Beyond the Dance

by Chan Hon Goh

  Our new artistic director turned out to be Reid Anderson. Although from New Westminster, British Columbia, he had spent years as a principal dancer at the renowned Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, and he had already worked with the National by staging for them their first production of Onegin. In fact, I had seen Reid Anderson himself dance the lead in Onegin when I was just a kid, and he knew my father because the two of them had taught at the Banff School of Fine Arts. I had met Reid for the first time when I was preparing for the Adeline Genée Competition. My father invited Reid, who was then director of Ballet B.C., to watch me rehearse. I didn’t know how his appointment to the National Ballet might affect my own career. But it was Reid Anderson who would really see my ability and pull me out of the corps.

  Once again summer came around and, with it, our open-air performances at Ontario Place. It had been some time since I had any challenging dancing to do, but when I checked the cast list I discovered that I had been named to dance the Corsaire pas de deux. One year my first solo, and the next my first partnering in a piece that required some virtuoso dancing. Reid Anderson had paired me, a corps member, with a principal dancer, Jeremy Ransom. Surely he was testing my dancing ability, both for technique and expressiveness, and perhaps also for professionalism under the spotlight. It was tremendously exciting, but equally daunting.

  Jeremy and I had only about two weeks to prepare. The rehearsals were a struggle, as it seemed to me that Jeremy just wasn’t a natural partner, as some fine male dancers aren’t. Yet I was determined not to have the awful stomach troubles of the year before and I managed to keep calm. Our first show went wonderfully well. The movements seemed to flow without conscious effort, the timing was as natural as the beating of my heart, and the emotions came unbidden.

  Afterwards, I went back to the corps dressing room. When someone knocked on the door, another dancer answered it and then came up to me.

  “Reid wants to see you,” she said.

  I went out and Reid, waiting for me, put his arms around me and gave me a great hug. “I’m really, really glad to see what you did out there,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

  Somehow I managed to stumble out a reply. “Thank you for the opportunity to do this.”

  “Oh,” he smiled, “there’ll be more to come.”

  And so began the kind of support and affirmation that a dancer thrives on, that helps her to have the courage to grow. It was also true that, over time, I came to see that Reid perceived me as a certain kind of dancer – perfect for the classical “tutu” ballets and girlish roles. He did not cast me in other, more emotionally realistic parts. But Reid gave me the support that I needed to rise in the company.

  So far, I had been featured only in mixed programs or excerpts, rather than in any of the full-length productions that most people associate with ballet. But I knew that in December the company would perform its annual season of The Nutcracker – the perennial favorite, especially with children – to the famous musical score by Tchaikovsky. The National’s version, first choreographed by its founding artistic director Celia Franca, had been in the repertoire for decades (it would be replaced with a dazzling new version a few years later), and its characters – the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, Clara and Fritz (played by young student dancers), the toy soldiers who battle the mice – continued to enchant audiences. I was naturally curious to know what role Reid might think appropriate for me. Would I get one of the divertissements, the virtuoso dances in the second act, to perform – Marzipan or Spanish – or would I simply get more corps work and a few other tiny roles? Though I hoped for some nugget, I was amazed when the cast list went up and I saw my name next to two leading roles: the Snow Queen in Act I and the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II.

  My partner, Kevin Pugh, had danced his role for many years, but it was my first time leading the company in a full-length ballet. This sort of role was just what belonging to the National meant to me, and I was naturally thrilled. But perhaps the happiest moment of all occurred during my debut performance when, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, I descended in the basket of a hot-air balloon and, looking out into the audience, saw my mother and father watching me with awe.

  As the Sugar Plum Fairy in Celia Franca’s production of The Nutcracker, with Jeremy Ransom.

  In a year and a half as a corps member of the National Ballet of Canada, I had been given the opportunity to dance solos, a pas de deux, and the leading roles in The Nutcracker. The management that hired me, and the director who followed, had been true to their word. They had given me opportunities to show that I deserved a more prominent position in the company. Che had finally joined me in Toronto, and I was no longer alone. I hardly felt satisfied. I sensed too much potential in myself, too much expressiveness hungering to get out. Nor was I fully at home yet, or even confident of my place. But I was full of hope and expectation and I was determined to make the most of every chance I got.

  In the dressing room.

  CHAPTER 10

  ON THE RISE

  It was under Reid Anderson that I rose from a member of the corps to principal dancer and began to dance the roles that I had long dreamed of The rise was fairly quick and always steady, with Reid offering me new opportunities for growth without thrusting me into roles that I was not yet ready for.

  In his first year at the National, Reid did not promote any of the dancers, but kept the company as it was until he had a chance to observe us all. During that time Veronica Tennant, an important star for the National, retired, and it came time to make some changes. In June 1990, two years after I began as a corps member, Reid called several dancers into his office, one at a time. I was one of those called and, when the door was closed, Reid told me that he was promoting me to second soloist. “You are going to lead the National in the future,” he said. “You are going to be one of the stars of this company.”

  I was twenty-one and could not take in all that he meant, perhaps because beneath my confidence remained both self-doubt and a realistic sense of how much farther I still had to go. But I was ecstatic and hurried to tell Che. We both agreed that moving out of the corps into a soloist position was the biggest hurdle in a dancer’s advancing career.

  A dancer doesn’t only need to improve her technical skills and artistic style as she rises to more prominent roles; she must also gain confidence on stage and develop the stamina, which was never my greatest attribute, needed to dance larger and more demanding roles. It was not until after I was promoted to first soloist in January 1992, a year and a half after becoming second soloist, that I got to play the Sylph in La Sylphide. First performed by the Royal Danish Ballet in 1836, La Sylphide is one of the great ballets of the high romantic period. The role of the Sylph – not human at all but a sort of otherworldly sprite or fairy – requires a dancer to be graceful and charming, and to appear lighter than air. In the story, a kind of tragic fairy tale, James, the lead male character, is about to be married but falls in love with the Sylph. He pursues her, only to be fooled by a witch who promises to help him win the Sylph’s heart. Instead, he causes her death.

  My debut in the role – with Jeremy Ransom as the male lead – was received by the critics in a way that showed how my concentration was still on the technical demands of a role. The Globe and Mail praised my “technical mastery,” especially my “ability to freeze en pointe with absolute security, in a way that caught the breath.” But the critic also wrote that the character was “as thin as tissue paper” and, even though he partly faulted the ballet, that criticism did sting a little. The reviewer for the Toronto Sun wrote of my “exquisite technique” but also claimed – horror! – that I had a “penchant for mugging.” Well, it seemed true that my acting skills, which I had not fully concentrated on, had some way to go. In fact, I did not yet fully realize that although brilliant technique can impress an audience, it cannot move one. Only by bringing deep emotions to a role can a dancer make the audience really feel. At this point – I was all of twenty-two years old – I was still c
onsumed with perfecting my technical skills.

  I was so consumed that I sometimes pushed myself beyond healthy limits. In my third year at the National I began to get a pain in my left foot. Thinking – or at least hoping – that it would go away, I continued to take class, rehearse, and perform. But instead of it lessening, I began to get “referred” pain in other areas of my foot. The doctors couldn’t zone in on the problem because of the different points that hurt, until finally an indentation began to form in my foot where the muscle wasn’t receiving enough nutrients from the blood. Only then, six months later, did the doctors give me yet another bone scan and X-ray and conclude that I had a stress fracture in the metatarsal bone. Stress fractures are caused by excessive use and constant repetition of the same movement, the obvious result of overwork. Treatment: six weeks with no weight on the foot.

  That meant six weeks without dancing, and so I had to go on sick leave. About the only exercise I could do without hurting my foot was swimming and Pilates. But it was a difficult time mentally more than physically, because without dancing I felt lost. Who was I without dance? Going to class or rehearsals and watching the others proved to be too painful, and I ended up going back to Vancouver with Che. Those six weeks seemed to last forever and, although the doctors reassured me I would get better, I was a little afraid that my dancing would never be the same. Eventually I was able to begin physiotherapy treatment and began gentle exercises, slowly increasing the weight on my foot.

  As I healed, I came to see that this injury was teaching me a lesson. Pain is the body’s way of sending you a warning message, and you had better not ignore it. Until now I had tried to command my body to obey my wishes, rather than listening to its needs. If I wanted a long career as a dancer, I had better respect my physical self and take care of it. That meant not only responding to pain, but also eating properly and getting enough rest in order to recuperate from the extreme exertion of dancing. It took another two stress fractures for this lesson to really sink in. Dancers face many difficulties; physical injuries are only one. The desire to excel, to look and perform beautifully, to conform to the so-called “ideal” appearance of a ballerina – all these pressures can take their toll. Some dancers suffer from stress, others develop eating disorders that can severely threaten their health. And while dance companies are now more aware of these dangers, dancers are still pretty much on their own. Those weeks of forced rest due to injury seemed like time lost from dancing that I would never recover, but in retrospect they were valuable in a different way. I knew that I would have to take care of myself, body and soul. If I didn’t, I would never get to dance the great roles of the major ballets, roles that I was growing towards.

  Despite the injuries, however, I was starting to feel more settled in life. Che and I were living together happily, and he was developing his own fine career as a teacher in the dance department of George Brown College. He was often invited to guest teach, both in Canada and abroad. One Saturday night I was speaking long-distance to my mother and suddenly mentioned to her that I had been thinking about getting a dog – we had two during my Vancouver years. To my surprise she encouraged the idea, and the next day I browsed through the classified section of the Toronto Star. And that was how we found Daly, an apricot miniature poodle, the oldest of his litter and just a little puffball when we brought him home. He cried for six weeks every moment he wasn’t with us, making us hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but he turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to us. With Daly, both Che and I learned to be more considerate, responsible, and nurturing.

  At home with Daly on his sofa.

  On a wintry day in February 1993, the snow was falling over Front Street and I, always feeling the cold, was wrapped up like a bear, a warm hat pulled over my head. I crossed the street and went into the O’Keefe Centre where class was being held when I saw Reid Anderson. “Come in for a second,” he said to me. “I want to see you in my office.”

  Still cold, I left my hat on. “Listen,” Reid said. “I’ve just proposed to the board that I promote you to principal dancer. I want to do it at the start of our new season in July but I’m not sure if we have the budget. If I can’t then, I’m going to do it in January of the following year.”

  Reid came through with his offer and I became a principal dancer in January 1994, the first principal dancer in the National Ballet’s history to be of Chinese heritage. It was five years from joining the National Ballet of Canada as a corps member to becoming a principal dancer, so naturally I felt proud of my own rapid rise. And I was unsure – despite it having been my determined goal – of whether I really was good enough.

  The proof, of course, would be in the dancing. I did not think that a dancer had really proved herself, could call herself a true ballerina, until she had danced all the leads in the major ballet repertoire. And so I was elated when Reid gave me a chance to dance my first Sleeping Beauty.

  I had loved Sleeping Beauty since I was a kid, when I had seen videos of Natalia Makarova and my other favorite ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, in the role. Fonteyn was perhaps most famous for the role of Aurora, the beautiful princess who is pricked by a cursed needle and falls asleep for a hundred years before being awakened by the kiss of a prince. Many consider it to be the finest classical ballet of the 19th century, and the composer Tchaikovsky’s greatest score. Back in Vancouver with my parents, I had seen the National on tour perform the famous Nureyev production, and now here I was at the age of twenty-four, about to dance in the same version.

  Karen Kain would also be dancing the role of Aurora. In fact, the season would be her farewell to Sleeping Beauty. I was able to prepare not only with Magdalena Popa but also with Karen. Karen’s partner, a guest dancer from the Paris Opera, would not arrive until a week before the performances began, and Karen liked to have company in the studio, so the two of us would rehearse together. She was very generous about offering advice and suggestions. Both she and Kimberly Glasco, who would also dance as Aurora at some performances, warned me about the famous rose adagio in the first act of the ballet. During this scene, four suitors arrive to ask for Aurora’s hand in marriage, and each one offers her a rose. Dancing with each in turn, Aurora performs a long promenade, posed and balancing on one foot while the male dancer walks her around. To the audience it is all light and beautiful, but for the dancer it is an excruciatingly long time to stay on pointe. It demands both fine precision and control, and Karen and Kimberly told me that my legs would feel like tree trunks by the end. Fortunately, I didn’t quite believe them, because if I had known just how exhausting the scene was I would have been defeated before ever starting. In fact, the whole ballet was my first experience of how absolutely depleting a three-act ballet could be.

  The role had a lot of other challenges as well. At the beginning, Aurora has to run down a long staircase for her birthday party, all youthful effervescence. But it is no easy thing to run down stairs in pointe shoes, while wearing a tutu that blocks the view of the steps. My favorite part, however, was the Act III wedding scene, in which Aurora comes down those stairs again, together with her prince, this time as a mature woman ready to accept the throne. Tchaikovsky’s music always elevated me to a higher, grander place, and the scene culminates in a grand pas de deux with the prince – a triumphant finish.

  Unlike the somewhat mixed response to my debut in La Sylphide, my performance in Sleeping Beauty received only praise. “A born Aurora if there ever was one,” wrote the Globe and Mail. The reviewer even compared me to Margot Fonteyn! “With her light, easy jump, her playful musicality, her elegant line and her daring balances, she’s already an Aurora to remember.” For me, it was not merely a step but a leap forward.

  Despite its challenges, Sleeping Beauty seemed a natural ballet for me. The next time I got to dance as Aurora, it was with Vladimir Malakhov, one of the greatest classical dancers of our time. Certainly it felt more natural than the next one – Swan Lake. Swan Lake is the best known classical ballet,
and the image of the ballerina as swan has become one of the few ballet images to enter the popular imagination. It is a kind of fairy tale, but also a tragedy, in which Odette the Swan Queen can return to human form only when a man promises to love her faithfully.

  Prince Siegfried falls in love with her but is tricked by the evil enchanter Von Rothbart to believe that his daughter Odile, the Black Swan, is Odette. When Siegfried mistakenly declares his intention to marry Odile, he dooms the Swan Queen. In the end, Siegfried throws himself into the lake and drowns.

  With Vladimir Malakhov, after the last curtain call of Sleeping Beauty.

  Performing as both Odette and Odile is a challenge both to the endurance and to the acting ability of the ballerina. My coach insisted on the strictest technical precision in this, Erik Bruhn’s version of the ballet. The first weeks of rehearsal were particularly difficult, especially learning the White Swan part in Act II, slow and sustained. I almost began to feel as if I didn’t know how to do a single ballet step correctly. Things eventually got better, but I continued to feel constrained, as if I were dancing with the style of the coach instead of my own. My first performance was a matinee, or afternoon performance, and I don’t know whether my shoes were too tight or I hadn’t warmed up enough – or maybe I had just been trying too hard and had over-exerted myself

  As the Black Swan Odile in Erik Bruhn’s version of Swan Lake, right before the Prince is tricked into pledging his love.

  in the first entrance, causing my muscles to cramp up – but just before going back on stage for the White Swan solo I thought to myself, I cannot feel my feet. They had gone absolutely numb. How could I go out there and dance the solo? Standing in the wing, the cygnets’ dance coming to an end on the stage, I pounded my feet on the floor, trying to get some feeling in them. When that didn’t work I used my fists on my calves. Nothing. All I could do was go out there. Fortunately, my muscles remembered the steps even if I couldn’t feel my feet, and I got through the solo. But it was a very scary feeling and I was relieved it did not occur again during the run.