Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (24 page)

One ballerina whom I’ve always admired for her stage presence is Wendy Whelan. In rehearsals, she works immaculately, fixating on small details as she strives to understand and conquer whatever role she is dancing at the moment. She addresses minute technical issues as well as broad motivations and themes, and at the final stage rehearsal it
appears that the part has never been danced better. But then the performance comes, and Wendy somehow takes everything to another level, transporting herself into the role, inhabiting it as only a creature of the stage could. Her way of working yields amazing results and has made her one of the most memorable artists of this generation; I’ve held her up as an example to follow ever since I first saw her perform.

When dancers step onstage, they see each and every performance as the culmination of years of work and dedication. They are prepared to expend any amount of energy and to sacrifice their bodies in order to make the performance somehow special. The goal is to move and thrill the audience, and to make them feel lifted up and taken beyond the ordinary world.

But as I said, performances are never perfect. Usually the mistakes are minor and are noticed only by the dancers. We might take off for a jump on the wrong leg and have to fix our position midair, or find a new ending position for a pirouette that didn’t go as planned. A lift might go badly, and the man may have to carry the woman in an unrehearsed position that the woman then has to find a way to make pretty. Sometimes, however, something goes so wrong that there is no recovery from it or disguising it, and everyone, including the most inexperienced audience member, knows that a big problem has occurred. I’ve certainly had my share of every kind of mistake.

First of all, I’ve fallen. Now, at this stage of my career, I know that falling down onstage isn’t the end of the world. It is a little embarrassing, but it usually gains the dancer so much sympathy and goodwill that she gets an extra-loud round of applause. But the first time I fell onstage, I was devastated.

It happened when I was still a student at Washington School of Ballet. For the spring student performance, I was given a solo to dance. It was a short solo with quick footwork that ended with a diagonal of very tricky pirouettes; the pirouettes were
en dedans
,
or “inside” turns, which I happened to do well. To turn
en dedans
,
the dancer stands on the right leg and turns to the right. The other way of turning,
en dehors
, is the
“outside” pirouette, where the dancer stands on the left leg and turns to the right. In variations class, I’d been one of the few who had been able to successfully tackle that diagonal of eight
en dedans
pirouettes, which must have been why I was eventually cast. I still even today feel much more comfortable in this type of turn than in the
en dehors
, or “outside,” pirouette.

Rehearsals seemed to be going well, but I was still terribly nervous as the performances approached. We had three shows over the weekend, and I felt as if these were the most important days of my fourteen-year-old life. In the first performance, after executing four of the pirouettes, I fell. I was mortified. I got sympathy and reassurances from teachers, students, and parents alike, but it didn’t help. And some of the sympathy seemed tinged with a little bit of gladness that something ill had befallen the “girl who got the solo.”

The next day was a Saturday and we had our last two shows, a matinee and an evening performance. My dad was with me that day. He and I prayed before the matinee performance, but I still felt very nervous. While I was dancing the opening section, I felt like I was unconnected to the floor, like a deer on ice. Before my solo, I thought butterflies would erupt from my gut. Then the moment came and I made it through all eight pirouettes, but as I started the steps to get into the final pose, I fell again! I couldn’t believe it. Now I was given sympathy with sidelong glances; I could tell that people were wondering if I was a “choke artist.” Maybe I didn’t have the guts to perform under pressure. Maybe I was one of those talents who would end up a flop. Literally.

In between the matinee and the evening, my dad and I went to a fast-food restaurant for something to eat and just to get away from the theater. I cried. We prayed again. And then, oddly, I fell asleep on a bench right in the middle of that busy restaurant. My brain must have needed a break. But I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the last performance. The worst had happened, twice, so it could only get better.

Mary Day, the head of the school, was backstage for the last show. She looked anxious for me. As I waited in the wings to go out for my solo,
I was nervous but felt a certain grit-your-teeth determination. I was going to get through this, and I was NOT going to fall. Suzanne Erlon, one of my teachers, had suggested not thinking too far ahead of myself, but just counting each turn as “one.” It was too easy (and dangerous) to start worrying about the fact that there were eight turns in a row. I decided to try it. This time I felt connected to the stage and like I was dancing as myself, not as someone labeled as “talented” or “going to be something someday” or “has just fallen twice during her eight pirouettes.” I danced the solo well, executed all the turns, and finished on my feet. I had done it. I ran into the wings and jumped for joy; I felt I had never jumped so high in my life. Mary Day jumped up with me and hugged me, saying, “I knew you would do it. I just knew it!”

Since those early experiences, I’ve been able to handle my falls with more grace. Falling in the corps de ballet was always complicated because I had to get up and somehow find my place in both the choreography and the formation without disrupting things too much. Also, while on the floor, there were usually pointed toes and kicking feet to avoid. Sometimes I had to roll or crawl a bit to get out of everyone’s way. We don’t get in trouble when we fall—everyone knows that it is an accident and that sometimes there is nothing a dancer could do to prevent it. But certainly no one wishes to fall onstage.

Falling during a solo meant that I had to find a way to recover well and pretend nothing had happened, all the while knowing that everyone knew something had happened. Once while doing the Fairy of Generosity solo from
The Sleeping Beauty
in the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, I had a particularly loud fall. SPAC is an outdoor theater, and the performance was a pleasant summer matinee. I was enjoying dancing and being able to see the faces of the audience while dragonflies and butterflies darted over the lawn. About to dance an easy transitional step, I thought, I’m going to do the loveliest
bourrée
right now, looking back at the audience the whole time.

Suddenly I was facedown on the floor like a frog about to be dissected, staring at the stage tape through my fingertips. There was an
echoing
brong
kind of sound bouncing through the amphitheater, no doubt caused by my knees and elbows forcefully connecting with the somewhat hollow-sounding stage. The packed audience of almost three thousand gasped a horrified
Oh
. I stood up quickly and went into B-plus, a ballerina’s go-to pose where she stands on one leg with the other leg crossed behind her, toe on the floor. I had a couple of bars of music before my next step began, so I simply smiled at the audience and opened my palms toward them in an acknowledgment of what had just happened. We shared a moment. They clapped.

I once had a tumble during Balanchine’s
Kammermusik No. 2
,
a neoclassical ballet set to difficult Paul Hindemith music and danced by two women with a corps of men. The counts of the steps were intricate and unusual and took all of my focus. Right in the middle of the opening dance, I slipped and fell to my knees. Luckily I was dancing that night with my friend Kathleen Tracey, who always knew what she was doing. When I fell, all the counts with their matching steps flew out of my brain, and I had no idea where I was in the music. I knew I was about to be hopelessly lost for the rest of the section. But without pausing in her own difficult steps, Katey began barking out the counts to me.

“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen!” I heard her say, and she looked at me on the floor as if to say, “Get up!” I got up with alacrity and was able to join right in with her; she saved the moment. What would we do without generous friends onstage?

Another memorable fall of mine happened during the Winter section of Jerome Robbins’s
Four Seasons
, where all the ballerinas zip around the stage, pretending that they are freezing. There is a section that’s particularly hard because it’s nonstop jumping; it feels like the hardest aerobics class that must be done with pointed toes and a smile. After the solo girl’s first entrance, she stays onstage to dance a pas de trois with two boys. At the end of this part, the three dancers do a series of
coupés jetés
, or turning leaps, in a diagonal to a final pose on one knee. During one performance, I slipped and fell during these jumps. Fortuitously, I had so much momentum built up from my previous leaps that I slid like a
baseball player all the way across the stage and was able to pop up onto my knee, right in the perfect formation between my two boys, and finish with my arms out on the last count of the music. This fall was beloved by those in the company and reenacted many times. In fact, I found out weeks later that the boys had gotten a copy of the performance tape and played it over and over in slow motion in their dressing room.

Perhaps my favorite fall, however, happened during a
Nutcracker
gig with Charles Askegard in Brooklyn. December can be a lucrative month for dancers because thousands of schools across the country are doing their own productions of
The Nutcracker
and need dancers to come in for the principal parts. I’ve always loved to do these gigs, which enable me not only to augment my dancer’s salary but also to meet and talk to students across America. It is wonderful and refreshing to see their love for dance and their joy in being a part of such special performances.

On one such gig in Brooklyn, Charles and I came onto the stage at intermission to warm up and get acclimated to the space. We discovered that the Snowflakes had gone rogue with the resin box. Dancers use this sticky powdery substance called resin when the floor is slippery; there is usually a box offstage that we can step in so that we can get some of the substance on our shoes. Apparently the Snowflakes had felt that the stage was especially slippery, because they had taken the resin box and dumped the entire contents onto the stage. The stage now felt as if someone had covered it with upside-down duct tape.

Charles and I could hardly dance. We had to pull our feet off the floor with every step we took, resulting in little
tick-tick-tick
sounds as we moved around. Even in my pointe shoes and with Charles’s vigorous partnering assistance, I could turn around only twice during the pirouettes
of our pas de deux because the tip of my shoe would stay planted on the floor while the rest of my foot and body tried to turn. Before his solo, Charles found some baby powder and sprinkled it on his shoe while he was in the wings, hoping that he could eke out a double
pirouette himself, but he made it around only one and a half times and then had to jump the rest of the way. Under normal conditions, Charles usually turned like a top.

Somehow, in the middle of this very sticky situation, I managed to slip and fall. It was right before our big
grand jeté
lifts, and Charles and I had moved to opposite sides of the stage as the choreography built suspense. The music soared, Charles ran majestically toward me, and I wound up on my bottom, feet in the air. Charles just looked at me in consternation and then helped me up gallantly. While he held me over his head in the first lift, he said, “How did you possibly manage to fall?” I will never know.

—

A
nother problem that often catches dancers unaware (literally) is what we call “blanking.” Sometimes, no matter how hard we have rehearsed or how many times we have repeated the choreography day after day and week after week, we get onstage before the audience and our brain draws a complete blank. It is a disconcerting feeling to be standing in front of over two thousand expectant people and not have a clue as to how to entertain them.

This has happened to me several times, but two instances in particular stand out. The first is when James and I were dancing the lead roles in Francis Patrelle’s
Romeo and Juliet
. It was a full-length ballet and we were onstage the majority of the evening, so there were lots of entrances and exits to remember. This is usually not a problem, however. It was, after all, what we had trained ourselves to do for a living. But during one of the shows, the worst happened: both of us blanked out at the same time.

In a pas de deux, when one partner forgets the steps, usually the other remembers what they are supposed to be doing and is able to prompt his or her partner with either physical movements or a whispered verbal cue. But I turned to face James and suddenly had no idea what step to do next. I stopped moving and looked into his eyes. He looked back at me, waiting for me to move so that he could respond and partner me.
I said one word to him: “Blank!” and watched as panic entered his own eyes when he realized that he didn’t know what to do next either.

So I spoke another word. “Spin!” I told James, and I got up
en pointe
and started turning around and around in the middle of the stage, hoping I still looked somewhat tragically in love with my Romeo. After the briefest of pauses, James started to run around me, looking ardent and as if he had intended to passionately run around me all along. Eventually, one of us was able to figure out where we were supposed to be in the choreography, and we resumed the real steps. James still blames me for the entire incident. But as far as I’m concerned, it was a meeting of the mindless . . .

My other favorite blanking memory happened while Peter Boal and I were dancing Twyla Tharp’s
Beethoven’s Seventh.
Her choreography for us was lightning quick, and the music often rushed us along with its intensity; she had choreographed the ballet on Peter and me, and we knew it inside out. Many of our entrances began in a similar fashion, with Peter carrying me onto the stage in a
grand jeté
lift. After one such entrance, Peter put me down gently on the floor and moved around in front of me to begin our dance. I looked at him and said, “Blank.”