When Hedi Khursandi’s dancers execute perfect piqué turns, things come full circle in more ways than one.
Teaching his sixth ballet summer intensive at Vero Beach Charter High School, Khursandi, a Royal Academy-trained dancer formerly with the Vienna Festival Ballet, is welcoming back his own students to help teach the three-week program.
Emily Slawski has taught the past two weeks. At 16, the Sebastian home-schooler became the youngest company dancer ever hired by the Royal Ballet of Sweden – at least in memory; the company was founded in 1773.
Now 18, Emily is home for a six-week break. And her friend Katerina Schweitzer, 15, will be teaching, too. Katerina is headed to New York for her fourth summer intensive with a top ballet academy. Like Emily, she intends to pursue a career in ballet.
Slawski, considered a late bloomer when she started ballet at 10, trained with Khursandi along with teachers in Melbourne and Miami. Within weeks of joining the Swedish company, her contract was extended. She was cast in a challenging role that might have defined her young career: Julia, in a new rendition of Romeo and Juliet, a contemporary ballet by the prominent Swedish choreographer Mat Eks. Sadly, Slawski hasn’t been able to dance the role due to a back muscle strain two years ago. Meanwhile she still dances in the company’s corps de ballet.
Slawski’s rise was meteoric. But Khursandi’s own success was no less surprising. He was 11 when he took his first ballet class. Most of the offspring of his Iranian family became doctors, he says; his father was a merchant in Karachi, Pakistan, where the family moved when he was an infant. When they relocated to London and Hedi signed up for ballet, from the first, he was smitten.
“I couldn’t sleep at night. I wanted to get up and go do it,” he says. “I had a lot of catching up to do. After class, I had a little notebook, and I would make notes on the train home.”
Khursandi studied at the London Arts Education School, a vocational school of the arts. His final year, he passed an audition to dance as an extra with the legendary Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev. “He was going to do ‘Petrushka’ at the London Coliseum. Then a day before rehearsals, they told us we couldn’t dance because we were non-equity dancers. It was a very cruel thing that I’ll never forget.”
If the disappointment drove him harder, he would get his second chance. Khursandi was “guesting” with Ballet de Nancy, France, when in 1983 he danced in the coachmen dance with Nureyev as Petrushka.
Close enough to smell Nureyev’s “sweat and his cologne,” Khursandi took the same warm-up class, remarking on Nureyev’s “intensity and detail.” On breaks, Nureyev fueled himself with green tea and baked potatoes.
He also watched him push through a painful injury, when Nureyev, then in his 40s, performed with a badly bruised and swollen toe.
“I could see the agony in his face,” says Khursandi. “But he goes on that stage and he does everything as it is set, and he did it full out.”
Running off stage after his final grand jeté, Nureyev limped in circles, wincing, then went back out to take his bow. “It was as if nothing were wrong. That’s when I realized he is not any ordinary man.”
Such stoicism can become a problem when young dancers push too hard. Emily, for example, “goes 110 percent” rather than hold back in rehearsal and save her muscles for her performance. “In hindsight, I should have stressed that more,” he says.
“I can’t help it,” says Emily. “I want to do it all.”
Khursandi says Emily’s place in the corps de ballet is more difficult in ways than a soloist’s. “It’s every night, every performance. A soloist only dances a couple of times a week.”
Khursandi believes American dance students are too eager to advance and compete and don’t take the time required to prepare, as the Royal Academy training requires.
He remembers being “chewed out” by his teacher in school when his buddies and he were caught doing turns in the basement. “I didn’t see the wisdom but then I realized how important that is. It’s a process. It’s like making a steak without marinating.”
“He’s strict,” says 17-year-old Valentina Mendoza, a rising senior at Charter taking Khursandi’s summer course. “But it’s a good kind of strict. I wouldn’t be as disciplined as I am today if it weren’t for him. It’s a privilege for the dancers to have a teacher with his background.”.
Khursandi has been a fixture in Vero’s classical ballet scene since 2004, when he taught a class at Ballet Vero, founded by Jocelyn Woodruff, another Royal Academy-trained dancer. Six months later, when the principal of Charter High School, Cindy Aversa, found out he was in town, she immediately invited him to interview for the school’s new arts academy.
The fine arts school scenario is very familiar to Khursandi. After his own training at such a school, he danced for six years with Vienna Festival Ballet, then moved to Australia to teach at a Royal Academy dance school. In the early 1990s, he came to the U.S. to visit his cousin, an Orlando psychiatrist. Through friends, he was asked to teach the summer program of Orlando Ballet. From there, he was recruited to teach in Birmingham, AL, and eventually became ballet master at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, a public boarding and day school.
Eventually, he and a fellow teacher left to open their own academy. When it appeared that teacher’s husband was being transferred to Vero, she convinced Khursandi to follow. The husband’s job fell through, but Khursandi decided to stay on.
The interview with Aversa was as revealing of her own training as Khursandi’s; she was a serious student of ballet until she changed her focus to voice.
“Nobody told me about her background,” he says. “She started talking, and I thought, wow, she knows a lot.”
He told her his vision was to build a “very strong classical ballet school to enable the students when they graduate from here to get into a company or to go on to college in dance.”
Since that meeting, Khursandi’s program has swelled.
“The first few years were a struggle,” he says. He says his students lacked foundation; their training was “mishy-mashy, a bit of this and a bit of that.”
“I was wondering if I am at the right place. It took three or four years to start seeing the result.”
At this year’s annual review, he says, he and Aversa agreed this was the best year ever for ballet. (The school also has a modern dance teacher, Cher Bounds.) Meanwhile, he teaches younger children on weekends in and after school, in the hopes of steering them into the Charter program for high school. He also teaches adults.
Unlike most arts academies, at Charter, no audition is required.
“It would be nice to have the luxury to pick and choose here, but it’s a public school. We take everyone,” says Khursandi. “Many of our students have never taken ballet before. That makes it quite challenging.”
As for Khursandi, he has fans outside of ballet, within the cult following of the original BBC show “Dr. Who.”
In three 1984 episodes, he played Tractator, a space monster, trading tights and velvet waistcoats for a bug-like foam costume, with antennae he manipulated from within.
“It was very tedious. But on TV, it was very effective,” he says with a grin. “I still get mail asking for my autograph.”