Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (5 page)

The charismatic Julio de Bittencourt taught us ballet and character dancing. In character, we wore heeled shoes and did stylized czardas and mazurkas like those I had seen in folk festivals or European national dance exhibitions on television. Mr. de Bittencourt tried to draw the fire out of our young souls and instill some passion into our dancing. We studied the subtly precise art of Chinese dancing with a company member from the Washington Ballet, learning ritualistic processions and poses. We had regular technique classes in soft ballet shoes with the challenging and funny Suzanne Erlon. She would lead us through barre to the center work, which included turns and then jumps. After a short break during which we put on our pointe shoes, we had pointe
classes with the feminine and ladylike Patricia Berrand, who taught us the finer elements of dancing
en pointe.
Mary Day herself came in to teach us when she could, and that was always cause for extra nerves and more attention to how our hair was fixed.

It was fascinating for me to be exposed to all of these different styles of teaching and dancing. I felt myself growing as a dancer every day as new ideas or techniques were offered to me. My competitive side also came out, and I found that I wanted to be the best in the class at every step. I never completely succeeded, but there were certain movements in which I felt, proudly, that I had perhaps been the closest to perfect. Looking back now, I’m not so sure I was always correct in my assessment!

I began to form friendships with the other girls in the class and soon became closer to them than to the students at my high school. But when we were actually in the studio, there was always a subtle competition for the teachers’ approval and attention. The Level B class that I was in was very talented, and we all wanted to stand out. I surprised myself by becoming more assertive than I ever had been; in those larger classes, it was important to try to stand in the front line of girls, or at least at the center, so as not to be overlooked. I don’t remember our ever being overtly mean to each other, but I do remember silently jockeying for the best position in line or trying to get my leg the highest just so that I could “win,” not necessarily for the pure reason of improving myself. The talent in the other girls definitely drove me to improve. I wanted to be able to tell myself that I was the best, at least at a certain combination.

My mother was receiving an education as well. On every available surface sat what we came to call the Ballet Mothers. These women, who loved ballet, were very involved in their daughters’ progress, and waited at the school for the duration of their daughters’ classes, striving to catch glimpses of the studios when the door was accidentally left cracked open. My mom started to joke that she was becoming one of them, and that I would one day write a book called
Ballet Mommy Dearest
.

During my second year at Washington Ballet, something happened that would alter the course of my life. I came in contact with a ballet
called
Serenade
, choreographed by a man named George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet. I had never heard of George Balanchine, and I assumed that the New York City Ballet must be some small regional company in Manhattan. In fact, Balanchine was the most influential and innovative choreographer ever to arrive on the ballet scene, and his company, the New York City Ballet, is one of the best in the world.
Serenade
was the first ballet the Russian-born choreographer made in America when he arrived in 1934. It is as heart stopping now as it was then.

The Washington Ballet was going to perform
Serenade
at the Kennedy Center, and they needed four students to fill in the corps de ballet
because they didn’t have enough women in the company. With much excitement, I learned that I was to be one of the four. The rehearsals were incredible. I’d never danced steps likes these to music that stirred me as much as did Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C. These steps
were
the music, and my body
was
the instrument playing the notes. It almost seemed that with every new step I learned, my heart had to grow bigger.

Finally, during my initial performance of
Serenade
at the Kennedy Center, I felt a new light dawning inside of me. It was at the end of the first section of the ballet, when all of the women return to the pose they were in when the curtain arose—double diamond formation, palms and faces lifted to the light. Then, on a deep chord, they turn as one and take a stately step, followed by successive steps in time with the slow rhythm of the music. As I did this, surrounded by my fellow dancers, I lifted my eyes and looked toward the bluish stage lights illuminating our path. Like the other women, I trailed my right hand behind me as if I were running my hand over the tops of tall grasses or letting my fingers pass across the surface of a body of water.

And the thought rose up in me, distinct: This. I want to do
this
for a living.

I
n 1987, when I was fourteen, my mom and I began to realize that the thing for advanced students to do was to go away to summer ballet intensives. A lot of Washington Ballet students went to the Chatauqua program in upstate New York. Some students chose to go to the School of American Ballet in New York City, a choice that wasn’t very popular with Mary Day because of the very different training to be found there.

After asking the Ballet Mothers and reading some ballet books, my mother found out that the School of American Ballet, the ballet school attached to the New York City Ballet, was reputed to be the finest ballet school in America, and we felt that even if Ms. Day didn’t approve, it would be a good indication of my level of talent to go to SAB’s Summer Course audition and see what happened.

I had never auditioned for anything before, and I was very nervous. The audition was held at a studio in the Kennedy Center, and after I’d safety-pinned my number to my leotard, I went and stretched with the rest of the silent, unsmiling girls. The teacher walked in; I found out later it was Susan Hendl, one of the ballet mistresses for the New York City Ballet. She gave us a full ballet class. It was very difficult—some of the steps were faster than I was used to, and many of the accents were placed at different points in the music. During the
grand battement
combination at the barre, where the students perform high, fast kicks, the teacher zeroed in on me.

“Get your leg back into fifth quickly!” she said, standing right next to me. Fifth position is where ballet dancers close their legs together, feet
pressed against each other, the toe of each foot touching the heel of the other. “Into fifth and hold it there on the count of one.”

She began to clap her hands on the downbeat when she wanted me to freeze in fifth position after kicking my leg all the way up to my ear.

“And fifth!” Clap.

“And fifth!” Clap.

“And fifth!” Clap.

She looked at me consideringly. “A little better.”

She walked away, and I stood in place, panting. I’d never been asked to do
grand battement
that way. It was much, much harder. But I could see that it was also better.

After the audition came weeks of waiting to see whether I’d been accepted to the summer program. When the letter came, we learned that I had been accepted, on scholarship.

We were thrilled, but after looking at what it would cost to stay in New York City for five weeks, we didn’t think we could afford it. My grandmother came to the rescue.

Marie Brown, my mother’s mother, loved the arts; she herself was a chorus teacher and often brought her students to New York City so that they could be exposed to the best opera and Broadway shows. She told my mother, “You should go. I’ll pay for your hotel.” And it was settled.

That first summer course was terrifying and exhilarating. Terrifying because we were in big, bad, scary New York City. Would we get mugged daily? And I would be going to the biggest, baddest ballet school in the country. Would the students scorn me? Would they lock me in the lockers? Would I even be able to keep up?

But it was exhilarating for exactly the same reasons. The city was amazing—busy, fascinating, and ever on the move. We toured every inch of it and went to as many Broadway shows as we could afford to. And SAB was a revelation. The other students were nice, the teachers were demanding but kind, and the instruction was eye-opening.

Everything at SAB was on a higher level. The other students were better dancers than any I had yet encountered. We took our technique
class, which I’d always danced in soft leather ballet slippers, in pointe shoes; I had to learn to dance every step, even the beginning steps at the barre, in pointe shoes. The standards were extremely high, and my learning curve was steep. I was challenged every moment of class. The Balanchine technique they taught was quick, precise, and intensely musical. When George Balanchine came to America to start his new company, he had first opened a ballet school, the School of American Ballet, because he knew that he was going to have to train dancers from a young age to dance in the revolutionary way he wanted them to dance. He wanted to open up classical ballet, make it more extreme and at the same time more efficient, and he needed to teach a whole generation of dancers to move in a completely different way. Once he had laid down this new technical foundation for his school, he felt that he could start his company.

For me, I felt as if I were starting over, because even the most basic ballet steps were taught differently at SAB. Something as easy as a plié, where the dancer bends and straightens her knees, was executed with a different impetus and musicality than I was used to doing it. The barre exercises were often set to a faster pace than I was accustomed to, but as a result, my muscles were more ready to move quickly once I was in the center. Even when we were dancing the slower adagio movements, the instructors wanted a sense of power and purpose in our movements. Something in me thrilled to every class.

The school asked me to stay for the year, an honor given to very few summer course students. We declined, as I would have had to leave my family and live on my own in New York, and my parents thought I was too young for that. I returned to Washington Ballet that fall a much different dancer, stronger and more confident. I missed the challenge I’d felt at SAB and couldn’t wait to go back to New York the next summer.

During that year, a surprising turn of events brought change to my family. My father, continuing to work for the U.S. government, was given the opportunity to transfer to New York City. There were many considerations, but ultimately my parents decided that he would take
the transfer. It would be a great job for my father, my sister could study piano with some of the best teachers in the world, and I could attend the School of American Ballet while still living with my parents. It seemed as if God had paved the way for my sister and me to pursue our arts in the city known for some of the best artistic instruction in America. And my mom had fallen in love with New York City, so she would be pleased just to wake up every morning as a New Yorker. She would be able to get a job there as well.

—

I
n the summer of 1988, when I was fifteen, my family moved to New York City. We sold our cars and felt a sense of freedom that we could just walk out of our building and go anywhere without worrying about traffic or parking. And we felt very safe; we were in the busy Lincoln Center neighborhood and lived in a doorman building.

Our New York existence was in fact a bit unrealistic, as I discovered a couple of years later when I moved out on my own. It is common knowledge that New Yorkers live in cramped, expensive apartments, but since my father’s job considered New York City an undesirable “hardship” post, they provided incentives to those employees willing to work there. One of those incentives was help with housing costs. Because of that aid, we were able to get a large and lovely apartment on the thirty-third floor of a doorman building that had a pool and a gym in the basement. On a clear day, I could see the Statue of Liberty blinking far away in New York Harbor from my bathroom window. My family thought that living in New York was a piece of cake; why were people always complaining?

My sister was home from college and was looking for a summer job. I had a bit of time to settle into my new room; I remember unpacking while listening to the one country music station in New York City. We searched for a church and started going to a church called All Angels’ Church, which was about twenty blocks away from our apartment. Very soon, however, the summer course at the School of American Ballet had started up, and I was busy dancing again.

It felt very different going back to SAB this time around, having done it once before and knowing that I would be staying for the year. I was fifteen now and felt a curious mixture of confidence and insecurity. On one hand, I was now experienced, and I knew that I was liked at SAB. But on the other hand, what if I got there and learned that I was just one of many they liked and ended up getting lost in the crowd? What if I was good, but not really
that
good?

And there was a whole new set of other students to be concerned about. I was used to the competition with the other girls at Washington Ballet. They were a known factor, and we had worked out whatever little things we needed to work out. But now at the SAB summer course, I was in a new class. There were some familiar faces, but also many new and talented girls whom I hadn’t seen last year. And what about the girls who regularly attended the year-round course? Most of them were off at other summer courses, so I would have to wait and see what they were going to be like.

Since I was now in the highest level at the summer course, I was eligible for the SAB summer workshop performance, in which students performed new choreography in the small theater at the Juilliard School. It would be the last year for these summer performances, though the year students would still have their annual spring workshop performances, and the school would be taking the dancers to perform upstate in Saratoga Springs, where the New York City Ballet toured in the summer. This summer workshop meant rehearsals after our regular classes, but it was a chance to work with new choreographers and to perform in New York City, and I was really hoping to be picked.

Three different up-and-coming choreographers from different ballet companies came to watch our classes, and all of the students struggled to dance well and be noticed. I wasn’t sure whether I would be singled out or not; I wasn’t one of the flashier dancers in the class. There were others who could jump higher or turn around more times as they
pirouetted on one pointe-shoe-clad foot. I was coordinated, had good
movement quality, and could generally dance well; I also had a pleasing line and could make good-looking shapes with my body, excelling at adagios, where dancers moved slowly in a sustained manner. But I didn’t have any technical “tricks” that might set me apart.

One student in particular daunted me. Her name was Monique Meunier, and she was my age and new to SAB that summer. She was the sensation of our class, everything I was not: strong, confident, she could do multiple turns with ease. It seemed there was nothing she couldn’t do. Beside her I often felt small, weak, and mousy.

Somehow, however, I was chosen to do workshop and ended up being one of three leading women in one of the ballets. Monique and a student named Anne from South Africa were the two other leads. Best of all, I was going to do a pas de deux,
a “dance of two” between just one man and one woman; my movement was an adagio, and I was paired with a very tall boy who could lift me in soaring lifts around the studio. To my terror and excitement, the choreographer even wanted us to do a “bird” lift, where I was held over my partner’s head by my hip bones, with my feet and head arching up to the ceiling. It is the same lift made famous by the end of the movie
Dirty Dancing
. The balance was really tricky to get, and there were definitely times I feared I would be dropped on my head. Luckily I was with a good, conscientious partner.

The summer course sped by particularly quickly because I was so busy with the extra rehearsals. Suddenly the performances were over—I honestly don’t remember them, which has often been the case in my career. Only if something unusual happens during a performance do I recall it with any clarity. This may be because performances are adrenaline-filled moments where I become something else and express myself using the more emotional, unreasoning part of my brain. I experience them deeply, but after a couple of days or weeks, I forget what it felt like to dance them.

Once the summer workshop performances were over, I was just waiting for the fall to begin so that I could become an official student of the School of American Ballet. One of my teachers from the Washington
Ballet, Suzanne Erlon, told me that I should audition for the American Ballet Theatre, the more classical and traditional of the two major New York ballet companies. But I was fifteen, and it felt too soon. Many students start to think about auditioning for companies around the age of sixteen, but even that is on the youngest margin of professional dancer hopefuls. I knew that I wanted to dance for a living—I loved it utterly—and it was starting to look like I might have a chance, but I still felt very much like a student, not ready for the audition circuit.