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Inga Savitskaya

 

CUANDO LA MÁGIA SE VISTE DE MUJER

LAS DAMAS MÁGICAS SE CITAN CADA AÑO EN CATALUNYA

Inga Savitskaya Tango con la pareja invisible

Inga Savitskaya abrió la gala con su extraordinario número de “tango con la pareja invisible”.Una mujer solitaria, deprimida y abandonada que sueña bailar un tango con verdadero hombre argentino. Con la ayuda de la magia su sueño se convertirá en realidad. Una americana y un sombrero se transformarán en un seductor latin lover porteño que en un arrebatado tango transformará a la timorata y apocada mujer, en una atractiva dama llena de sex appeal. En la mejor línea de la escuela rusa, Inga Savitskaya, es bailarina y actriz con pleno dominio de la mímica. Entre otros ganó en el 2001 el premio Miss Illusion. Tras girar por multitud de paises, en el 2005 dejó su natal Rusia para ir a vivir a Buenos Aires donde trabaja como estrella invitada en el show Tango Porteño (musical estilo Broadway, www.tangoporteno.com.ar). Tambien trabaja en la capital argentina como profesora de plasticidad y de expresión corporal para actores y bailarines en la Escuela Musical de Buenos Aires.

 

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A PRINCESS OF GRACE

 

Where do princesses come from? Sometimes they grow out of ugly clumsy ducklings maturing into graceful swans. The lady I’ll be talking about grew up with the feeling of being awkward, unattractive and uncommunicative. As it is usually the case, her parents planned a good career for her and she obediently followed it to be trained as economist. And whatever life had in store for her in those days, no one would have believed that she would choose to upgrade her skills in an entirely different occupation – magic. 

Inga Savitskaya is a professional magician, laureate of numerous national and international contests of  illusionists and the holder of Miss Magic Title at the 2001 event in Poland. 

“Inga, in one of your best-known numbers you are setting fire to a visibly empty ladies bag and extracting chains of dollars from it afterwards. This is a trick, isn’t it? But how do you see it? On the posters you call yourselves “honest crooks”. Why?”

“Because we never make it a secret that these are just tricks, there is nothing supernatural in them. All my show numbers have a plot, like in a drama. So through the language of gesture and tricks I try to express human relations. It’s a special kind of communication.” 

“But this is the way you communicate with the public, with the audiences. Do you resort to it in everyday life too?”  

“Communication is very important in human relationship. But for each person communication means a different thing and we all communicate differently. I prefer to express myself through the language of the body. Because bodily language, or as they say nowadays, non-verbal communication, is much more expressive than words. It is more enigmatic and carries more meaning. Words can be deceptive, but not the body. The body language is clear as day. It can’t lead you astray.”
 
“And it’s difficult, I guess. So how come that you learned it?” 

“In my younger days neither me nor my parents thought I should be a magician. My mother was a doctor and my father was an engineer. In their dreams I was to become a business lady. And as I was a good daughter, when I finished school I entered the Institute of National Economy in Moscow. After graduation I took up a post-graduate course. So everything went according to my parents’ plans for me until one day a friend of mine took me to the Student Pantomime Theatre at Moscow University. Pantomime is an art without words, based on gesture only and body language. It helped me a lot, it gave me the ladylike elegance that I needed so much in everyday life. Trained in business matters I wasn’t very pretty or glamorous in appearance, I wasn’t that sexy or attractive as I am now, I was clumsy and shy. And I was never much of a success among the opposite sex.”
 
“So one visit to a dumb show changed everything?”

“It did. Because all of a sudden it dawned on me that I wanted to be the master of my body, to be attractive. Bodily communication appealed to me and I had no doubts I was quite capable of learning it. So I signed up for an amateur studio at the Mime Theatre.”
 
“But you were absolutely unprepared for it, weren’t you?”

“Absolutely. I didn’t have the slightest notion of how to do it or what to begin with. And it was very difficult at first. I was completely unprepared, both physically and morally. My parents had never paid much attention to my being in good physical shape.  But I told myself that I could do it, that it was my priority Number One. Despite an apparent lack of stamina I set my mind to it and I practiced every morning and evening. The exercises were exhausting and to do them properly I had to be endlessly patient. They taught me to send any impulse through my body and this required a lot of muscle training. I had to practice one single movement, say, an upward movement of my brow, a set number of times. And I had to work at imagination, coordination and balance, because everything counted and they all made sense in combination with one another only. I felt tired and shattered but I had no intention of giving up. This was what I wanted to do and I knew I would do it.”
 
“Your parents must have been furious over the whole matter.” 

“Yes, they were, and they were shocked too. After struggling to keep up my post-graduate studies I quit eventually. I had no time for that, I was already dancing at nightclubs and I knew I would never be a business lady. A friend of mine once invited me to join a variety show in oriental dances. I quickly learned that, because I had received the necessary training in my pantomime classes, and I liked that. My parents and me were not on speaking terms after that – they stopped all contacts with me. But I said I would live my own life, not theirs, and that I would live it the way I wanted.”
 
“Did you ever regret giving up the career of an economist?”

“No, because I had to try it, otherwise I would have regretted it afterwards. From another point of view, the pantomime classes helped me to win the respect of my colleagues at the National Economy Institute. Because I knew how to win people over, how to hold myself properly, to move properly, how to present myself, to express myself without words but clearly enough. And as I took control of my body, I began to feel more at one with myself, more confident, more grounded in myself. And I was suddenly very popular with men too.”
 
“Doing the job to your liking got you the much-needed feeling of self-respect and self-sufficiency. But at the time you are talking about this job was still far from magic. What happened next, how did you come to fall for magic after all?”

“While still in the variety show I met a performing magician. I quickly grasped the tricks he was doing and I knew I could be his assistant. It all proved so easy to me. Besides, I got attracted to him too and we soon got married. Several months later we staged a solo number, left the variety show and started to perform on our own. It was easy because I’m a person of inexhaustible patience when it comes to work, a fanatic, as my husband says. And it was easy because the pantomime classes had prepared me for all sorts of manipulations with the hand. At first we worked within groups of other performers but we didn’t like it. Working with a company makes you dependent, because you’re not always free to do what you want, you are often told what to do and you may be told off too. But we wanted to be our own bosses, so we didn’t stay long with those companies. It was risky to go on solo but we were together, the two of us, and because of that we were not that scared.”

“You are set on constant improvement. What are you working at now?”

“Now I’m doing a course in pantomime direction. Hopefully, I’ll soon be directing numbers for mime shows.” 

“Your work is your life philosophy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I express my view of life though the body language. This becomes particularly clear in my latest number, with which we’ve just toured China. In it I bring together magic, pantomime, dancing and my life philosophy – that we cannot change our circumstances, that’s impossible, all we can do is to change ourselves,” says Inga Savitskaya
 
Inga’s latest number is about tango, where she finds herself without a partner. But she wants to dance so desperately that she grabs a jacket on a hanger and dances with it. And the jacket, due to her competent direction, comes alive and holds her and leads her like a first-class partner. 

When we first met, Inga Savitskaya introduced herself as an actress of original genre. Women in this kind of occupation are but a handful in Russia and, probably, elsewhere in the world. Her originality shows in every gesture and she looks more than original too, with her ever-present elegance and a halo of mystery clouding her. Inga and Yuri Savitsky are laureates of many international contests and are a welcome couple at television shows where they luckily grabbed a kitchen unit as prize not long ago. In an article I recently read about Inga she looked exactly the way she normally does – as Princess of Grace. Well, I hope she’ll add this title to her collection…  

Copyright  The Voice of Russia

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