Victims speak up
Lack of pedagogical skills, treating children like disposable commodities, daily psychological terror sometimes coupled with corporal punishment – and sexual abuse. This is what former students of the Hungarian Dance Academy have spoken about in their interviews with azonnali.hu. For most of them it took over two decades to be able to talk about the abuse they had suffered from celebrated stars of Hungarian ballet.
Former Ballet Institute student László Kriston first felt he had to speak up during the 2017 #metoo movement. First, he started to write posts to Facebook, and this already gained him both supporters and enemies. However, the institute never gave him an official reply, not even when he wrote an open letter to György Szakály, retiring rector of the Hungarian Dance Academy (HDA), in which he asked a number of questions, including whether the leadership knew about sexual and other abuses in the Institute and whether they had started an investigation about these. This April he wrote another open letter on Facebook, this time to Imre Dózsa, who was head of the institution between 1979-91 and 1998-2008. László accuses him of 25 charges, including that “ballet masters psychologically humiliated their students”, “in the changing rooms bullying and offensive physical touching prevailed”, “chairs were thrown at the children while dancing”, “body shaming (and, consequently, anorexia) was widespread.” In May László gave an interview to wmn.hu, and this was when the institution reacted. Former ballet artist, winner of the Kossuth Prize and now Art Director of the Institute Katalin Volf and rector Gábor Bolvári-Takács, formerly secretary of the Hungarian Dance Academy, responded that László’s statement do not contain any concrete cases that could be investigated, only general tendencies, though they do acknowledge that some things that were formerly acceptable are nowadays judged differently.
In whatever case of abuse, it is typical that victims only speak up decades after the events. The words of former ballet students suggest that due to the closed, isolated environment they did not even realize that what was happening to them was not OK.
“These ballet masters were the stars of state socialism and behaved accordingly. They were surrounded with an abnormal amount of respect. We did admire them and believed we had to put up with this.” The school was highly popular, every year it received 2000-3000 applications more than it had places, so masters frequently commented that “if you don’t like it, you can quit”, emphasizing that it was a privilege to get in. And for a child who started the Ballet Institute at the age of 10, being forced to stop dancing and not graduating at 19 meant the shattering of their dreams.
Bullying
It is not only the masters the students had to fear. Rivalry between the children started early, at the age of 10, when they were competing for parts in the ballet Nutcracker in the Opera House. The pressure to perform and the toxic atmosphere brought out the worst in many of them.
“Approximately until 4th grade, so until age 13-14, we were beaten up in the changing rooms a lot”, says Dávid, whose career has taken him to renowned foreign theaters. Besides beating, humiliation was also frequent. Dávid claims that the leaders of the institution knew full well what was going on in the changing rooms and the dormitories, because the children had reported that they were kept in fear by older students. The adults, however, did practically nothing to protect the children.
“Once, when we were 10 or 11, me and my roommate were so afraid we locked ourselves into our room. Then one of the dormitory counselors asked us why we had done this. After all, should anything happen, counselors would not be able to enter either. We told him we were terrified of the older kids, but he did not do anything”, Dávid remembers.
Left to their own devices
Apparently, it was not only bullying that was ignored in dormitories. Another former student, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us that when she was already older, some girls of 10-11 asked her to help them: they complained that one of their dorm counselors, after sending them to take a shower, often stayed in their room reading in order to see them undress. The former student made a complaint to the dormitory director, but nothing happened. Finally, she played a trick to get the counselor sacked.
“Once this counselor caught me smoking and pushed me to the door. I did not get hurt, but the next day I pretended to have a concussion. They even took me to the hospital and kept me under observation at the Neurology Ward for two days. This is why the supervisor was fired, not because he humiliated the girls”, she recalls.
Abuse taken for granted
Based on stories by former students, masters took it for granted that they could use abusive language with the children, and sometimes resorted to corporal punishment if they found it warranted. Nor did they keep this secret.
„Keveházi [Gábor Keveházi, lifelong member and that-time ballet director of the Opera House] said at the first teacher-parent meeting that he did beat the kids. He added that any parent who had a problem with that should say so”, László recalls. Only one parent raised their hands, and to László’s knowledge, the master indeed never laid a hand on their child.
Vera, who asked us to only use her first name, recalls a case when one of her 16-year-old classmates was hit by ballet master Gyula Sárközi so hard that she fell spread-eagled on the floor. Even the pianist was so shocked that she stopped playing. Sometimes they did not even know the reason for such aggression.
“You could get hit for anything, there did not need to be a reason”, Vera says. She adds that she left the school at the beginning of 7th grade to avoid beatings by the new master.
Katalin Sebestény, who still teaches classes at HDA, did not beat children but often left a mark with her nails. Rita remembers that Sebestény often pinched their buttocks or carved her nails into their skin shouting “Pull in your ass!”, or even scratched their backs if somebody (in her opinion) did not stand straight enough. This even left a mark.
Students made anorexic
Sárközi also spoke to the children in an extremely humiliating way. As a teacher teaching lifts, he often made remarks to the girls’ weight. Vera, as well as Edit Rohonyi, says he especially picked on them because he thought they were overweight.
“My first lifting class, at the age of 16 or 17, started with Sárközi pointing at several girls and saying: ‘Out of the room, fat pigs, come back when you got thin!’”, Vera remembers. She adds that at the time she was 1.73 meters tall and weighed 47-48 kilos. “If you look at a photo made of me at the time, you’ll find it absurd that anyone’d call me fat.”
After some time, Vera could no longer put up with the humiliations, and when she informally found out at the age of 16 that she would be fired, she practically attempted suicide: she took several strong painkillers. On the way to the underground she started feeling sick. Fortunately, some of her companions were there with her; they took her back to the school, where she threw everything up. After this, she did not attend ballet classes – and apparently none of the teachers wondered why.
Psychological violence
Female ballet masters often humiliated girls by ignoring them. Vera recalls one of them, whom we have not managed to contact through the Opera House or the HDA, so we will not name her hear. She no longer teaches, but she has been awarded lifelong membership in the Opera House and has received several awards. She used to ignore Vera so much that she says: “when once she did speak to me, I started crying.” As a teenager, she took even this as an acknowledgement.
Sexual abuse
Male teachers frequently made sexual references. Gábor Keveházi used to finish his classes early so he and his male students could observe the girls practicing next door, making comments like “I’d fuck that one, and that one too.”
László adds that ballet in itself creates an oversexualized environment, especially for teenagers who are just exploring their own sexuality and are working with their bodies. However, Richárd thinks that for this very reason, Keveházi should not have focused so much on sex. Some other masters, however, did not stop at words when it came to sex.
After passing his end-of-term exam, Péter ran into a now deceased master, who made a negative remark on his thighs. Péter took it very badly; though students are not fired at the end of term, but he was afraid he might be at the end of the schoolyear. Therefore, he asked for help from another, now also deceased, master, who invited him into his apartment.
“I suspected nothing. As a boy of 14 or 15 I could not even imagine he might have another agenda”, Péter begins. “We went to his apartment, he offered me some drink that I refused. We talked and he also drank. Then he started examining how flexible my strings were, and suddenly told me to get undressed.” This was something Péter found strange, but the master claimed this was the only way he could see his muscles.
“He made me lay down on the bed. Then I knew this shouldn’t be happening, but I was afraid to refuse to cooperate. After all, the other master had scared me that day that I might get fired. I didn’t dare to say no.”
“He started touching my legs and checking my strings, but one of his hands kept sliding up to my penis. As I had no erection, after some time he felt he had to stop. We got dressed and I left. I felt terrible”, Péter remembers. Afterwards, he told the story to his classmates and one of the teachers.
“Listen, I’ve talked to the headmaster and he said there’s no point in making a scandal out of this”, the teacher said. “All that would happen is that you’d get fired and there’d be a disciplinary warning against the master.” Péter cannot recall whether this message came from the that-time (now deceased) headmaster of the HDA or the high school headmaster. We have contacted the teacher, but he refused to answer our questions.
Richárd claims that this very same master was obsessed with little boys’ buttocks. In other classes he used to smack the naked bottoms of 10-year-olds and used to put coins between their butt cheeks (through their clothes) to teach them to tighten their buttock muscles. If the coin fell out – and in most cases it did – the boy had to touch his toes and the master hit his naked buttocks.
The master who molested Péter is no longer alive, but ballet master Csaba Sebestyén is – he is employed at the Opera House as master and choreographer and also works for HDA. Two former students tell stories about him which are even more shocking than Péter’s.
“It happened in 6th grade; I was 15, at home with an injury”, Dávid starts the story of his harassment. “Csaba Sebestyén called me and said he’d visit me when my parents would not be at home. I didn’t like this at all, but in the system of the Ballet Institute you couldn’t say no.”
“Sebestyén turned up in his white SUV and clogs. He massaged my legs, then started touching my penis. I was scared to death but didn’t dare say a word. That’s how much systemic terror had become our second nature.”
“Fortunately for me, after some time he asked me if he should go on. I have no idea how I dared to say no, but I did”, Dávid continues. After this, he was the one who apologized to Sebestyén. But all the master said was “don’t tell your mother or I’ll go to jail”. And Dávid did keep silent; he only told his mother about this story a few years ago.
So Sebestyén sometimes visited students in their home. However, as Dániel (pseudonym) recalls, it was an open secret that some students visited his apartment. Of course, nobody officially knew what was happening at Sebestyén’s. Dániel himself only found out when once he, still a minor, accepted the master’s invitation and visited him one evening. They were drinking and talking. Dániel claims he was no longer sober when he notices that Sebestyén was caressing his thighs and “suddenly his hand was in my pants.”
“He felt I had an erection. I pushed his hand away, though not very firmly. This whole thing lasted longer, in the meantime we talked about completely different things and sometimes smoked cigarettes.” However, eventually “my pants got unbuttoned, and next thing I knew, his head was going up and down between my thighs. I didn’t know how to handle it. I thought, if I didn’t protest, it’d be over sooner”, Dániel remembers, suggesting that it was not OK to go against a teacher’s will.
“They should know what they did”
“I don’t want to cause suffering to anyone after 20 years. But I want to protect the present and future generations from the things that happened to us”, Vera explains why she has shared her memories. Virtually all the other interviewees say the same.
“Imre Dózsa must admit his negligence and the school must acknowledge the abuse we suffered. Also, I expect both Dózsa and the institution to apologize”, László adds. ászló.
Responses
We contacted all the former masters mentioned in this article with our questions. Until the publication of this article only Gyula Sárközi got back to us through his lawyer. The letter says: “The statements implied in your questions (especially, but not only, regarding physical abuse and the humiliating treatment of students) are false and unfounded.”
A day after the article was published HDA rector Gábor Bolvári-Takács reacted in a press release. In this, he apologized to former students and promised to start criminal procedures, if necessary, against the masters still employed at the Institute.
