"The Story Of My Relationship With English"

My friendship with the language began somewhere around 2004; I was a student of Kaliningrad Technical State University. One time I accidentally attended the contemporary dance performance of Vitaly Glukhov in the Kaliningrad Museum of History. After the performance I approached him telling that I was very moved by what I saw, we chatted a little bit and it turned out to be that he was also an actor in the theater and an English teacher as well.

I went to the audition because I wanted to be part of this amazing world of creative personalities; it went well, and I was accepted and became part of the troupe, to my great happiness really. It was an incredible time for me, when you are in the theater, there are a lot of people there, and they are all creatively crazy in a good sense of this word, so I had the opportunity to learn from them by being a 'sponge'.

I also started to take private English lessons from Vitalik. He was also my choreography teacher, he was an incredible actor in the theatre and an amazing dancer; and he was kind of a guru to me, because I saw his performances and it was very inspiring; I could talk to him as an actor, teacher, choreographer, director, and just as a friend. He was very supportive in every passion I had, we talked about (actually I talked about my creativity and he was listening to me) music, English, meaning of my songs, etc and it gave me a great confidence about my art.

I was so inspired by the theatre, his lessons and the whole mysterious atmosphere of this creative world so I even changed my University from technical to the humanities. ...when I was changing my University from 5th year, everyone - friends, family told me I shouldn't do it but I did the right thing; it's kind of a challenge when nobody around believes in you, but once you get through it, your belief in yourself becomes stronger, and then you begin to see absolutely new perspectives. I had my English teacher who believed in me, and I did the right thing.

So I would take private English lessons from him. Often the theater rehearsals would finish quite late so what it meant – me sneaking around in the rehearsal room with an English book, Rhymond Murphy, in my hands making sure the director didn’t see the aspiring student because I could’ve been fired, and riding my bicycle in the midnight towards the place where Vitalik was living, really a mysterious one in the basement of the amber seller’s mansion with a quite underground atmosphere.

So I took inspiring lessons from him and at the same time I was a student of Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, ‘Philology and Journalism’ (‘Art and Humanities’) and Linguistics & Intercultural Communication - ‘Spoken English’. I also joined Contemporary Dance Theatre as a dancer where Vitalik was a director, ballet classes and started to take jazz singing lessons.

Artwork: Marina Borovik

The Magic Of Writing 2006 - 2023 Doggedly Extracted From The Adventurous Midst Of Turquoise Imagination Via Sergey Denisov somewhere around 2018