ I was also really terrified. I actually cried because I wasn’t used to this kind of ‘attention’ at all. After the lesson, I said: ‘Mom, I never want to see her again!’ But a week later, I said to my mom: ‘Actually, I think I want to see her again. I want to see her one more time.’ The rest is history. I saw her every weekend. Initially, when I said: ‘I don’t want to see that teacher ever again,’ I was just in shock by the amount of ‘hands on’ that was happening – slapping the feet, ‘point your feet’ and saying, ‘STAY STAY STAY.’ My muscles hurt like they had never hurt before. But with her, I discovered what hard work really was. And I became addicted to that, really addicted to working really hard for something. At that point, she had introduced me to Vaganova videos on YouTube. I just saw these incredibly strong, beautiful young dancers, and thought: ‘How is that possible? I’m going to try my best.’ I learned from Zina to try my best in every lesson. And not to be lazy. Not that I ever was lazy – but to not waste a second. When something is hard, I know it’s hard, but I wouldn’t give in to that. With her, I’d always come out looking completely red in the face.”
Push to the limit – and then rest.
Zina introduced Isabella to a powerful figure in St. Petersburg’s ballet world: Gennady Seliutsky: “He was for a long time heavily connected with the Vaganova Academy and the Mariinsky Ballet. He was the one who managed to get me to be looked at by the school. Gennady was such a wonderful man, hugely respected, so humorous, so funny. I embody Gennady a lot. I think just his passion, his encouragement, still very strict and to the point. Stern, but not cruel in any way, just very passionate. He would push you to your limits but in a very encouraging way. And would then say: ‘OK, rest, enough.’ I really loved and respected that. He was like a father figure for me within the school, he really looked after me and I really appreciated that. I’ll never forget him; he was so special to me.”
Isabella at the Vaganova Ballet Academy.
You must earn your place.
Isabella fondly remembers her first teacher at the Vaganova Academy: “I had Maria Gribanova for my first two years, who has produced some really fantastic dancers. She taught me as well really, really hard work. When I joined, I was told my muscles were too soft, and I knew they were, I knew I wasn’t strong enough, because I had grown a lot as well. They made me repeat a year when I joined. She taught me heard work, perseverance, pushing myself. She also taught me that I had to earn everything. Obviously, when I first joined, I had zero reputation. I was very much ‘the English girl.’ And I was stood on the side barre, I wasn’t cast in anything, nor was I going to get cast. I had to really prove myself. Working hard every day and knowing that hard work pays off. I didn’t speak Russian very well at this point. So, with her I learned the skill of watching like a sponge and taking everything in visually more than verbally initially. She used me eventually as an example and said to the girls: ‘Look, Isabella doesn’t understand a word I’m saying, but she is doing it better than you.’ And I was like: ‘OK, great, I must be doing something right!’
Believe in yourself.
“But then, my very, very special teacher came into my life. Irina Sitnikova, who has taught many legends. And she shoved me on the centre barre on the first day, where all the good people stand. She literally pointed at me and went (points to the central spot) – and I went: ‘Me?!?!?!’ And I stood there, sort of like when you stand suddenly with the popular girls, and you are like: ‘Am I allowed in this exclusive club?’ She really taught me how to come out of my shell and believe in myself that I had the capabilities of being a really great dancer that initially I didn’t believe. Because I was always someone who worked really, really hard, but even though people saw potential in me, I was always like - naaa. I always got something to work on, this always needs to be better, I’m not good enough, this kind of thing. She really taught me to own my potential and be a confident dancer and dance confidently, dance big. I’m very tall, but to not let that inhibit me, to dance large, this kind of thing. Because when I was at the Royal Ballet School, things were said like: ‘You need to stop growing NOW.’ Obviously, I was so stressed: how can I possibly control that. It’s like: ‘Mom, no milk, nothing,’- - - you know? When I got to St. Petersburg, they were saying: ‘You must stand tall!’ Sitnikova used to say: ‘Nose in the air!’ And so, I’d walk around” – Isabella puts her nose in the air and laughs: “trying to believe that I was this person. In those two years I was with her, I completely transformed. Not only technically, but she gave me the drive to really, really push myself. That’s when I started to practice every night on my own, because I wanted to be the dancer I knew she thought I could be. I worked tirelessly, and I became confident. I started to really believe that I deserved that spot at that barre - she had put me bang in the centre of the central barre, under the Vaganova picture. It was a big task for me to actually live up to that spot.”
True Mentors
“I also enjoyed from both of those teachers, Gennady and Sitnikova, the very special Russian coach-student relationship, which I’ve never experienced anywhere else. They would ring me nearly every night. Sitnikova used to say, and sometimes it made me embarrassed: ‘You are number one for me, you are one of the best in the school,’ this kind of thing, but then she’d flip a switch and be like: ’But this was terrible today, this was terrible.’ I always found these conversations really both terrifying and very amusing. It was just the bluntness of their personalities that was always just really funny. But I fully respected it. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I wouldn’t want someone saying: ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine, not bad, it’s ok.’ That means it terrible. Just tell me it’s bad. And that’s, how, again, I embody both of them. I’m not going to say: ‘That was diabolical.’ But I am honest and to the point, but not in a cruel way at all, just in a very open way. I think it is really important to be open with people, especially when you are trying to be good at something. There is no point faffing around.”
Curious to find out what Isabella would like to change about the way ballet is taught, and to hear about her vision for the future? Read part II of our interview: Ballet with Isabella: I Really Fell in Love with Helping People!’
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