Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (35 page)

Playing at being ballerina at home, about age four.

My grand introduction to the stage: singing a solo in my school’s Christmas pageant.

This is from a photo shoot Terry Shields arranged at her ballet studio in South Carolina. I was about eleven.

Trying out a “fish dive” with Dad—my first pas de deux partner—at my grandmother’s house.

Grand jeté
under the oak tree in my yard in Summerville, South Carolina.

My mother took this photo on the balcony of our New York City apartment in 1988. I was wearing a real New York City Ballet tutu for the first time, for a performance with the School of American Ballet.

Dancing with Arch Higgins during SAB’s performance of Balanchine’s
Serenade
at the New York State Theater, at the age of fifteen.

In costume for the role of the Maid in my first
Nutcracker
as an apprentice with the New York City Ballet, in 1989.

Waltz of the Flowers costume from
The Nutcracker.

Hot Chocolate costume from
The Nutcracker . . .
along with a famous visitor. Meeting Michael Jackson was definitely a highlight of my first
Nutcracker
.

The
Waltz Project
performance with James Fayette during which I hurt my back, a serious injury for a dancer.

Dancing in the third movement corps from Balanchine’s
Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet,
in the early nineties.

Now a soloist, leaping as the lead in the Winter section of Jerome Robbins’s
The Four Seasons
.