Over the next weeks, Tanya and I alternated during every rehearsal, each of us dancing with Arch, who ended up having to do each section twice. Every rehearsal felt like a deciding performance, with Suki watching Tanya and me critically and never letting on what she was thinking. Ballet masters from City Ballet were brought in to work with us. Sean Lavery and Karin von Aroldingen, both legends from the Balanchine years, came in to give us their wisdom on the ballet. Sean helped us with the partnering, telling the girls how to hold their bodies in the lifts and Arch where to place his hands so that he could more easily control our weight. He made everything richer and more exciting. Karin worked with us on the feeling of the role. “Run through the light,” she said, demonstrating with her chest lifted and arms held back as if she were about to fly. Both of these dancers had worked with Balanchine, so it was a thrill to hear what they had to say.
Tanya and I could both do the steps well; it was a deceptively difficult part that was physically hard to get through without tiring out. I pushed myself to never let any weakness or tiredness show, no matter how out of breath I got. Tanya and I were both dancing under feelings of stress and tension as we awaited the big decision.
Ultimately, there was a rehearsal scheduled to which every major faculty member of the school came. We were to dance the ballet twice, first with Tanya as the Waltz Girl, and then with me. I felt a mixture of nerves and resolve. I knew I was the underdog but really wanted to prove that I was strong enough and good enough to dance the part. I gave the rehearsal my all, attempting to dance it as if I were performing it onstage. Afterward, I sat at the back of the studio, spent, sweaty, and flushed, while the powers that be discussed things at the front of the room.
Finally, Tanya and I were taken aside one by one. I saw Suki pull Tanya to the side of the room to speak with her. I rummaged around in my dance bag so that it would not look like I was listening, but I stayed in the studio: good or bad, I would be getting my news next. I heard footsteps and looked up as Suki approached.
“Jenny. So we have decided that you are going to be dancing at State Theater with Arch,” she said, a tiny pleased smile on her face.
“Wow!” I said quietly, thrilled but trying hard not to celebrate too obviously. I was euphoric but contained my excitement out of respect for Tanya. I learned later that the school had actually decided on a compromise, where though I would be dancing this excerpt at State Theater, Tanya would be doing the more important evening performances of Workshop while I did the less attended matinees.
“But we have to keep working on your jeté battu into the soutenu,” she said, suddenly demonstrating how she wanted me to do a particularly difficult passage in the ballet. It was hard for Suki to pass up the opportunity to give me a couple more corrections. I adored Suki and would do anything for her, so I stayed and worked with her on my aching legs until she finally released me to go home.
Ecstatic but also exhausted, I went home to let the stress roll off me for the first time in weeks. That night, I woke up with a 102-degree fever and ended up being sick and unable to dance for three days. I think my body crashed under the weight of the anxiety and physical exertion I’d forced upon myself; some subconscious part of me wanted to ensure that my body would rest in bed for a few days. There were still two weeks until the performance, so the days off didn’t affect my rehearsal time too much.
The day of the performance at the New York State Theater came quickly. My parents and I had a long prayer that morning and committed the performance to God; I had done all the work I could, and now it was just time to dance and let God be in control. The day passed rapidly, and then suddenly my fellow students and I were backstage, waiting for our stage rehearsal. Shaky with nerves, I tried to laugh and joke with my friends, but mostly I was too tense to talk. Company members lingered onstage and looked at the students, their expressions mostly shuttered, though a few offered smiles of encouragement. Meg and Katey Tracey came to check on me and offered hugs and wishes of merde, the way company members bade each other good luck. I was surprised to learn that merde was French for, well, what you might step in if you walked through a cow pasture.
The company ballet masters were on hand for the stage rehearsal. These were the coaches who taught and rehearsed the individual ballets; they were responsible for making sure the steps were correctly danced and the technique looked polished. A little woman with short reddish brown hair and a giant cat T-shirt that reached to her knees placed us in our spots onstage. She was Rosemary Dunleavy, the main ballet mistress for the company. Kind but firm, she obviously knew what she was doing. Peter Martins, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet who had become ballet master in chief after Balanchine’s death, was also there. He had been a famous dancer in Denmark before he came over to join the New York City Ballet, and was one of the most notable of Balanchine’s choice male dancers. Now he was in charge of everyone and everything in the company. For this rehearsal, he sat on a stool at the front of the stage and watched with interest, smiling and laughing at us a bit and jumping up to fine-tune certain moments from time to time.
The rehearsal was brief, really just a run-through of the ballet. The company had other ballets to put on the stage that night and couldn’t spend a lot of time on us. When it was over, I sat backstage for a moment and sorted through my emotions. There was excitement because I’d just rehearsed with Peter Martins on the State Theater stage, and it had gone well. There was relief that the rehearsals were finally over, and all that was left to do was perform. There was also terror that the rehearsals were over, and I would never get to rehearse my problem spots again. What if everything went wrong? What if I fell out of the two consecutive double pirouettes? What if even just one thing went wrong? Would that mean I had blown it and my chance to join the company was over forever? Should I put my pointe shoes back on, find Arch, and practice again? No, there was nowhere to rehearse, and company members were all over the place, watching. I needed to stay cool. I had done my best. Obviously I would just have to deal with the nerves fluttering in my stomach for another few hours until the performance began.
My fellow students and I were sent down to the basement of the theater to get ready for the show. The New York State Theater is located in Lincoln Center, a complex of buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The three main buildings are grouped around a great fountain; the State Theater, renamed the David H. Koch Theater in 2008, is to the left of the fountain. In the center, behind the fountain, is the Metropolitan Opera House, and on the right is Avery Fischer Hall. The New York State Theater was built in 1964, and Balanchine was involved from the beginning in making the theater perfect for dance. From the sprung floor, to the acoustics meant to dampen the clicking sounds of ballerinas’ toe shoes, to the great sight lines and lack of center aisle so that every seat in the house was good, Balanchine had thought of it all. A cement block of a building, with its face made almost entirely of long windows, it is actually not that beautiful inside; the primary colors are white and gray, and there are hardly any windows back in the working part of the theater. But the stage is the perfect place to dance ballet. The basement of the theater, quaintly called the Lower Concourse, is a labyrinth of dim hallways lined with large crates and filing cabinets. I’d never been in the backstage area before, and the only way I found my way to our dressing area was by following the sound of excited chatter.
Meg and Katey came down to visit me and offer encouragement. They checked out my stage makeup and told me it was fine. I slicked my frizzy hair back with an enormous amount of hair spray, until it was hard and shiny. If I was anxious about a performance, I usually took my nerves out on my poor hair. I felt a surge of confidence, knowing that at least I could depend on my hair not to pop out of my bun and let me down. I don’t remember warming up or putting on my costume. All of a sudden I was backstage, waiting the final ten minutes before Serenade would begin.
Suki came up to me and assessed
my appearance.
“You look good! Good luck,” she said encouragingly. Then she cocked her head and started brushing the hair on my forehead downward, against the hair spray. “You could do your hair a little softer though, you know.” She gave my hair a dissatisfied grimace and moved on to another girl.
I silently screamed inside my head.
I ran to a backstage mirror and was horrified to see that she had made my hair stick up like Alfalfa’s in The Little Rascals. Breathless, I took water from the water fountain and attempted to reslick my hair. Luckily, the quantity of hair spray I’d applied made my hair like glue, and my problem was quickly solved.
Arch appeared beside me.
“Do my shoes look the right color?” he asked, looking panicked. “They told me to dye them blue to match the unitard, but there were a million shades of blue spray paint! I tried to mix colors, but I don’t know . . . and I think I did it too late. My shoes are still wet! And look, my hands are BLUE!” I later learned that for the boys, Serenade blue is a notoriously difficult color to achieve on ballet slippers. And no one had told Arch to wear protective gloves.
He held his shaking hands up to my eyes. Obviously I wasn’t the only one trying not to freak out.
“I’m sure you won’t be able to see that from the stage,” I told him, trying to reassure him. I needed a calm partner. It was too late to worry about blue hands.
“Places, please,” we heard the stage manager call. Feeling unreal, I went to stand in my place at the front of one of the two diamond formations. The audience noise dwindled to silence. The stage lights went blue. For our excerpt, we were starting with the Waltz section. While the other girls turned and walked offstage, trailing their hands behind them as I had done as a student at Washington Ballet, I would stay onstage, repeating the famous arm movements that began the ballet, and wait for Arch to come and tap me on the shoulder so that we could begin our dance together.
Just feet away from me, on the other side of the lowered curtain, the strings burst forth with Tchaikovsky’s opening chords, like cries of the heart. My stomach rose into my neck, making it impossible to breathe for a moment. I raised my right hand toward the lights, a gesture that half reached, half shielded. Then the curtain rose with a quiet, zipping hum. I felt the breeze from the rising curtain blow my skirts gently around my ankles.
A strange thing happened when I looked out from the New York State Theater stage for the first time. The audience looked warm and inviting. The large jewel-like lights placed along the different audience levels glowed gently. The floor felt soft under my pointe shoes. My nerves suddenly left me, and I felt comfortable, at home. I felt a gladness rise up in me, and I knew that I was going to be able to dance with ease and confidence.
The whole performance was a joy that ended all too quickly. Arch and I danced like soul mates, everything going perfectly. I made my double pirouettes and got through those jetés battus that Suki had been worried about. I felt as if I were flying, lifted up on soaring winds. I wanted to do it again, right away if possible.
I could hardly sleep that night, reliving the entire day over and over in my head. After the experience of dancing on that stage, I craved a repeat and started to dream of being asked into City Ballet right away. Yes, I was young. But I thought I was ready. I wanted to be a City Ballet dancer.
And then the next week started, and it was as if nothing had happened. I was back to the normal routine. However, Peter was apparently impressed enough with my performance that he wanted to change my casting in the Workshop performance. To my surprise, Susan informed me that I would now be learning the principal women in both the second and third movements of Balanchine’s Symphony in C.
I was of course excited by this, but also a little daunted. It didn’t mean I was going to perform the roles, but there was a good chance I would if Peter had asked that I learn them. I knew Susan was skeptical that I was strong enough, so I felt that I had a lot to prove. Also, the girls already doing these parts were currently the unspoken stars of my class; Elizabeth was dancing the third movement, and Monique was dancing the second movement. Both of them intimidated me; when I watched them dance I saw everywhere I was lacking.
I pushed myself, though, and felt that I could rise to the occasion. I was used to succeeding, and after the performance at the State Theater, I had more confidence.
Then disaster struck.
It was springtime, and a few weeks before Workshop. I had just turned sixteen and was taking Susan’s class. She had stopped the class to give me a correction on my ballonnées, scissorlike pointe steps. I was trying to do them sharper and cleaner and stronger. Something happened, and I kicked my working leg so hard that it pulled my standing leg out from under me and I fell.
Embarrassed, I got up, but I couldn’t put weight on my foot. I looked at Suzy, who cared intensely about her students. She looked horrified.
“Sit down,” she told me. “We’ll get some ice.”
She looked very upset, and I sat against the wall under the barre, trying not to cry. I was brought a pack of ice and watched the class with blank eyes as it resumed, not really seeing anything. I took the ice off my foot to check on it. It was turning purple, and a ridge of swollen skin was rising as if it were on a fault line.
In disbelief, I called my mom to come pick me up. She was just as devastated as I was and in full protective mode. She refused the offer of crutches, probably because that would mean we were admitting defeat. We went to a doctor in a taxi.
He took X-rays and then presented us with the news.
“Looks like you’ve broken your fifth metatarsal,” he told me kindly. “Now, it’s just a hairline fracture, so if you really want to do those performances, I can tape you up real good so that you can do it.”
I looked at the doctor for a moment, taken aback. Is that what real dancers did? Did they dance on broken bones? Should I do that? Perhaps he was just testing me. I couldn’t tell. I knew that Workshop was the most important event of an SAB student’s year. I knew that to be asked into the New York City Ballet, or any other company of repute, for that matter, I had to dance Workshop. I knew that if I didn’t do Workshop, I would have to put my dreams on hold and come back next year to try again. It was a devastating thought.
But my foot hurt. I couldn’t bear to stand on it at all. It looked like an eggplant. I knew there was no way I could dance on it, and I knew that even Workshop was not important enough to make me crazy enough to dance on a broken foot.
I was given crutches and sent home. That night my mom somehow sweet-talked another doctor, Dr. Louis Galli, into paying a house call to give us a second opinion. I believe it was Dr. Galli’s first and only house call, and he became my favorite doctor for the rest of my career. He often reminds me of how he came to my pink bedroom and looked at my eggplant foot while I was in my flowered pajamas. Dr. Galli confirmed the diagnosis, and I resigned myself to six weeks without dance to allow my foot to heal.
I didn’t go to watch Workshop. It was just too hard to be missing it.
—
In a lot of ways, that first catastrophic injury was good for me. I learned a lot of lessons during the recovery that I was able to apply during the course of future injuries. Even while my foot was broken, I learned there were other things I could do to stay strong. Since the year was almost over at SAB, I didn’t have to go and watch classes while I recuperated. The teachers told me to heal and come and take the summer course classes when I was ready. I started going to Pilates and discovered that I could hop one-legged around the studio from machine to machine. The instructors would put a cuff around my ankle so that I wouldn’t use my foot. They loved having ballerinas and would come up with all kinds of crazy exercises to confound me and make me sore. This was probably the first time I realized I had stomach muscles.
I also learned that it was important to come back slowly and methodically from injur
ies. Stanley Williams saw me on the sidewalk one day, and in his typical Zen master fashion he gave me a nugget of wisdom to take home with me.
“The slower you come back, the faster you come back,” he said, gazing at me with his deep brown eyes. I smiled and nodded, but didn’t understand his advice.
As soon as I could, I was back in ballet class and even in rehearsals, trying to be ready to go on a fantastic trip SAB was taking to Holland in order to perform with the Kirov Ballet School as part of an early fall festival. I was to dance Serenade and the lead in another Balanchine ballet, Valse-Fantasie. But in the middle of one of my rehearsals, my foot began to hurt again.
This time I had a stress reaction on one of my metatarsals, a precursor to a stress fracture. It came from coming back to ballet too quickly and not having the muscular support around my bones to protect them from the difficult physical activity. I was sidelined again, though I was allowed to go to Holland with the group anyway, since my ticket was paid for.
I was happy to be going to Holland with the school because I’d never been overseas and all of my good friends were going. But I was bitterly disappointed and felt worthless. I was surrounded by dancers preparing for performances and talking about their roles; all I could do was take part of their ballet classes, and even the steps I was allowed to dance with my injury I couldn’t do very well because I was not in the top form that all of the other students were in.
It was from this trip that I have my first memory of compulsively eating. It was not what I ate or how much of it I ate, but how I felt about the food and how the food would make me feel after I ate it. We would eat in a cafeteria for every meal, and I remember eating a lot of the fried cheese sticks they had there. I didn’t overdo it necessarily, but I had a strange need to eat them, and I knew they were not the healthiest choice I could have been making. I was unhappy to be on this fabulous trip as just an observer. There was something about those cheese sticks that I ate every day that made me feel better. I looked forward to them because they made me feel happy.
Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet Page 6