The Ageless Exactitude of Madame Tumkovsky.

THE MEETING room at the School of American Ballet filled with laughter when Madame Antonina Tumkovsky said, "I am 94--94 and a half. Half very important at my age." True enough, but one has the feeling that the fraction would be just as important to the lady were she half the age she is now. Exactitude is Tumkovsky's business. As a teacher at SAB since 1949, she has spent just more than half a century drumming into her students the importance of getting every combination exactly right, of holding every part of the body exactly right. And she still has no intention of letting her students off the hook, even though, as she freely admits, she no longer demonstrates everything as fully as she did when she began teaching in New York.

Just before our little conversation--which took place last January, to be exact--Tumkovsky gave her daily morning class to the advanced girls. No sooner had they begun a series of plies than Tumkovsky got busy with corrections. "Arms, fingers," she murmured at a girl in the back of the studio, and immediately the girl's elbow rose a bit and her fingers curled in toward her palm instead of drifting in space. Immediately, the girl looked more alert--and lovelier. But not content to let this correction pass, when the girls finished the exercise Tumkovsky showed all the students how the arm must be held firmly. Then she let her arm droop, slumped into her chest and muttered, "Ugh." The point was made.

There is no medicine as pungent as Tumkovsky demonstrating when you're wrong, and no balm as soothing as her saying, "Exactly," with a quick bob and a smile, when you've done it right. You could see the sense of accomplishment pass over a girl's face after Tumkovsky asked her to repeat the end of an exercise by herself. The second time around, the girl closed her feet in a very tight fifth position. "Was medium closed," Tumkovsky told her. "Now is close fifth exact." Mission accomplished. Tumkovsky nodded, clapped her hands, and said "Other side."

And so it goes--and so it went some forty-five years ago when Tumkovsky was after me about my fifth position when I was a student at SAB. Of course, there are differences. Back then, Tumkovsky would walk by every student at the barre for each exercise--pulling here, nudging there, but most importantly, letting us know through close physical contact that she was keeping tabs on us just in case we were inclined toward a lazy moment. Today, Tumkovsky teaches the class while perched on a chair, but she still has a sharp eye. "Why you no do combination?" she suddenly asked a girl who, presumably, thought she had gotten lost in the shuffle of an exercise done across the diagonal of the studio. She made the girl do the exercise alone, and Tumkovsky was satisfied. After class, she said, "I know who is lazy. Who is not lazy. But they must try, even if so-so."

Back then, Tumkovsky demonstrated everything, while today she says the names of the steps while she etches them out with her hands. Back then, she would constantly clap her hands and holler out a steady barrage of corrections and reminders. Her noisy exuberance was a way, I think, of keeping the energy of the class at peak level, particularly with the younger students. These days, Tumkovsky's class is a quieter place.

Yes, her class is still a killer. It's not only that the combinations are difficult, but that the pace is quick. At the barre there is no break--not even a few seconds between left and right sides. Once in the center of the floor, Tumkovsky quickly divides the groups into two, picks the girls for the front and back lines, and launches into the first combination, an adagio. Few words are spoken. Following the traditional Russian teaching method, Tumkovsky does not analyze or otherwise hold forth verbally on the material. The girls learn and grow stronger simply by doing. "You must do, do, do," Tumkovsky says. In most classes the tempo slackens as group two replaces group one. What's noticeable about Tumkovsky's class is that the groups change with barely a pause. Thus, give or take the moments when Tumkovsky asks a girl to demonstrate a combination by herself or when she makes a correction to the whole class, the students are moving nonstop for ninety minutes.

In a video celebrating Tumkovsky's fiftieth anniversary at SAB, one of her students gigglingly confided to the camera that sometimes she asked "Tumey," as her students affectionately call her, to explain a movement just to give the class a breather; she once even fell down on purpose, to slow things up a bit that day. There were no such shenanigans at the class I observed, however. It was "do, do, do" all the time. It was, Tumkovsky said after class, "the way I learned."

Born on August 21, 1905, Tumkovsky started to learn in her native Kiev at the late age of 12, "just like Melissa Hayden," she said brightly, enjoying the company of a celebrated dancer. She started late because no one in her family danced and her parents never thought she would. But her girlfriend studied and one day she went, too. "I looked and I liked," she said. The school took her younger sister also, and in 1923, when Tumkovsky was 18, they made their debut together at the Kiev State Theater of Opera and Ballet. Eventually she became a soloist. Madame Beriosova, the director of the company and later an assistant to Vaganova, taught Tumkovsky how to teach at Kiev's Choreographic Institute.

Having survived the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the early Stalin years, the lives of Tumkovsky and her family were eventually undone by the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. Tumkovsky was transported by train to Berlin, where her beloved sister was killed by a bomb. "Just like that: dead," she remembered, still obviously shaken by the speed with which tragedy can occur. She continued to dance in Berlin, but was eager to make the distinction between the "concert performances" she gave in Germany and the full theatrical productions of the Kiev theater.

After the war the Russians wanted her to return home. "We taught you how to teach, so you must come back," she remembered the authorities saying. But Tumkovsky was not to be fooled by all the wonderful promises she heard. "They want me too much," she laughingly said. "I am smart. Absolutely not. Not for me." Her arm sliced through the air as if to cut short the propaganda, and her pale green eyes turned emerald as she recalled her determination not to return home.

In 1949 Tumkovsky, her youngest sister, and her sister's child sailed for New York. They had relatives in New York; one of them worked at the United Nations. She spoke not a word of English and didn't know about the School of American Ballet, but the wife of a cousin, who did speak English and had heard of Balanchine and his school, brought Tumkovsky to meet its director, Madame Eugenie Ouroussow. Tumkovsky pointed out that the cousin's mother and Madame Ouroussow's mother sewed dresses together--so there was at least a slim connection in their emigre world.

Mme. Ouroussow didn't know if there was a place for Tumkovsky but said that perhaps Balanchine would speak with her. ("He spoke Russian," Tumkovsky said with relief.) In a few days they did speak. "First thing I said, I am not a ballerina. I am soloist. Mr. Balanchine says, 'Good. I like that. Everyone says they are ballerina.' He asked me to teach children fourth. He watched and I gave lesson. Then he took me by arm and said, 'Come with me.' I said, 'Where are you taking me by arm?' He led me to Mme. Ouroussow and said, 'Now you have teacher.'" And that is how Madame Tumkovsky came to teach at SAB.

In the beginning years, Balanchine watched Tumkovsky teach a lot. He would tell her how he liked the students to spot, how he liked epaulement. Eventually he had Tumkovsky teach everything and at all levels--in addition to technique classes, Petipa variations, and character. "I taught Kay Mazzo czardas," she said with pride, raising her shoulder elegantly and a little haughtily, imitating Mazzo as a student.

The one class she didn't want to tackle was men's class. She said to Balanchine, "You say women should teach girls and men should teach boys. So why I teach boys?" Balanchine replied apologetically that he just didn't have a man for the job. "Felia (Doubrovska) can't but you can," Balanchine insisted. "So I did," Tumkovsky said with a shrug.

Then one day, in the 1970s, a big strapping Russian came by, and Tumkovsky thought, "Aha." She ran to Colleen Neary and Lincoln Kirstein, and they ran to Balanchine, and in a few days Balanchine was watching Andrei Kramarevsky teach. He was hired on the spot. "Now you are free," Balanchine said to Tumkovsky.

Although Tumkovsky--who holds the Mae L. Wien chair at SAB, one of only two endowed chairs--is one of SAB's most versatile teachers, her specialty has been children. Now she is too old to teach them--too much bending over, she said--but her legacy has been entrusted to former City Ballet dancer Katrina Killian, who spent all of last year watching Tumkovsky and writing down her combinations in a book. "She is very smart," Tumkovsky said of her protegee, "and now she knows how to do."