Ballerina

by Deirdre Kelly

  The stigma is lessening, and Sidimus sees that as another sign that the ballet culture is changing in ways ultimately beneficial to the ballerina: “The whole subject is now out of the closet; people are now talking about it and they are doing something about it. If a dancer has a transition plan at the beginning of the career, knowing in advance that it is short, it takes some of the anxiety away. It helps dancers be better at what they do.”25

  Still, retirement for dancers is like death: a scary prospect. Aware that dancers are spooked by the prospect of letting go of the one thing they have trained their whole lives for, the center and its half dozen branch offices across Canada offer its dancer-clients the services of onsite psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists to help them through a time in their lives that can be quite disorienting.

  Indeed, in ballet, as one dance writer has wryly noted, “There are few stories like that of Nora Kaye, one of the brightest stars of American Ballet Theatre, who reportedly celebrated the event by driving with her husband through the Black Forest of Germany, happily hurling her old pointe shoes through the window of their car.”26

  When Sidimus started investigating the post-dance lives of her former colleagues for her 1987 book, Exchanges: Life After Dance, a collection of interviews with dancers who have successfully moved on from the stage, she discovered instead that the majority were shell-shocked and destitute.27 “Many of these people were founders of dance companies. They have the Order of Canada, and yet they have nothing to live on,” Sidimus says. “There aren’t hordes of them, but you would be shocked by the names.”28

  Evelyn Hart is a poignant example, as well as a reminder that more still needs to be done to safeguard the ballerinas of our time. Born in Ontario in 1956, she won the Gold Medal and the Certificate for Artistic Achievement at the International Ballet Competition held in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1980. During her years on the stage, from 1977 until her abrupt departure in 2006 as a result of arthritic ankles, Hart was internationally regarded as a consummate artist; in the 1980s, she toured Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries, where audiences and critics alike hailed her as one of the greatest Giselles of the twentieth century.

  Her artistry had come at a great personal price. Hart made no secret of having approached ballet as an act of self-sacrifice; she starved herself to be what she perceived as an expression of balletic perfection and denied herself intimate relationships, including marriage. She spent most of her waking hours in the ballet studio, devoting every ounce of her being to perfecting her craft. Those who danced alongside her at the RWB during the 1980s still marvel at the single-mindedness with which Hart pursued her career, to the exclusion of everything else. “She was unique in her approach, almost neurotic but in a good sense of the word; her process didn’t allow for anything else in her life,” says Svea Eklof, who shared a dressing room with Hart when both were with the RWB. “She was known to say, ‘You are not as deep into this [meaning ballet] as I am; that’s why you took time off to have a husband and to have a baby.’ She said it, and she meant it: She is the best dance artist that Canada has ever produced.”29

  But when the curtain came down on her final performance in 2006, Hart, then fifty, was suddenly unemployable. Although she was a recipient of the Order of Canada, she had no assets other than a highly disciplined body blessed with a rare degree of musicality. She tried acting but didn’t have the articulation.30 She applied for a job in a bridal salon, making and selling the fanciful headdresses that she used to craft as part of her onstage costume but was turned down for lack of experience.31 Save for a handful of students who have come to her privately for coaching, Hart’s own profession has been reluctant to hire her as teacher or coach; the perception within her industry is that Hart represents an old-school, tunnel-vision approach to ballet, which is contrary to the new emphasis on life-work balance that many of today’s ballet institutions say they want to instill in their students. Certainly, to see Hart is to see a woman ravaged by her profession—thin, alone, and invisible in a crowd now that her dancing career has ended. This is an artist who, just years earlier, had full houses leaping to their feet, cheering and showering her with roses. That she has been so abandoned by her profession and by society is a great scandal. Had she lived in another era, her selfless devotion to ballet might have been lauded. But today, she is no doubt one of the dancers Sidimus is talking about: a jilted female not unlike Giselle, a ghost of her former self.

  Sidimus says she has been lobbying for years to get funding for artists like Hart, dancers she calls “national treasures,” urging Canada to provide for them in retirement as other countries have done for their senior dance artists. It would be respectful, at the very least, to create for ballerinas who have given their lives to their art the respect of a position worthy of their experience and training, a chair within a university dance program, for instance, where they could pass their artistry on to the next generation. Shunning dancers because they are old and put out to pasture is a shameful way for any nation to treat its artists. “There’s something about a dancer in transition that is exceptionally difficult and painful and different from anyone else in transition,” Sidimus says.32

  Previously, the ideal in ballet was to pretend that you would keep on dancing until you dropped—as Anna Pavlova and Rudolf Nureyev did. While romantic, this image of the swooning dancer, shackled to the art, no longer cuts it in today’s climate of economic restraint. “The average annual salary in Canada is still under $14,000 for a dancer,” Sidimus says. “They can rarely put enough money aside to live on while they study something else for a second career.”33

  Sometimes a dancer has to leave dance because of an injury that never quite heals.

  “In the past twenty years I’ve seen a lot of heartbroken people,” former National Ballet of Canada dancer Karen Kain, now the company’s artistic director, has said. “They had trained, almost killed themselves, given 150 per cent—and suddenly it was all over. There was nothing for them. I’ve seen nervous breakdowns when people’s dreams were shattered. There were people who came into the company with me, and I’ve seen them fall apart.”34

  Leanne Simpson was one of those dancers, devastated when the dancing was over. The former ballerina with the Alberta Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens who quit dancing in 1988 said in an interview, “I was very depressed. After five months, I called the Transition Centre.”

  Through the center, Simpson received counseling and then went to university, where she chose a new career, teaching in an arts school. To help her, the center gave her grants that helped cover expenses for two years of her post-dance training. “I feel much better now,” Simpson said. “I still miss performing, but I feel that I fit into the real world now.”35

  Mary Jago-Romeril sees many dancers like Simpson in her position as a national representative of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre, a position she has held since 2002. From her vantage point, she is able to see how dance has changed since she was a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, from 1966 until her retirement from the stage at age thirty-eight in 1984. During her illustrious career, the British-born, Royal Ballet–schooled ballerina was celebrated as one of the Fabulous Five, a group of top-ranking female dancers, each of whom had been handpicked in the 1970s by guest artist Rudolf Nureyev to dance as his partner in his extravagant and costly version of The Sleeping Beauty. The others in this pack of elite ballerinas were Nadia Potts, Vanessa Harwood, Veronica Tennant, and Karen Kain, all of whom toured with Nureyev as part of their National Ballet duties, an experience that inspired camaraderie among the dancers: “In my day, being in a ballet company was like family,” Jago-Romeril says. “You looked out for each other.”36

  Touring isn’t as common for ballet companies anymore; the costs have grown prohibitive, and few companies can afford it. As a result, today’s dancers don’t get to play the field as much as Jago-Romeril once did; they have tended
to become more specialized, dancing full-out only a few times during a performance run, not every night, as Jago-Romeril used to, under her stage name, Mary Jago. She wonders if that is why she is seeing an increase in injured ballet dancers. “There’s not enough consistency,” Jago-Romeril says. “Dancers no longer get to dance every day, which puts them at greater risk of hurting themselves.”

  Although it is definitely beneficial to commit resources to helping dancers cope with the inevitability of injuries in the course of their profession, perhaps a more effective approach for companies to take would be to address the problem of injuries at its root, get dancers more exercised, expose them regularly to performance opportunities, large or small, so as to keep them resilient. This would require a rethinking of how ballet is organized and produced. There’s innovation now in choreography. How about a similar level of innovation applied to ballet administration? But there are no easy solutions. How do you get dancers to dance more, when ballet companies in general struggle to make ends meet? How do you keep them from being injured when taking physical risks is a key component of the profession? How do you strike a balance? Jago-Romeril doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but she does express concern that the current emphasis on experimentation in ballet puts dancers at a greater risk of injury, especially when their bodies haven’t been trained to perform the new multi-step, hyper-frenetic, acrobatic-style creations being produced by some of today’s cutting-edge choreographers. “What we have noticed today,” continues Jago-Romeril, “is that choreographers are pushing dancers more than they did in previous years. In my day it was basic classic. Today’s choreographers are emphasizing a contemporary approach, and actually I feel sorry for the dancers performing it: Ballet is now very hard.”

  But on the bright side, and partly as a result of diminished touring opportunities that have turned ballet dancers from nomads into people who can lay down roots, Jago-Romeril says that there’s a greater acceptance of the need for dancers to balance their workload with a life outside the studio. She cites the example of the National Ballet, where several principal dancers in the company over the past decade have started families, while still pursuing a full-time dancing career. These new-generation ballerinas are now taking advantage of paid maternity leaves and job protection. “And that’s a huge step forward,” Jago-Romeril says. “Today’s dancers have families if they want them, they have children. I think that’s important because it puts a different focus on your life, it’s not all about ballet. Human beings need balance,” Jago-Romeril concludes, “no matter what they do for a living.”

  The advancement of workers’ rights has liberated women in all professions, including ballet, where pregnancies among professional dancers are increasingly common. Increased wages combined with guaranteed paid maternity leaves as required by law have provided incentives for dancers to want to start families while still pursuing a dance career. These relatively recent changes in labor law and general societal attitudes have brought artistic directors on board in giving ballerinas leave to have babies in the understanding that their jobs will be waiting for them when they are done. “For me it’s a miracle,” says Sidimus who, at seventy-three years of age, is a member of ballet’s all-or-nothing generation, having waited until her dancing days were over, at age forty, to have a child. “In my era it was a much more isolated view. You were expected to be a ballerina and not anything else. Today when I look at a dancer like [National Ballet of Canada’s] Sonia Rodriguez, a principal dancer who is also a mother of two, I really do wonder how she manages to do it all.”37

  It’s not entirely a mystery. Advances in health sciences like nutrition and body conditioning have enabled dancers to fully recover their dancing form after childbirth. Cross-training involving Pilates, yoga, and weight lifting has also helped ballerinas cope with the demands pregnancy places on their bodies, enabling them to stay supple and dance well into the last trimester. Some ballerinas claim that motherhood has made them better dancers, physically, mentally, and emotionally: “I feel stronger,” said Julie Kent, the American Ballet Theatre ballerina who, in 2004, posed pregnant on the cover of Dance Magazine, dressed in flowing white chiffon and a skintight white leotard that showed off the voluptuousness of her rounded figure. She was thirty-three. “Motherhood has changed my priorities and impacted my performance,” Kent continued. “It has liberated me and broadened my perspective. I don’t apply as much pressure on myself and I have blossomed.”38

  Motherhood, muscle building, and healthy weight gain are changes directly affecting the ballerina’s body, making it feel more in balance. But ballet is not composed of just one body; it is also a social body, a tightly knit network of human relationships where imbalances have for a long time been allowed to proliferate unchecked, in the mistaken belief that to change one aspect of ballet is to change the culture as a whole, killing in it what has long been regarded as beautiful. This is especially true with regard to racial imbalances within the ballet culture. For centuries, and continuing into the present day, ballet has widely been regarded as a white, elitist, European pursuit. Its symbol is the ballet blanc, literally the white ballet, an ethereal dance performed by white women in white dresses and pointe shoes pretending to be ghosts or swans or something equally vaporous. But society today is rapidly diversifying, especially in immigrant-rich North America, and this image of a white ballet is deeply unreflective of the social composition.

  Ballerinas of color, especially black ballerinas, tend to be rare. The thought is that audiences won’t readily accept a black Giselle or a black Aurora, thinking she is too obviously cast against type. It’s a ridiculous premise: ballet is theater and theater is make-believe. Of course a black ballerina isn’t Giselle: it’s a role. But there’s another prejudice at work: black women on the stage are perceived as naturally earthy and robust; they are not the airy sylphs more easily embodied by their white counterparts. There perhaps is a reason for this: scientific research demonstrates that black ballet dancers typically have not fallen prey to the anorexia epidemic that swept the ballet world during the Balanchine era. According to one study, black female ballet dancers had a more consistently positive body image than white female ballet dancers, leading to the conclusion that anorexia nervosa is “a disorder of the white upper-middle-class, where a premium is placed on the pursuit of thinness.”39

  Misty Copeland supports the statistic. A ballerina of African-American descent, she says that she never suffered from an eating disorder, even while her teachers and her white classmates chided her for being big—“big” being relative given that the dancer stands five feet two inches and weighs a mere hundred pounds. “I never had an issue with an eating disorder,” says Copeland, a rising star at American Ballet Theatre who is also the first black ballerina soloist in a major company in decades. “I can’t imagine dealing with that or having to speak up about it,” she continues. “But I’m definitely not fat; I just have a different body type than all the rest. I am thin, but I have muscles and I have curves and I have a breasts—I’m a size 30D.”40

  Her curves allow Copeland to stand out on stage, which ultimately is a good thing: “I think it has given me an advantage,” she says. “It has allowed me to develop as an individual, which is often hard to do for ballet dancers. From a young age we are groomed to be in a corps de ballet, all trained in the same technique and expected to look the same. I tried as a student to be the dancer others wanted me to be but I found that it was better for me to be me; it’s what has enabled me to become a soloist and, hopefully, it will help me become a principal dancer, which is my goal.”

  But to get ahead, Copeland says that she has to work extra hard to appear worthy of promotion: “My skin color was never before a factor for me,” says Copeland, one of six children born to a single mother who raised her kids in Los Angeles after moving there from Kansas, the dancer’s birth city. “I only saw my color when I started to dance. Still, I was a dancer. I wasn’t a black danc
er. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City and joined ABT was it talked about. I wasn’t aware it was an issue. And then I looked around me—and oh my gosh—there were no other black ballerinas but me. I still wouldn’t have thought it mattered, but then I watched as others were promoted ahead of me, given roles that I could easily have done but wasn’t allowed to. And that’s when I realized that my natural talent wasn’t enough. As a black woman I have to work three times harder. I have so much to prove. I’m extremely exhausted. I’ve been doing this now for eleven years.”

  But her hard work and tenacity are paying off. In December 2011, Copeland received word that Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, said to be the most important choreographer working in ballet today, had cast her as the lead in his new production of Firebird, which had its world premiere in Los Angeles, Copeland’s hometown, in April 2012, to glowing reviews. “I’m ecstatic,” the dancer says. “Ballet will never be perfect, but for me this is about as good as it gets.”

  Another indication that ballet might be moving in new directions is the increased popularization of ballet as entertainment. These days the art born in the courts of kings is showing up at the movies, on the fashion runways, and in rock and rap music videos by the likes of Kanye West, whose 2010 single, Runaway, came with a thirty-four-minute promotional film featuring ballerinas aggressively stabbing the ground with their pointes: “I was just moved by the classic dance,” the rapper told MTV News, “I just wanted to crash it against the pop music.”41

  As a black ballerina trying to break down barriers herself, Copeland understood what the pop star was after, saying in an interview that by mixing ballet with pop music, West was making classical dance “relatable to the audience that’s viewing those videos.” The expectation was that it would increase audiences for ballet, one of the reasons Copeland agreed to dance in the 2009 fever-dream video for the single Crimson and Clover by Prince. Copeland was also the featured ballerina in the pop star’s Welcome 2 America tour, which played Madison Square Garden and New Jersey’s mammoth Izod Center in the early part of 2011. Copeland says working with Prince was both a career and a confidence booster: “It signaled my growth as an artist; it made me more visible to others as a role model.”42 Her bravura style of dancing was readily accessible to stadium audiences for whom ballet remains a foreign word. Copeland lured them in. “I think that there’s so much history when it comes to classical ballet—it’s not going to change overnight... [but by] inviting people in and exposing them to the fact that classical ballet doesn’t have to be uptight... I’m hoping that change can happen.”43