“Classical ballet needs great interpreters,” says Sylvie Guillem, the former étoile of the Paris Opéra Ballet and principal guest artist of London’s Royal Ballet, the ballerina other ballerinas still look to for inspiration—a YouTube darling. “It can’t be done in a mediocre or average way, even if danced very well. Like it or not, ballet comes from the past; we have to drag it from the past into the present, and if it is not danced intelligently, not danced with beauty, the people will no longer come, and ballet will not survive into the future.”44
But ballet is not breaking with its past; it is renewing itself, while at the same time drawing inspiration from a long tradition of classical dance. Embodying that feeling of continuity and regeneration in ballet today is former ballet star Gelsey Kirkland, among the first to lift the veil on the art of the ballerina as a punishing life of self-deprivation and self-sacrifice in the name of beauty. To many observers, Kirkland is the poster girl for all that is wrong with ballet—eating disorders, injuries, insecurity, exploitation, and a dissolute lifestyle. Kirkland lived it all—and more. She altered her anatomy to make herself more closely approximate the ideal ballerina. The sad irony is that Kirkland was already a rare specimen of balletic excellence—and a beauty as well. A dancing prodigy who entered New York City Ballet in 1968, at the tender age of sixteen, after being trained by George Balanchine at his School of American Ballet, Kirkland was born with the requisite long-limbed body type, the swan neck, the hyper-flexible feet. Her speed, grace, and agility survive in films and videos of her earlier performances, especially the 1977 film version of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, in which she dances opposite her former onstage and offstage partner, Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Often referred to as the female Nijinsky for her genius for dance, this American-born ballerina was one of the great ballet artists of the twentieth century. Ballet patrons who remember her when she was at the peak of her powers shake their heads and speak of her as the ballerina who squandered her talents. They want to think of her as one of the neurotic pinheads of the Balanchine era, a malcontent who exaggerated ballet’s dark side as an act of morbid self-promotion. They see her as twisted and irreparably disconnected from ballet as an art of beauty and transcendence. But the opposite is true. After dancing in the trenches of ballet, Kirkland has emerged, scarred but wiser, and is today channeling her remarkable gifts into her own Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet, which she founded in New York in the fall of 2010, at age fifty-eight, to train young dancers for a professional dancing career.
Located on Broadway, in Manhattan’s industrial TriBeCa district, the dance school perches incongruously over a dusty fabric shop and next to scaffolding emblazoned with graffiti. It’s only a subway ride away from Lincoln Center, where Kirkland once ruled as one of America’s reigning ballet superstars, but in many ways it is light years away from the life she once knew. She runs the school with her husband, Michael Chernov, an Australian-born former dancer and Broadway actor, who trained at the National Ballet and Theatre School in his native Melbourne. The interior walls are covered in framed oversized vintage posters from the Diaghilev era; another image, of Kirkland dancing opposite Baryshnikov in Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, serves as a computer screen saver. There are four studios spread over 8,000 square feet of high-ceilinged space, in addition to an exercise room teeming with workout machines and balls and bands for core training. The Russian-based training is rooted in the Vaganova method of teaching ballet, a combination of French lyricism and Italian virtuosity as developed early in the twentieth century by former Imperial Ballet dancer-turned-pedagogue Agrippina Vagonova. Each day begins with a morning yoga-inflected stretch class using mats on the floor. This is followed by classes in ballet technique and also, unusual for a ballet school, voice and drama.
The emphasis in her pedagogical approach is on storytelling through dancing. Abstract ballet, such as Kirkland knew in her Balanchine ballerina days, is not the objective. Kirkland wants her sixty-four registered students to learn how to move from the heart, to connect with audiences emotionally as artists using their bodies expressively, not as athletes performing acrobatic tricks. The divide between expressiveness and pyrotechnics has existed in ballet for centuries, at least since Camargo, the technician, and Sallé, the poet, ruled the stage. Kirkland has no doubt as to which rival she supports. In conversation, she uses words like pure and truth to emphasize that her training is less image oriented, more focused on inner states of being.
“You can’t drive the body from its form,” she says. “There are other ways of creating a stage life.”45 She wants her students to connect to the inner core of ballet and not be distracted by the allure of the superficial attractions of the art, a lesson she must have learned herself the hard way. One technique used at the school is to have students dance in the studio with the mirrors covered, getting young dancers to concentrate on what it feels like to dance, rather than on how it looks to somebody else. It is the opposite of how Kirkland and other ballerinas of her generation learned their craft, and she is determined that her students don’t make the same mistakes. Taking her place in the studio on a busy Manhattan morning, Kirkland is dressed head-to-toe in black, over which is layered a button-down shirt flapping around her small, birdlike body. She moves silently around her cavernous academy, looking as if she could suddenly take flight. Kirkland covers most of her face with large Jackie O–style sunglasses; her fine auburn hair is tied back in a chignon. When she opens her mouth to speak the words come out nasally and in staccato bursts, pushed through the cushiony contours of distorted lips, a reminder of her days as a tortured artist. It’s her reputation as a complex ballet genius that draws students to her from across the United States. They choose her academy over larger and more prestigious schools like Juilliard or Kirkland’s own alma mater, School of American Ballet, because they believe she has something valuable to teach them, no matter how negative her own past experiences of ballet.
“I am inspired by her,” says Jacqueline Wilson, a twenty-one-year-old dance student, who traveled halfway across the country to study with her ballerina idol. “I grew up with a blown-up poster of her on my bedroom wall. She represents ballet to me.”46 In Kirkland’s morning technique class, Wilson takes her place at center floor in front of the watchful eye of Kirkland, sitting like a Buddha on the edge of a stool at the front of the studio. The dancers come in all shapes and sizes—tall, short, svelte, muscular. Kirkland is easily the tiniest person in the place; her waiflike look definitely marks her as senior, her body having been shaped by the eating disorders that have plagued her profession. But she has moved beyond the tyranny of that aesthetic. During a lunch of a homemade sandwich laced with onions—“You’re not bothered by the smell, are you?” she asks, betraying the kindness that those who know her say is one of her most unsung attributes—Kirkland explains that the point is no longer to create dancers who all look the same. It’s about creating dancers who are unique, with something of their own to say. She had learned the hard way the mistake of trying to conform to someone else’s idea of what a ballerina should look like and is now passing on the benefit of that experience to her own students. In one of her studio’s classrooms, in fact, a curtain has been drawn over the mirror to get the dancers to find meaning within themselves, not in a reflected image. “A perfect body can be dead as a doornail,” chimes in Chernov, allowing his wife another bite of her brown-bagged meal. She sits beside him, nodding in agreement. “The idea is to get people out of ballet’s image orientation,” he adds. “The ideal,” says Kirkland, swallowing, “is to explore what’s true.”
Back in the classroom, Kirkland provides an insight into what she means. Perched slightly forward on her stool, ready to pounce, she watches her dancers in ominous stillness as strains of Tchaikovsky fill the air from the accompanist in the far corner. “Draw the line on the way out, open the door,” she shouts above the music, her hand beating time on one thigh. But the dancers
are having difficulty understanding. She leaps up from where she has been sitting to give an impromptu demonstration. The once famous body pulls up and lengthens. All the weight is pushed forward onto the balls of the feet, and she rises slightly into the air. She opens her chest wide, her arms blossoming into an elegant port de bras. Her head is slightly tilted; her eyes are raised. “To the king,” she says. And then she bows slightly to this imaginary being in the room, looking down from on high.
It’s an extraordinary gesture. In that moment, all the minutes, the hours, the months, the years, the decades, the centuries go whizzing by. We are no longer in traffic-clogged Manhattan, with the horns blaring outside the window, the graffiti spray-painted on the wall, a pretzel cart on every corner. We have gone back in time to the opulent court of Louis XIV, where this glorious art of ballet first flourished more than four hundred years ago.
Kirkland provides a link, a ballerina who through her own training, stage experience, and tortured past is showing the way for how the art can proceed from a troubled history into a more hopeful future—a ballet survivor.
“There’s a lot of rigidity that frees you,” Kirkland says. “There are ways of using tradition to move forward and not sideways. It’s about knowing what matters, and following the right path.”
In Kirkland’s hands, the catastrophes that have befallen ballerinas through time have been channeled into catharsis.
French ballerina and experimental choreographer Janine Charrat was scheduled to dance the role of the madwoman in her own ballet, Les Algues, when her diaphanous costume caught fire on a lit candelabra inside a Paris television studio, engulfing her in flames. Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet/Getty Images
The first recorded instance of professional ballerinas on the public stage was Le Triomphe de l’Amour, staged in 1681 in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the man responsible for giving women dancers a leg up in what was then a male-dominated art form. Gianni Dagli Orti /The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Eighteenth-century ballerina Françoise Prévost was the leading female dancer of her day, ruling the Paris Opéra for almost fifty years. She was also a well-known courtesan, whose dual reputation is captured by this historic portrait of her as a dancing bacchante. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
Courtesanship flourished at the Paris Opéra throughout the eighteenth century, earning the theater the nickname the Brothel of France. V&A Images, London/Art Resource, NY
Young ballerinas were frequently pimped by their own mothers, who viewed ballet as a means to social advancement. Visual Arts Library/Art Resource, NY
Marie-Anne de Cupis de Camargo was a pioneering dancer who, by trimming her hemlines, revolutionized technique for the ballerina while adding an erotic dimension to ballet. The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
The Paris Opéra ballerina Madeleine Guimard was a wily ballet survivor, outwitting not only the French Revolution, which wanted her head, but also the sexual exploitation rampant in ballet of her day by spearheading a series of pornographic theaters for the French elite. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Ballet’s reputation for sin was hidden in the Romantic era behind the popular image of the ballerina as a frail creature of the air. Marie Taglioni epitomized the new ethereal ideal, even while, behind the scenes, she indulged in such earthly pleasures as extramarital affairs and hoarded treasure. Eileen Tweedy/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
The ballerina’s notoriety as a creature of vice is captured by this nineteenth-century caricature in which reproving ecclesiastics inspect dancers for signs of moral depravity. Eileen Tweedy/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
At the Paris Opéra, the administration permitted paying subscribers to cruise the notorious foyer de la danse in search of sexual adventure with willing dancers. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
This image of ballerinas in Vienna shows that the ballerina-courtesan trend was not confined to Paris. The backstage show was in many ways as entertaining—if not, for some, more so—as what was presented on stage. Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Marie van Goethem was the real-life model for Degas’ multimedia statuette known around the world as The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. Her emaciated body marks her as one of the petits rats who comprised the corps de ballet in nineteenth-century Paris. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
The two-pronged reality of the ballet girl’s existence is captured in this poignant drawing: by day, she toils anonymously in her own poverty; by night, in tutu and makeup, she carries on her bony shoulders the illusion of ballet as an escapist art form, even as she prostitutes herself to the highest bidder. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
Emma Livry was the last of the great French Romantic ballerinas. Her signature role was the butterfly, which she first performed in Le Papillon, a ballet whose plot about a winged creature dying after it collides with an open flame eerily prophesied her own demise. Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY
Gaslighting claimed the lives of many ballerinas in the nineteenth century, among them Emma Livry, whose tarlatan skirt caught fire during a dress rehearsal for Auber’s La Muette de Portici in 1862. She died eight agonizing months later. Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works
Early in the twentieth century, Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova brought ballet to the masses through a series of international tours that she produced and headlined. Devoted to ballet to the exclusion of much else, she danced herself to an early grave. Culver Pictures/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Mathilde Kschessinska attained the rare rank of prima ballerina assoluta in her native Russia on account of her pirouetting powers and her well-known sexual affairs with high-ranking members of the ruling Romanov family, among them the last tsar, whose mistress she was. HIP/Art Resource, NY
Ida Rubinstein was a member of Diaghilev’s famous Les Ballets Russes in the early twentieth century. She expertly manipulated the press to her advantage, feeding it details of her many steamy love affairs to ensure she remained in the public eye. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY
Girls! Girls! Girls! George Balanchine attained almost cult-like status among his ballerinas when he was chief ballet master of New York City Ballet. He coined the phrase “Ballet Is Woman,” but he was the one in control. Bernard Gotfryd/Premium Archive/Getty Images
Balanchine’s preference for long-legged ballerinas with narrow hips, long arms, and small heads established a new feminine ideal in ballet so difficult to attain it sparked a global epidemic of eating disorders that persists, to a large degree, today. Marco Secchi/Getty Images Entertainment
Complications from an eating disorder cost a young Boston Ballet ballerina her life. Her grieving mother unsuccessfully sued the company for urging her daughter to diet. John Storey/Time & Life Images/Getty Images
National Ballet of Canada principal dancer Kimberly Glasco is the swan who roared. After her artistic director abruptly fired her, the ballerina sued, scoring a series of legal victories. Peter Tym; www.petertymphotography.com
Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theatre is a black and buxom ballerina breaking down barriers. She performs here with Prince on one of his world concert tours. Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images
After overcoming anorexia, Jenifer Ringer of New York City Ballet made headlines when, following a performance of The Nutcracker, a critic accused her of eating one too many sugar plums. Paul Kolnik
The former prima ballerina of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Evelyn Hart equates the end of her dancing career to a loss of identity. Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
After surviving ballet’s dark side, Gelsey Kirkland teaches the next generation of ballerinas about the enduring beauty of classical dance. Andrea Mohin/The New York Times/Redux
Epilogue
It’s hard, it’s inju
rious, and the pay stinks. So why would anyone in their right mind commit to ballet as a career when the heartache and the hazards are so clearly spelled out in advance? The average ballerina now blazes out by age thirty, often with little to fall back on. If the motivation is glory, the result of being in the spotlight before a paying audience, that feeling of being on top of the world is always short-lived. The next day, no matter how high she soared the night before, the ballerina comes crashing back down to earth in the form of the daily ballet class. There, the aches and pains of a sometimes recalcitrant body remind the dancer that she is like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder of human weakness up an ideal hill, only to have it come crashing down, mocking her effort and making her start all over again. It seems a thankless task, riddled with deprivations.
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