Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet

by Ringer, Jenifer

  “Isn’t this wonderful?” I remember exclaiming to my mother when I managed to tear myself away from the airplane window.

  “Uh-huh,” she replied with a strange grimace on her face while she gripped the armrests hard enough to break them. We took the train home.

  The real reason I went to DC that weekend and my sister didn’t was that I was going to audition for the summer intensive program at the Washington School of Ballet. Mom and I wanted to see if we liked the school, and we needed to find out how I stacked up against the ballet students in a big city. Terry Shields had told my mother that she thought I “had it all” and could be a professional dancer if I wanted to, but we just didn’t know for sure. I was only twelve years old, and I had no particular aspirations to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance, but ballet was just an after-school activity for me; I presumed that, like everyone I knew, I would go on to college after high school and then get a regular job. Was dancing even a real job, or did dancers have to wait tables to make money? Besides, after reading James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, I wanted to be a veterinarian.

  Anyway, the audition was set up at the school. My mom had done research and found out that the Washington School of Ballet was the best in the area. She had kept her quest a secret from Ms. Shields, afraid that Terry would give me lesser parts in our upcoming performances if she knew I was leaving. For the audition, I was just to take a regular class with girls my age so the director of the school, Mary Day, could come and watch me. When we arrived at the white-and-gray building that housed the Washington School of Ballet, I was overcome by terror. All my confidence drained away, leaving me feeling like the biggest small-town ballet dancer in the world. What if those big-city teachers were mean and scorned me for even trying to take classes at their school? What if the other girls did bad big-city things to me, and I was humiliated? What if I got lost inside that huge building and never found the studio? I sat in our truck and cried, telling my parents that I had changed my mind and I didn’t want to go there after all.

  Somehow my parents convinced me that I needed to try. We had a long prayer in the truck, and I poured out all of my fears to God. I gathered up my courage, and we all went inside together. The predominant color was gray—gray walls, gray floors, gray sky outside the windows. Everyone inside seemed very serious. Mothers sat on benches, whispering to each other and assessing every passerby, no matter what age. Students dressed in the uniform leotard of steel gray scurried about purposefully, knowing where they were going. Directed to the dressing room by a distracted secretary, I somehow made it to the studio for the class. I wore a black leotard and stuck out like a sore thumb.

  The other girls, hair slicked back into tight buns, stared at me while they stretched their long legs around their heads. One or two asked me why I was there and seemed nice enough, but the others remained aloof. A man came in. Was he the teacher? No—he proceeded up a very small flight of stairs that led to an elevated platform in the corner of the room. Upon that platform, miraculously, crouched a piano. Live piano music. My intimidation increased. I had never danced to anything but a record.

  Another man came in. He was dressed all in black and had gray hair to match the ambience, a straight back, and an unsmiling face. This was the teacher, Michael Steel. Class began, and I had the definite feeling that serious work was about to happen.

  The style of the class and the combinations of steps were totally new to me, and I felt that I was floundering and constantly having to catch up. I had only ever taken ballet class from Ms. Shields, and I was used to her combinations of steps and her style. Here at Washington Ballet, they had a different syllabus and a different training style, even to the way they canted their heads while they did the combinations at barre. The other girls were extremely good, much better than the girls I had been taking class with in South Carolina. For the first time in a long while, I was not the best in the class. Mr. Steel never said a word to me, for which I was thankful; everything seemed difficult enough. When he corrected the other girls, he was very stern and demanding, not mean, but I did not think I could handle a correction or criticism of any kind during this class.

  At one point a plump, owlish woman came in and watched the class, peering sharply through her large brown glasses. She was unsmiling the entire time and seemed to watch all the girls, not just me. I quickly figured out she was Mary Day. As the class progressed, I started to get my bearings, and my confidence grew as I was able to execute some of the combinations respectably. The hardest part was not knowing how to navigate with the other girls; I did not know whether to stand in the front or in the back of the groups when we began to do our center work after the barre. When doing moving combinations across the room, I did not know whether to go first or last. What impression was I making, and what was the etiquette? The other girls, I was sure, would prefer that I stay back and out of their way and only dance when they were finished. But would Mary Day expect me to be more assertive, to show that I had gumption? When the class was finally over, I was terribly relieved. Though the hour and a half had felt horribly stressful, I had a sense of accomplishment: I had faced a huge fear, walked through it, and come out the other end.

  A few weeks later we learned through the mail that I had been accepted to the summer course, but I still could not decide how I felt about the whole experience. There were many ballet school options for me in the DC area; we would be living in West Springfield, Virginia, near multiple dance schools, some casual, some more serious, including the Virginia Ballet School. In Maryland there was also the well-respected Maryland Youth Ballet School, but that was too far of a commute. I was torn about how serious I wanted to be in my ballet studies. My mom and I prayed often that we would make the right decision about where I should go.

  Meanwhile, we finally sold our house in Summerville and moved to Virginia. We went through the motions of settling into a new home, which were pretty familiar to us now, since we rarely lived in one town longer than four years. My sister and I set up our rooms. My mother got us registered for school. We began the great “church search,” looking for a Bible-based community with good preaching.

  And we had to make a decision about where I would study ballet. I leaned toward Virginia Ballet, which seemed friendlier and less intimidating. Washington Ballet, with its grayness and unsmiling students, seemed too scary, and my mother was terrified of the drive into the city in the infamous DC traffic. But we wanted to say we had given it a chance, so we decided I would take a summer course at both schools, a couple of weeks at Virginia Ballet and then a couple more at Washington Ballet.

  I loved the teachers and classes at Virginia Ballet. I studied with a teacher called Oleg Tupin, who had danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. He was wonderful and gave me a lot of attention in the classes. Oleg taught in the Russian classical style, my first experience with this technique, which stresses dramatic, more extended positioning of the body and high leg extensions. This school seemed perfect for me because it combined serious training with a friendly atmosphere, and I even got to take pas de deux, or partnering, classes for the first time. There were no boys taking ballet in Summerville, hence no pas de deux.

  Dancing with a male partner was one of the things real ballerinas did, and it was a thrill to try it myself. The men taking the class were older than the girls and had probably consented to come just to give the students some partnering experience. I felt shy around them at first, and it seemed odd to be doing such things as holding a strange man’s hands or feeling his hands intimately on my waist. But the men were very professional, and it soon became apparent that this was work. Pas de deux is difficult, subtle, and technical and there is a lot to learn, even for experienced partners. In fact, partnering is a skill that professional dancers are constantly working on to maintain and improve.

  My favorite thing was being lifted; the first time my partner seized me and held me in the air, I felt a “Gee, golly
” smile spread over my face. The sense of flying through the air in beautiful positions as classical music soared around me was exhilarating. The instructor of the class knew that many of us were new to partnering, but he went ahead and plunged into some of the trickier, more spectacular moves. One of these moves was a grand jeté lift where my partner tipped me backward over his head so that I was in a backbend, staring at the wall behind us, my front leg pointed straight up to the ceiling. I loved it, but it took lots of tries to get the balance just right. Not only does the man have to hold the woman in the correct position, but the woman also has to have the strength to hold her position for a sustained time. I was never dropped, but we had some ungainly dismounts. My partner figured out exactly where on my hips he needed to hold me to find the balance point of my body, and I was told how to hold my position so that I did not cause him to injure himself. We tried it over and over.

  I was having so much fun that I ignored the pain I began to feel on the skin of my back every time I was lifted. When I got home and looked at my back in the mirror, I saw that the material of my leotard, pressed repeatedly against my skin by my partner’s thumbs, had chafed two sores on my lower back.

  I did not think too much of my wounds until the next partnering class, when we tried the overhead grand jeté lift again. Every time my partner picked me up, it felt as if someone were holding two lit matches against my back. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to try this glorious lift, which I might never have again. I continued, not telling anyone, and eventually we moved on to another lift in other classes. It was my first experience dancing silently with pain, something that professional dancers do on a daily basis. Even today, when I am doing a lot of partnering, I will actually build up slight calluses on the skin of my back that prevent me from hurting during certain lifts. Of course, I wish now that I had had the courage to tell the instructor that the lift was hurting me, but that communication skill was something I would not learn for a long time.

  I also suddenly had a pain behind my ankle during the classes at Virginia Ballet. Perhaps it was the newly intensive schedule. I was doing multiple classes a day, five or six days a week. We went to a foot doctor and discovered that I had a heel spur, an extra growth of bone that was impeding the motion of my foot when I pointed it. Heel spurs were very painful and often meant surgery.

  This news was devastating to me, but before we did anything, my family and I prayed about it. My mother found out that there were people in our new church who felt called to pray for other people’s healing, and she asked if they would consider praying for me. One night we went over to the group’s regular Bible study, and some of them prayed for my foot. I felt a little uneasy about it because I had never been prayed for by a group of strangers. It was extraordinary to meet people who cared enough about what they felt God had called them to do that they would pray for someone they did not know, and for something that was horrible to me but not necessarily that important in the scheme of the world. But these generous Christians assured me that God cared about even these things in my life, and they prayed for my healing.

  Well, to my surprise, the pain went away. We never went back to the foot doctor, as it seemed pointless—the problem was gone. I was never bothered by that issue again and gave it little thought after the fact. I was thirteen and felt invincible.

  After the two-week intensive course at Virginia Ballet, I felt pretty sure that I would end up there for the year. But we went ahead and tried the summer intensive at Washington Ballet as well—six days a week, three to five hours a day, for two weeks. I was very nervous in the beginning. The studios were huge, the classes large, with roughly twenty-five students, and the teachers difficult and strict. At one point the choreographer for the Washington Ballet, Choo San Goh, even came and taught our class. He was very quiet and gentle, but I couldn’t believe that I was taking a ballet class from a real, famous choreographer. I felt breathless every time he walked by my barre because I was trying so hard to please him and be noticed.

  At one point in the class he asked me my name.

  I thought I said, “Jenny.”

  “Genie?” Choo San asked.

  I remembered that with my very southern accent, people in the North often didn’t understand that my name was Jenny, short for Jennifer, but instead thought I was saying, “Ginny,” short for Virginia.

  I overcorrected. “Jahny,” I said.

  “Johnny?” he asked.

  “Juney,” I replied, with emphasis. Had that sound really just come out of my mouth?

  “Pardon me?” he said.

  “Jeeny!” I blurted.

  Choo San looked at me with a bemused expression. The students laughed. What was wrong with this girl, that she couldn’t say her own name? I felt my face turn bright red. Finally inspiration struck.

  “Jennifer!” I gasped.

  “Ah,” said Choo San, and the class continued. I felt like a wet noodle.

  Despite that one incident, I soon discovered that I loved being at the Washington School of Ballet. Yes, it was harder and stricter and more serious than anywhere else I had been. Yes, the girls there were better dancers than I’d ever seen in my age group. But I loved the difficulty, and I loved the challenge. Everything was at a higher level, and I found I wanted to conquer the heights. I saw something in myself that was inspired by the conflict and wanted to triumph over it; I felt that I actually could succeed in this school and that the school would make me better. I wanted to stay.

  We had some backtracking to do because I had pretty much committed to the Virginia Ballet School. We asked the Washington School of Ballet if I could attend their year program after all, and I was accepted on a half scholarship. I wrote Oleg a letter, telling him how much I had loved studying with him but that I’d decided to go to Washington Ballet for the year. He wrote back, telling me all of the plans he had had for me that year, which of course confused me and made me feel guilty.

  The program for advanced students at the Washington School of Ballet was early release, which meant that I would have to get out of my high school one period early. My school allowed ballet to be my physical education credit, so we could make it through traffic and be at the Washington Ballet in time for the first of my two daily ballet classes. My mother started doing dry runs into DC with my dad so that she could get used to the forty-five-minute route before it really counted. We found another student who was willing to carpool with us so that we could all save on gas money. It felt like we were preparing for a lot, but I was so excited about this new beginning.

  I was thirteen when I began studying at Washington Ballet in the fall of 1986. For my mother and me, life in the afternoons revolved solely around ballet. My mornings were those of a normal high school student. My sister and I were both going to the same high school, she as a senior and I as a freshman, since I had skipped second grade all those years ago. My sister was extremely busy with extracurricular activities as well; her piano studies were intense, and she was also captain of the tennis team. But now that she could drive, she was becoming more self-sufficient. She drove us both to school most mornings.

  My mother had a part-time job as a school nurse and would pick me up early at school. During our forty-five-minute commute into DC, I would have a snack, do some homework, twist my hair into a bun, and even change into my leotard and tights if the traffic was bad and I thought we might be late. We also started praying together on the days when we didn’t have a carpooler with us.

  Initially the prayers were just for our safety during the commute; my mom was petrified of driving in the notoriously bad traffic of the Beltway, and she needed the reassurance of God’s protection all the way there and all the way home. But soon our prayers blossomed to other areas, and we ended up praying for everything in our family’s lives, no matter how small. It was a wonderful time of growth for both of us because we had never had such a lo
ng uninterrupted, undistracted time to pray. I learned how to pray, and how to watch for the results of those prayers. I felt more peaceful about things because I knew that even when I was scared or feeling out of control, God was there and His wisdom was working, whatever the outcome might be.

  My first months at the Washington School of Ballet were invigorating and eye-opening. We had a variety of teachers, not just one, as I was accustomed to in South Carolina. The student body was large, and there were three good-size studios. We were grouped roughly by age and also by talent, and there were a couple of boys in our classes as well. The teachers were demanding but pleasant.

  The charismatic Julio de Bittencourt taught us ballet and character dancing. In character, we wore heeled shoes and did stylized czardas and mazurkas like those I had seen in folk festivals or European national dance exhibitions on television. Mr. de Bittencourt tried to draw the fire out of our young souls and instill some passion into our dancing. We studied the subtly precise art of Chinese dancing with a company member from the Washington Ballet, learning ritualistic processions and poses. We had regular technique classes in soft ballet shoes with the challenging and funny Suzanne Erlon. She would lead us through barre to the center work, which included turns and then jumps. After a short break during which we put on our pointe shoes, we had pointe classes with the feminine and ladylike Patricia Berrand, who taught us the finer elements of dancing en pointe. Mary Day herself came in to teach us when she could, and that was always cause for extra nerves and more attention to how our hair was fixed.

  It was fascinating for me to be exposed to all of these different styles of teaching and dancing. I felt myself growing as a dancer every day as new ideas or techniques were offered to me. My competitive side also came out, and I found that I wanted to be the best in the class at every step. I never completely succeeded, but there were certain movements in which I felt, proudly, that I had perhaps been the closest to perfect. Looking back now, I’m not so sure I was always correct in my assessment!