Figure skating is a kind of sport for young athletes and experienced coaches. Usually it is the former who achieve success, and it is the latter who lead them to victories. But sometimes someone manages to break the paradigm. So, at the age of 32, the production coach Daniil Gleikhengauz can be called one of the most successful specialists. tells what was the path of Gleichenhaus to the top of the profession, and what influenced his coaching style.
Mark Gleikhengauz made documentaries and historical films, Lyudmila Shalashova danced at the Bolshoi Theater. Both were 43 years old when their son Daniel was born. When your mother is a ballerina, there is almost no chance of escaping a dance-related fate. This is not so much the influence of heredity as a favorable environment. And if you add the director's father to everything, you get a completely creative context. So the future of Daniil Gleikhengauz was in a sense predetermined.
Boys are rarely enthusiastic about dancing, especially classical choreography. So little Dana didn’t like it all very much. Later, he admitted that at times he was even negatively disposed towards his mother and her initiatives. “It seemed to me that she tortured me,” Gleikhengauz said in an interview. «To be honest, until the age of 17 I simply hated choreography. Well, imagine: a transitional age, everyone, having worked out the ice, goes to McDonald's, and the mother-ballerina gives you ballerinas and says: «Let's go to practice.» Subsequently, this overcoming of oneself will help him to find a common language with the same teenagers, for whom walking with friends at the moment seems to be a much more interesting activity than training on a bored ice rink.
True, my mother wanted to see him rather not as a ballet dancer, but as a director. Now we can definitely say that Daniil fulfilled the will of his mother: “When you get older, you realize that without this (regular choreography classes — ed. note) you would not have become a choreographer, because the sense of posture was instilled by my mother from childhood «.At the age of four, directors are not taught anywhere and not even in every dance studio they will accept. But everyone will be welcome at the rink. So Daniil was in business from the earliest years and did not leave the ice, because he began to progress.
As a child, his rivals, among others, were Nikita Katsalapov, Fedor Klimov, Nikita Mikhailov, Sergei Voronov. It is interesting that almost all of them did not succeed in singles, but achieved high results in dancing, pairs or coaching. Only Sergei Voronov, as a single skater, reached the medals of the European Championship. It is ironic that some of these medals were won with the indirect participation of Gleikhengauz when he first came to work in the Tutberidze group.
The time that the conscious career of Daniil Gleikhengauz fell on can be called the era of the comet named after Evgeni Plushenko and the tail of this comet. For victories in the men's singles, at least one stable quadruple jump was needed, in addition to the triple axel, but this was exactly what Gleichenhaus was not given. The body didn't listen. Such an extensive theoretical and practical base regarding quads, which the coaches have now, did not exist then, besides, the skater was tormented by injuries. And so the family council decided: 18-year-old Daniil should try his luck in ice dancing.
The decision was adventurous: I had to look for a partner, work on my physical form and almost completely relearn skating. Daniil was taken under guardianship by Alexander Zhulin, he also picked up a girl for him — a textured blonde Ksenia Korobkova. At first, the duo seemed promising, a couple of insignificant international tournaments Korobkova/Gleichenhaus won in the second joint season. But they could not stand the strong internal competition, losing the championship of Russia among juniors to ten couples at once. Two years remained before the Olympics — if desired, this is enough time for a desperate breakthrough, if we are talking about super-motivated athletes. But Daniel was not.The turning point was the death of his father in November 2010. In addition to the fact that the loss of a loved one always takes a lot of internal strength, this affected the financial situation of the family. Only at first glance, athletes are recklessly rich people. If you are not in the top of the national team, if you do not regularly win medals at major international starts, do not have advertising contracts, and especially if all this happens 15 years ago or even earlier, there is no need to talk about any financial carelessness. Therefore, from a career as a skater and a possible Olympics, as from a symbolic pie in the sky, Daniil refused in favor of a job for which he was paid a salary. He had to help his mother and «raise» himself.
At first he did not have a permanent place. Ice shows helped out, where Ilya Averbukh called him. Plus, it was necessary to occasionally set up programs, help children with skating, and so on — many young skaters who have completed their careers are engaged in similar skaters. and ice.Horizontal connections and a good reputation helped. Gleikhengauz invited Eteri Tutberidze for an internship on the recommendation of Ilya Averbukh. Then she was a figure of a completely different scale than now. Despite the Olympic triumph of Yulia Lipnitskaya, the main victories that made Tutberidze a superstar coach were waiting for her ahead. Therefore, there was no special calculation in the choice of Gleichengauz, as well as guarantees of success — he just needed a job, and he took it up with burning eyes. The challenge from the group with the newly-baked Olympic champion was an advance, which Daniil willingly worked out. Tutberidze, on the other hand, was looking for a permanent director and coach for the team: sensible and enthusiastic. On this basis, they came together and have been working together for almost 9 years.
During this time, Gleikhengauz managed to stage more than a dozen programs himself and in collaboration with Tutberidze, including Olympic productions by Evgenia Medvedeva, Alina Zagitova, Alexandra Trusova, Anna Shcherbakova and Kamila Valieva. He is always in sight and on hearing, because he influences the images in which the best single skaters of the planet appear on the way to their records. It was Gleikhengauz who became responsible for Khrustalny's relations with the press after Tutberidze completely closed herself off from it.
For many, his contribution to the programs is directly associated with the medals of the figure skaters, so he is considered a brilliant director. At the same time, many criticize him, pointing out the secondary nature and lack of an individual approach. If you ask two people if Gleichenhaus is a cool director, they will answer differently. And both will be right for themselves.
It would be incorrect to compare Gleichenhaus, for example, with the American choreographer She-Lynn Bourne. She is not tied to any group and does only a few programs per season, each for a lot of money.It is incorrect to compare him even with Nikita Mikhailov, who is close in age and level — he also does not work with the athletes he bets on on an ongoing basis. Today he creates for Elizaveta Tuktamysheva, tomorrow — for Alexander Samarin, the day after tomorrow — for ice shows with a complex plot. Gleikhengauz is deprived of such creative freedom for objective reasons — he is a full-time production coach for a large successful group. But even despite this, he manages to produce really cool and interesting programs.
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In the Channel One podcast, Daniil clearly articulated the peculiarity of his tasks: “It is easy to show the difference between a choreographer and who I am. Any choreographer comes, puts on a program and leaves to put on a program elsewhere. He does not go to work every day, he does not raise children with a team to Olympic medals. When you lead an athlete from an early age, you teach him, and now he reaches the main start of his life — the Olympic Games. And there, God forbid, everything works out. That pride that you feel at this moment, emotions — that's what you went this way for.Gleichenhaus in his coaching journey is like a graduate with honors who was taken to a risky startup with potentially high returns for making beautiful presentations and not conflicting with the team. As the startup progressed, it became clear that the graduate also understands finances, conducts excellent negotiations, and possesses strategic thinking. So, over time, he had more responsibilities than many others could handle. But it still doesn't scare him.And most importantly, Daniel perceives the success and failure of the «startup» as his own success and failure. Eteri Tutberidze in 2014 was looking for an assistant for herself — one more eye and head — and in the end she found a real like-minded person, interested in the result no less than herself. Perhaps this is the main secret of their well-coordinated work.
Daniil Gleikhengauz did not just stage her «Karenina» to Evgenia Medvedeva — he understood how she had grown to this image, while still a very young girl. And I felt all the tragedy of the image in Pyeongchang-2018 after the «silver» rental. He saw how Alina Zagitova came to say goodbye to the skating rink, because she, 11-year-old, did not stick, and then congratulated her on Olympic gold.
He visited Anna Shcherbakova with a broken leg when she was still just a little girl, and a few years later she was not afraid to change her program in the Olympic season. Because he himself stopped believing in the old one and could not afford to doubt it.
He, perhaps, really does not have enough time to put on couture piece programs for the whole group, to find music that no one has ever skated to, not to repeat a single movement from two different athletes. All this would be more possible if Gleikhengauz was a freelance artist who paints portraits only from those faces that evoke inner fire in him.
He has a more difficult task — to evoke an inner fire in the viewer, and not in himself, and put it on stream. To come up with a worthy frame for the best skaters on the planet and not prevent them from doing what he himself did not succeed in his time.
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«As an athlete, I have absolutely failed in terms of results. And it rather helped me, because I knew what to do, how to tell the athletes: don’t behave like this, don’t do it like that. Because I knew from my own experience that this would not lead to anything good. I myself was like that — when you have a talent, but you didn’t use it, didn’t dispose of it correctly. You need control, and I lacked discipline in sports. When I see an athlete with excessive emotionality and disobedience, I remember myself, «Daniil said in the Channel One podcast.
Daniil's mother, Lyudmila Borisovna, died in 2019. She left very early, but still managed to see what a professional and successful director her son had become. In addition, in recent years, Shalashova herself helped the Khrustalny figure skaters with choreography. In particular, her role is in Alina Zagitova's ballet number «Don Quixote» — the one that brought her Olympic gold.