A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  * * *

  ANTICIPATION MOUNTED AROUND me as the two New York performances of Swan Lake loomed. More than thirty of my family members were in town for the opening, as well as family friends and fans from around the country. There was a discernible buzz. But through all the attention and anticipation, I was distracted. I felt a mounting unease about the pain that would not subside.

  On the first night, as the lead-in to my entrance swelled from the orchestra pit, I stood in the wings praying I could get through each jump. I just hoped that whatever was causing that pain wouldn’t produce a snap, or a crack, or a pull on takeoff or landing, leaving me unable to finish the few performances I had left in that season. I willed myself to get through those two shows, knowing I wasn’t offering my best on the stage.

  Those last performances of Swan were not me. I danced protected and reserved. Before each entrance, I hoped for the best. After each exit, I was relieved to have gotten through another section of the ballet. There was so much distraction around my homecoming (dinners, cameras, articles, previews, reviews) that I almost thought the public hardly noticed the actual dancing. But as I knew from before, when an artist’s work starts to slip, even an untrained eye can see it.

  I felt like a fraud, a fake, in the world I respected. I wasn’t giving the art what it deserved. My inner circle knew how I felt. Sergei, having danced Yuri Nikolayevich’s Swan Lake more than I ever had, noticed the steps I had changed to protect my foot. Sasha, I could sense, just wanted me to get through it.

  There are some photographs, captured by a friend who was documenting me in the lead-up to the tour for Condé Nast Traveler, that show my last few performances before I stepped off the stage. Henry Leutwyler is a photographer who can reveal the essence of a dancer in his or her domain. In one of his pictures, I am midair in a Moscow studio, Sasha behind the camera coaching me. In what seems like a perfectly captured moment, with photographer and subject clearly synced, there is a detail that tells the true story. The image shows the jump at the start of my Act III variation. I am jumping in the opposite direction from that which the choreography calls for. Henry’s image brings back painful memories of my physical shortcomings at that time and the subsequent pain.

  In another, I am in my Lincoln Center dressing room, putting on my white tights, hair and makeup ready, a face of pre-performance concentration. But what is on my mind isn’t the usual nerves of the looming show, it is the doubt that my foot can handle the stress I am about to inflict upon it. You can see an eerie despondence in all of these photos.

  After the performances were over, Henry captured Svetlana and I hugging onstage. There is such relief in my face, a happiness that I made it through without major mishap.

  Though internally, I knew I was broken.

  CHAPTER 44

  At last, at the end of the New York performances, I was on a much-needed vacation. I had made it through, without my best work onstage, but at least from start to finish. I was desperate for a rest. I needed to get away from everything and everyone. A solitary road trip was my remedy. I began just outside my hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota, at an idyllic cabin owned by Sam and Karen Mortimer, very close family friends since my birth. After a few days there, listening to the rushing stream just outside their house, I headed straight down the border of South Dakota and Wyoming. I crave this part of the country. It is quiet, underpopulated, and vast. During the drive, I would step out of my car onto the side of the road and listen to the near deafening silence around me. It was the opposite of the chaos I had just left. Under the seemingly endless sky of the place where I was born, I was at last calm.

  And with that calm came clarity. As a pedestrian, I was pain free. I could walk as much as I wanted. But I knew that when I needed to return to dancing, the pain would return as well. I cut my vacation short to fly back to New York, where my surgeon decided that an acute injection of cortisone into the damaged area might relieve enough pain for me to go on dancing. It wouldn’t be a permanent fix, but it might provide temporary relief. I would know the results immediately. The plan was to inject the foot using sonogram guidance and test out right there in the doctor’s office what produced pain. If there was none, the cortisone would have done its trick. If not, I was told the sole remaining remedy would be surgery.

  The operating room was cold. The doctor’s assistant (a Russian) asked me to lie on the table with my foot perfectly positioned for the injection. She covered my whole leg with sterile towels, sanitized and numbed the area of the foot, shut off the lights so the doctor could see the screen, and coated the sonogram wand in cold gel. I thought, as I lay there, how depressing it all was. From the initial elation of my return to the States with the Bolshoi until now.

  After a prick and a dull sensation in my foot, the injection was over.

  “Now, try to test what would produce the pain,” the doctor told me.

  I eased myself off the table, stood on my foot, and started the suggestion of a glissade. I still felt the sharp sensation. Or so I thought. I wasn’t totally sure.

  I tried again, pushing a little harder this time.

  I felt it.

  The pain wasn’t gone.

  But it was a little less intense.

  I lied and nodded to the doctor that it felt a little better.

  “Good,” he replied. “Take it easy the next few days and then in a week test it out in the studio.”

  * * *

  I EASED INTO dancing the following week. I didn’t push much by way of jumping or using the foot to its fullest, but after a week it was time to see whether or not the injection had worked its magic. On a rehearsal day, toward the end of morning class, I slipped out of the studio full of sweaty dancers and into an empty one. I tried to replicate, at about 60 percent of my fullest push, some of the Swan Lake steps that had been so painful previously.

  Glissade cabriole.

  Oh fuck, I thought.

  Again.

  Glissade cabriole.

  Fuck.

  It hadn’t worked.

  A sense of dread came over me. A feeling of surrender. A despondency that I was done. I had tried everything I could to avoid this decision but alone in that empty studio, hearing the music from the other room as dancers surged into the air freely, I decided the fight was over. Surgery was inevitable. What a bitter contrast: dancers in the adjacent studio bounding in the air to the sound of a big sweeping waltz and me alone, grounded with the knowledge of my inescapable future.

  * * *

  I ATTENDED MY scheduled rehearsals during that day, remaining quiet about my decision to my colleagues. After all, I wasn’t incapable of dancing. I just couldn’t fully do what was asked of me.

  ABT was preparing Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free for its fall season, a ballet about three sailors on evening leave in New York City. It had been a personal triumph for me when I debuted it. I had warmed up to playing the “shy” sailor, though it had taken some convincing that I could dance a role so different from my usual fare. The répétiteur led the rehearsal with another group of sailors and I stood in the back with the dancers in my cast: Marcelo Gomes and Craig Salstein, a close friend since ABT summer intensive years. We were a good pack together.

  This would be my final rehearsal.

  Although I wasn’t aware at the time of how long it would take to recover, I was told it would take at least four to eight months. I observed the room. The dancers who had no idea that I was bowing out. The atmosphere of the rehearsal, some dancers stressing, others working hard, others phoning it in. The pianist, pounding away at Leonard Bernstein’s score. Silently, I was saying goodbye. But I felt calm at last. Reserved. Affirmed.

  And at the end, as the dancers went on to another rehearsal, I left the studio with no sense of when I would return.

  CHAPTER 45

  In August, two weeks after my last rehearsal, on the eve of my operation, my mother flew into town to take care of me. We went out for a “last supper” at Strip House, a traditiona
l steak house in the heart of New York. With martinis we toasted the decision made and the road ahead. At least Mom would be there for the first crucial week; the drugged-up, incoherent post-op week filled with stone-cold nights and dazed Percocet days.

  On my way to the hospital, I had a hunch. A strange feeling about the operation. There was nothing specific about it, nor anything that I could put my finger on, but there was something off inside me. By then, I was a pro at ignoring gut instincts, so I did as I usually did. I brushed it off. I remember thinking, It’s too late to cancel it anyway. The decision had been made.

  * * *

  I RODE HOME from the hospital with my mom. The surgery had taken four hours, and we had been told that when they opened my foot up it was a mess inside. I had a damaged deltoid ligament with a bone fragment embedded within it. While the surgeon was in there, as a precaution, he shaved off some bone spurs at the top of my talus.

  I was still in a post-op stupor as the driver pulled up to my apartment building. I took my time getting out of the cab, unsteadily crawling onto the support of my crutches.

  “What happened?” exclaimed the doorman. “Oh, man! This means you won’t be dancing for a long time!”

  One of the more obnoxious tenants in the building, who looked like he was a little too close friends with the drink, was leaning against the front desk in a lazy slump.

  “Not again!” he barked at me.

  I stared at him and didn’t reply.

  “Oh, oops,” he muttered. “Did I say the wrong thing?”

  “Yes,” I said as I hobbled to the elevator.

  * * *

  MY MOTHER WAS an amazingly attentive caretaker, but after a week she was gone. I attempted to stay positive. I wanted to see the experience as one in which I could learn and grow and do things that I didn’t have time for when I was going four hundred miles an hour. But despair crept in and settled there for the long stay. The walls of my apartment seemed to get closer and closer together. My thoughts veered from panic to utter disbelief. How am I here . . . ? Again?

  Days passed as I sat on my couch, foot completely bandaged and elevated. I binge-watched Six Feet Under on my laptop for the second time. The goals for this newly allotted free time went by the wayside. There were too many hours in the day to fill. I gazed around the apartment. I saw corners that I didn’t finish decorating, empty spaces that were supposed to contain furniture I never bought, a piece of art I’d always hated and now had to stare at all day. I told myself that injury happens to almost every athlete or dancer in one form or another. But it still ate at me and left me worrying about the people I had let down.

  * * *

  EIGHT WEEKS AFTER the surgery, the doctor gave me the go-ahead to start rehabbing the foot. The cast was sawed off; under it was a red, swollen foot and an atrophied calf half the size that it had been previously. “It shouldn’t be this red,” my physical therapist told me.

  Never mind, I thought.

  I needed to get on with rebuilding the calf, and strengthening the newly fixed ligament.

  I was determined to do it properly. I didn’t want to rush it or cut corners. I knew that if I took the fast track to getting back onstage, I could very well risk a major setback. Slow and methodical was going to get me there faster.

  Before I could even think about starting ballet, my foot had to recover and be integrated back into the simplest activities: walking, climbing stairs, standing. New York life posed a substantial problem. In New York, you walk everywhere, and climb up and down subway stairs constantly. As a New Yorker, one takes that for granted. But for a recovering dancer on crutches, every step, every stair, is a challenge to a healing foot.

  After the cast came off, another eight weeks passed before I finally started remedial ballet. I quickly realized that even remedial work was far too much too soon. A basic stretch of the foot. A bend of the knee. Even a rise onto demi-pointe. I had to accept it. Everyone who has been injured likes to tell their own story of time off, an anecdote to give you perspective on the hardship one goes through while learning to dance again. Clinton Luckett, then Ballet Master at ABT, shared with me the story of his own recovery process. As time passed after a first knee surgery, it became clear that he needed a second operation; the worst-case scenario for any surgical outcome. As he talked, emphasizing the tough fight that would be required for me to get back to dancing, I felt a piercing sense of dread. I suspected right then that I would need another operation.

  * * *

  THE DOCTOR HAD told me my estimated recovery time would be four to eight months. As each day passed into the next, I thought I must be making some sort of progress. But from the moment my foot was revealed from under the cast, it was bulbous and red. Like a balloon that never lost its helium. I assumed it was all part of the reaction to surgery and would eventually go down. It never did. It persisted. Red. Obtrusive. Almost angry. I had sensations of nerve pain on the side of the ankle, again like an itch that wouldn’t go away. It appeared if I walked too much or stood for too long. I couldn’t fit my feet into anything but large supportive Nikes, which I had to use even as dress shoes. I showed up in black Nikes during the celebrations for the Kennedy Center Honors, which I had to attend as a member of the Artists Committee. I even wore those Nikes at the White House when meeting President Obama.

  The months of recovery time slipped away. One by one, I canceled performances. Commitment after commitment. La Scala. Bolshoi. ABT. Japan.

  I was making some progress in class. But while I was able to execute more steps, something held me back. Something I couldn’t yet explain. I could only push my body so far before it blocked me, telling me it wouldn’t go any further.

  * * *

  COMPLICATIONS PILED ONE on top of another. My Achilles tendon started to produce a very sharp pain at the base of my heel. It would come and go, never producing the same pain consistently. But it hurt just as I pushed off for a jump, when the heel raises ever so slightly. The pain built and built. The more I tried to push through it, the worse the sensation. Like a knife stabbing my tendon.

  The itching I felt in my deltoid ligament whenever I walked too much was a potential sign of complex regional pain syndrome (RSD). A colleague was diagnosed with this and explained it as the most debilitating pain she had ever experienced. “I’d rather be in labor again than have RSD symptoms,” she told me.

  My doctor wanted to nip it in the bud, so I was put on Neurontin, a medication used to treat nerve conditions and seizures. The nerve specialist warned me, “Ask your friends to keep an eye on you. If you become withdrawn or emotional they must tell you and then you need to stop the drug immediately.”

  A month into taking it, I was at my wit’s end. One evening, I sat on a stoop near my apartment and began to wail. I sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe. It was as if there were no more filter left in me. I was lost in a thick forest with no idea which way was out. I had felt that way for the six months since my operation. One week dragged into the next. I’d wake up in the morning light, stare blankly at the gray walls in my bedroom, and find barely any impetus to continue fighting.

  * * *

  ALL THE COMPLICATIONS stemmed from one overriding issue: I still couldn’t plié properly. Every other symptom (my Achilles, the nerve pain) was caused by the blockage I felt when I needed to bend my ankle into a range that is crucial to dancing. My lack of plié had produced all these other problems.

  As the 2015 Met season rolled on without me, I stood just off stage right with my friend Craig, one hand holding the portable barre. Craig has a natural instinct for the needs of dancers in class and he gave me barre and strengthening exercises when he had a break from rehearsals and shows. As he tried to push me through an exercise, I struggled yet again to find the proper depth in my plié. The more we pushed, the more stuck it got. I was exhausted. At last, I broke. Something was functionally wrong. Instinct told me that there was no way I could push through; it was like trying to push a door open with no idea of what�
��s blocking it on the other side.

  I stopped, overwhelmed. After ten months of the fight, I was done. I stood there, numb, in the wings at the Metropolitan Opera House, on just a strip of dance floor. Around me was the vast backstage area of the Met, the worn wooden floors, and the stage just to the side. There was such a divide between what was happening offstage and what was happening on it. My colleagues, riding the wave of the eight-week Met season. And me, panicking, distraught that I just couldn’t join them.

  * * *

  A NEW MRI gave me the answer that instinct had been telling me all along. I had a glob of scar tissue embedded in the top of my ankle where the doctor had shaved off my bone spur as a precaution. This was precisely why I couldn’t plié. There was an extensive thickened callus of scar tissue across the entire front of my ankle joint, which was blocking that movement. It seemed that the surgery had required two completely different recoveries. The deltoid ligament repair, which had been successful, needed immobility to heal. Hence the hard cast and the crutches for eight weeks. But, unbeknownst to me, healing the talus shaving had required mobility from the outset. Continuous movement would have told the body not to lay down that scar tissue.

  I knew that the one way to achieve functional freedom was to get rid of the scar tissue. Surgically. A new doctor confirmed this. He bluntly stated, “The only way you will be able to do what you need to do at your level is if I go in, as noninvasively as possible, and remove what shouldn’t be there.”

  My physical therapist, Michelle Rodriguez, was by my side in the doctor’s office, asking the questions I didn’t know to ask. Once the appointment was over, we got in a taxi. As we rode, I sobbed. The worst-case scenario had become real. Eleven months after my first surgery, I needed another.