ADVANCED 3 – BRITANICO GOLD – READING TASK – SEP 2022

You are going to read an extract from an article about a dancer. Five sentences have been
removed from the text. Choose from the sentences A-F the one which fits each gap (1-5). There
is an extra sentence you do not need to use.

Pauline Koner (1912-2001)

Pauline Koner was a highly influential dancer and dance teacher, especially known for her book
Elements of Performance (1993), in which she carefully analyses the qualities that make dance
performances remarkable. The personal aura of great performers is surely inimitable, but the principles
upon which their art is built can be learnt. 1. _________

As a young child growing up in New York, Pauline Koner would dance whenever she heard music. After
seeing a performance by the great ballerina Anna Pavlova, she set her heart on becoming a dancer.
2. ________ But Pauline’s parents were dismayed to find he charged $5 a lesson, an unheard-of sum
in the 1920s. Pauline’s father, a well-known lawyer, came to an agreement with Fokine: he would offer
his legal services in exchange for the ballet lessons. Pauline loved Fokine, but classical ballet was not
quite for her. ‘I couldn’t express what I wanted in toe shoes,’ she recalled. ‘My feet hurt too much.’

Pauline went on to study Spanish dance and several types of Asian dance, and she performed with
dancers who combined Asian dance with their own particular modern movements. In 1930, Pauline was
offered her first solo concert. The originality of this delighted John Martin, an influential critic on The
New York Times, and he declared that the programme ‘exhibited her unquestionable fight to stand
alone.’ 3. ________ She also taught and performed in the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1936, one of the
first American dancers to appear there.

Pauline Koner was always curious about the customs, costumes and dances of other nations.
As a child, she would paste National Geographic photos into scrapbooks. She thought that she was
able to ‘absorb’ divergent styles and influences because, as she put it: ‘Dance was so much my life that
when I studied a dance form, I was really living that way of dancing and not just keeping in shape.’
4. ________ ‘They don’t allow themselves to be overwhelmed by a single technique,’ she says.

Although usually considered a modern dancer, Pauline enjoyed pointing out that she had never had a
modern dance lesson in her life. Rather, she developed her own modern style after studying a
remarkable variety of other styles. But why did she never study modern dance? Pauline answered that
question with a bit of history. In the late 1920s, modern dance was so new that there were few modern
dance schools in America. By the 1930s there were some, but Pauline had already established herself
as an artist: she had, in effect, become a modern dancer entirely on her own.

Then in 1945 came a momentous change in Pauline’s artistic life. 5. _______ She served as an artistic
adviser to the Limón Dance Company in the 1940s and 1950s and they found Pauline such a kindred
spirit that they invited her to be what they called a ‘permanent guest artist’ with them. The rest, as they
say, is history.

A. A family friend recommended that she studied under Michel Fokine, the famous local ballet teacher.
B. She asked Doris Humphrey, a dancer she particularly admired, to be her choreographic adviser,
her ‘outsider eye’, as she liked to call it.
C. She was convinced that students could also ‘absorb’ other dance forms.
D. She sent a note filled with praise, but it also contained some criticism.
E. By teaching these, Pauline Koner was helping a new generation go its own way with flair and
authority.
F. Pauline continued to dance solos around the world, touring Egypt and Palestine in 1932.