I almost always catch them in a tie, Alosha and Sasha.
They live in their rented dance studio off Mill Street beside Wendover. Or seem to. They arrive in the morning and leave late at night as they and six other instructors teach more than 200 active students how to dance like Fred Astaire.
Alosha and Sasha own the local Fred Astaire franchise studio. After eight years, they have turned it into one of the most successful Fred Astaire franchises in the nation because of competitions won and private dance lessons taught.
I see trophies everywhere in their studio, and I find students of every age from every corner in the South. I stop them, ask about dancing, and they go on about losing weight, finding confidence, discovering friends and following some long-lost dream in this big room of mirrors.
But Alosha and Sasha have their own dreams. Look at their last names: Alosha Anatoliy and Sasha Tsyhankov.
They came here with only a suitcase and a few hundred dollars. They couldn’t speak a lick of English, let alone do all things American.
They’re from the other side of the world — Ukraine, a country of 46 million people threatened by takeover, shocked by violence and hurt by a weakened economy. Russia is the bully; America is the cop and banker; and in the land of Alosha and Sasha, everyone is trying to survive.
I’ve heard mention of World War III, but that sounds more like TV talking than international diplomats. But Alosha and Sasha worry. They call friends and family to see if they’re safe. They are — for now — and war seems to be an empty threat.
Still, it’s tough. Alosha and Sasha have heard about the 26 deaths and hundreds wounded in Alosha’s hometown and the land-grab in Sasha’s homeland beside the Black Sea. But they don’t talk about it much or it’ll drive them crazy. So, they dance.
That’s the irony of it all. The country of their birth has this history that is so violent, so Old Testament cruel that phrases such as “Great Famine” and “Great Terror” describe the death and destruction that happened within its borders during the past century.
Yet, in this place where tens of millions of Ukranians have died or been crushed by Soviet rule, Alosha and Sasha learned to turn their bodies into visual poetry.
They dance incredibly well.
• • •
It’s Wednesday night, and I’m in the back. The video starts, the music gets loud, and the first few minutes of Sunday dance showcase broadcasts billboard big on the wall. Sasha is already clapping.
“The line looks good!” Sasha yells, stretching out every vowel like a rubber band. “Wow! We should dance in New York!”
It’s the cast party for the studio’s “Around The World in 80 Beats,” the two-hour show performed Sunday at the Carolina Theatre. I’m surrounded by dozens of dancers at a dozen or so tables. After every number, they clap, and their dance instructors come and hug.
As the party enters its second hour, I find Alosha and Sasha near a back wall. They’ve been at their studio for at least 12 hours. Yet, like proud parents, they take it all in. And with every dance they perform with any student, they do what their instructors do: They come and hug.
Or high five.
Alosha and Sasha act like Americans. They are American citizens. But deep down, they’ll always be Ukrainian.
Like many Ukrainians, they grew up dancing. Alosha started at age 5 in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital; Sasha started at age 7 in Kerch, a coastal city in the Crimean peninsula, one of the oldest cities in the world.
They practiced constantly, and the better they became, the more the Soviet Union paid for their lessons and their travel to various competitions and performances. The Soviets took pride in the youngest who excelled and could beat the world.
And Alosha and Sasha could. They were like soldiers, dance soldiers, and they became champions in a regimented governmental athletic machine. Alosha even wore a uniform, with a tie and a red star with the picture of Vladimir Lenin, the Communist revolutionary, in the center.
But they weren’t into politics. They were into dance. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that they realized what the government’s pull meant. Money was tight, dance lessons were expensive and their career was stalled by something they couldn’t control.
When that happened, they began to understand politics through their passion for dance.
“When it was the Soviet Union, we had jobs, we had money,’’ says Sasha, now 37. “But when the Soviet Union crashed, everyone was on their own. People didn’t know what to do. I’ll tell you. It was like being an animal in a zoo. We were taken out of the jungle, and we were on our own.’’
Sasha’s dad, an electrician, loved how his youngest son danced. And every time, he cried. He had watched his son, a self-described “big fat thing,” transform from a shy boy into a confident athlete whose push for excellence spidered into other parts of his life.
Alosha’s father didn’t feel that way. He was a construction manager for the city of Kiev, a member of the Communist party, and he wanted his only son, his youngest, to become a doctor.
When he heard Alosha wanted to become a professional dancer, he didn’t speak to Alosha for a year.
In 1991 after the longtime rule of the Soviet Union ended, Ukraine became an independent democracy, and Alosha and Sasha went to college, studied dance and continued their careers. But they knew they needed to get out of Ukraine to excel. That started to take shape in 2000 when executives from Fred Astaire Dance Studios came to Ukraine to recruit.
Like college basketball coaches, Fred Astaire executives flew to Ukraine because they heard about the deep talent pool. Plus, they needed qualified instructors to keep their business alive. There, in the western part of Ukraine, they found two of the country’s best dancers: Alosha and Sasha.
Meanwhile, in a twist that felt pulled straight from a novel, Alosha and Sasha met and became friends.
A year later, Sasha came to Greensboro. He felt he was, as he says today, “on a different planet.” A Fred Astaire instructor named Beth Horton helped. She became his American mother and showed him how to shop, make a phone call, use a credit card and operate a washer and dryer.
Sasha started teaching at the Fred Astaire studio on High Point Road, and he learned English from his students. Alosha called from Japan where he was teaching for a Fred Astaire studio.
“So, what do you think?” Alosha asked.
“It’s kind of slow,” Sasha responded.
Still, Alosha came here.
“I grew up thinking that the United States was a strong country,” says Alosha, now 38. “The Soviet Union fought the United States, and we grew up hearing and thinking we were against the United States. But in the back of my brain, I always had sympathy for the United States.
“I always felt I didn’t hear the truth. Here, I knew I could find a better life.”
• • •
Alosha first went to a Fred Astaire studio in Durham. Like Sasha, he learned English from his students. He later came to Greensboro where he and Sasha opened a Fred Astaire studio on Battleground in 2006. Three years later, they bought out the owner of the High Point Road studio and eventually moved into a much larger studio just north of Grimsley High.
Today, Alosha and Sasha have become the country’s No. 2 Fred Astaire franchise in terms of private dance lessons taught. That comes from Al King, the franchise director of Fred Astaire National, the guy who oversees the company’s 151 franchises across America.
He knows Alosha and Sasha. He helped recruit them. Of the 900 full-time Fred Astaire instructors nationwide, King says more than 100 are from eastern Europe. He says eastern Europeans were recruited because of their work ethic, knowledge and expertise.
With Alosha and Sasha, he says all that fits.
“You walk in that studio, you can feel the current of electricity, and you think, ‘Holy cow,’ ” King said from his office in
Birmingham, Ala. “It’ll blow you out the front door. That’s because of their enthusiasm. You can’t teach that. They are the whole package.”
In Mill Street’s big room of mirrors, Alosha and Sasha train champions. Greensboro attorney Carolyn Woodruff is one.
She and Alosha are two-time Fred Astaire national champions. Last fall, in a dance competition in Columbus, Ohio, they finished No. 6 in the world.
“I think they’re the ultimate American success story,’’ Woodruff said of Alosha and Sasha. “You hear about immigrants who come in and open a little shop and make a big business out of it. That’s what America is about. To me, being an American is being an entrepreneur. I think we have lost some of that, but what America was founded on was an entrepreneurial spirit.’’
In the beginning, it was just them — Alosha and Sasha. Now they have tapped into their eastern European network and brought in four other dancers from Ukraine and added them to their staff.
So on any morning, afternoon or night, you can walk into their studio and hear it awash in a surreal world of accents — ones we recognize and ones we don’t.
Like Alosha and Sasha, their instructors from Ukraine are worried. They have family members in the cross-hairs of conflict.
“It’s hard for all of us,” Sasha says. “We all think, ‘What can we do?’ All we can do is call family. So we don’t talk. Not anymore. If we did, it would drive us crazy.”
• • •
For two hours Wednesday night on one big wall, I watch a video of a general contractor dancing in a matador outfit and an artist dancing with a curtain rod across her shoulders holding drapes she made from her own tablecloth.
She is Scarlet O’Hara — or a Carol Burnett version of Scarlet.
Woodruff dances, too. She turns a 16-foot red scarf into a prop, and she and Alosha create a three-minute routine about star-crossed lovers from a century ago, an American woman, a Russian man and an affair that ends in death.
Many routines catch my eye. But there’s one with Alosha and his student, Karen McDonald. They look like a picture from long ago: red boots and blousing hand-embroidered shirts. Alosha in wide, royal blue pants; McDonald in royal blue skirt with eight ribbons of many colors.
I feel someone shake my shoulders. Alosha.
“A Ukrainian folk dance,” he shouts over the music.
The next day, I ask
McDonald about the dance number she began rehearsing in mid-January, a month before Ukraine erupted in violence. Once the violence made headlines, McDonald discovered a deeper meaning beyond the steps.
The more McDonald danced, the more she realized the culture and the spirit of a country she never visited. She says she felt exuberance. She says she felt their “need of freedom.”
After Sunday’s showcase, she found Alosha. She knew Alosha’s mom was visiting, and she knew Alosha didn’t want her flying back to Ukraine and returning to her apartment in Kiev.
Alosha wanted her safe, and he had her stay. So his mother watched rehearsals, she watched Sunday’s showcase and like her only son years before, she couldn’t speak a word of English.
Still, emotion is universal. So, McDonald asked.
“What did your mom think?”
Alosha knew.
“She almost cried.”