Pamela and Marat Daukayev’s dance of the heart, step by step

| January 23, 2025 | 0 Comments

PAMELA AND MARAT DAUKAYEV’S wedding, Aug.10, 1996.

They say it takes two to tango. For Pamela and Marat Daukayev, it took a pas de deux. Their story is a dance of the heart where, step by step, they built a life together in Windsor Square, with three now grown children (Marat Jr. and twins Emma and Nicholas), two golden retrievers and three birds. Plus, they founded an acclaimed ballet school along the way.

THE DAUKAYEVS met, fell in love, had three children and founded an acclaimed ballet school along the way.

Pamela Van de Velde Daukayev was born in Ohio; her mother was originally from London, England, and her father, who served in the U.S. military, hailed from Ghent, Belgium. They moved frequently, including stints abroad, before settling in Los Angeles. Pamela studied ballet growing up, but not seriously enough to pursue it professionally. After college, she lived with her mother in the Pico Robertson area and ran a small fiber optic company that did museum lighting. As an adult, she turned to ballet for exercise.

“It’s a demanding discipline and really great exercise,” says Pamela. “I wanted to improve. I was looking for a serious class.”

Step one: the meet-cute

A friend recommended an adult ballet class at a nearby studio that was taught by a Russian teacher. Intrigued, Pamela went to the class. “He looked younger than I expected a Russian teacher to be,” she remembers. He didn’t speak much English, so she wondered how he would be able to communicate, but once the lesson began, “He walked down the line [of dancers] and gave me a tap on my kneecap, and I knew exactly what he meant.”

The teacher was Marat Daukayev. He had been a principal dancer with the Kirov Ballet (renamed the Mariinsky Ballet in 1992) and, after retiring from performing, he became the premier teacher for their star dancers. He had taken this temporary teaching position in Los Angeles to have time to decide what to do next in Russia.

Pamela immediately responded to her new teacher. “He was an incredible dancer. He was a very kind person,” she says. “His talent had been reserved for the most well-trained in Russia. When he worked with us, he was very, very kind and inspiring. He wanted us to get as far as we could.”

“The first class or second class finished,” Marat remembers, “and [Pamela] sat on the floor, holding her ballet shoes, and she’s crying. It was difficult for me. I would like to help. I asked her what was the matter,” and she answered, “Marat, if I had had a teacher like you, I would have had a chance to be a ballerina.”

Step two: Uncommon language of love

They began dating. “In the beginning, we looked in the dictionary a lot,” Pamela explains. “We went to the ballet, cooked, went to the beach, talked, looked in the dictionary.” They quickly fell in love.

“It’s difficult to explain about love,” Marat states in his Russian-accented English. “You love [a] person, that’s it. It’s how you’re feeling. She didn’t speak Russian. I didn’t speak English, but we had a feeling.”

They also had an uncanny way of understanding each other. Once Pamela accompanied Marat to the dentist, who asked. “Will you translate for him?” She answered that she would. The dentist told Marat to sit in the dental chair and then he would put the bib on him, which Marat did not understand. Then the dentist asked Pamela to say it in Russian. “I don’t speak Russian,” she answered and promptly repeated in English exactly what the dentist had said, whereupon Marat complied. The dentist was baffled. “He understands me,” Pamela explained, “and not you.”

Step three: Marriage and decisions

The relationship got serious, and Marat took her to see his homeland. In St. Petersburg, Pamela wanted to see the Mariinsky Ballet performance of “Swan Lake,” but when they went to the theater, it was sold out. Pamela recalls, “A woman in pink came running after him. Marat recognized her. She was an usher.” Pamela could see how upset the woman was that a star of the ballet couldn’t get a ticket. “She ran off and came back with two chairs and put them in a theater box for us!”

When they went to Ufa, his hometown, all the local “babushkas” (older ladies) came to catch a glimpse of Pamela to see the woman from Hollywood who was dating their Russian celebrity. Pamela laughs, “They expected someone like Dolly Parton — voluptuous. One said, ‘She is just a skinny girl!’”

Pamela and Marat married on Aug. 10, 1996, in a friend’s house in Los Angeles. But soon they had some decisions to make. Pamela points out that in Russia, the state takes care of its stars; in America, Marat had to figure it out for himself. He had several offers, including assistant artistic director offers from the Mariinsky Ballet and the Colorado Ballet. They decided to try Colorado, but returned to Los Angeles after their first child was born to be near Pamela’s aging parents.

Pamela encouraged Marat to start a ballet school and, in 2001, they started the Marat Daukayev Ballet School with only two students. That same year, they bought their 1917 Windsor Square house. With Pamela as executive director and Marat as artistic director, the school flourished on La Brea Avenue before moving to Wilshire Boulevard in Wilshire Center (now commonly referred to as Koreatown) just before the pandemic. To date they have trained more than 2,000 students, some of whom have gone on to dance at such places as the Royal Ballet School, the San Francisco Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet.

Step four: Dance of the heart

On Feb. 6, 2023, Marat suffered a heart attack. His classes were covered by the other eight teachers at the school while he underwent operations and recovery, and Pamela kept the school running. He was back at work a month later, having barely skipped a beat.

“Work is life, is movement,” Marat says. “Now I am 72 years old and continue to work. People need me.” And he needs Pamela.

“I left Russia, I was 43 years old,” states Marat. “I start life here from zero. I met Pamela. I was lucky. And step by step.”

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Category: People

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