ESTONIAN DANCER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27197, 28 September 1949, Page 6

ESTONIAN DANCER

TRAINING IN BALLET NEW LIFE BEGINS “ I really would love to dance again. I shall be assigned to domestic work, but dancing is part of my life,” Astra Teenu-Tennenberg, a blonde lT-year-old Estonian woman, told the Daily Times yesterday after alighting at the Railway Station to begin what will be a new life for her and her mystified three-year-old daughter, Tiina. Mrs Tennenbexg was trained as a ballet dancer in Estonia, and after being sent to Germany she danced in a theatre. Her life which followed a happy and conventional course in her native Estonia, came to an abrupt end when she was sent to Germany at the age

of 21. Of her husband she could oply say in her quaint English: “ He was in Germany—l do not know now.” Mrs Tennenberg said that she had 13 yea-s’ tuition in ballet dancing in Estonia, including five years spent at a private school. Before going to Germany she was at a university, where she was taxing a course in what we Would know as physical welfare. Mrs Tennenberg, it could be gathered, did not dance the role of the Swan Princess in ballet, but it was an important part of her education and has, naturally, left hex with a strong love of the dance.

As Mrs Tennenberg told the reporter who interviewed her in the cold of the Dunedin Railway Station yesterday afternoon, she could speak German and her own native tongue, but “just a little English.” A travelling companion of Mrs Tennenberg from the transit camp in the north was Stasys Jurkenas, a single man aged 27. who is by occupation a motor driver. ”Auf weidersehen,” he said to Mrs TennenDerg, as he left the station.