Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet

by Ringer, Jenifer

  During the intermission before my piece, I put on my costume and waited for the ballet to start, dancing around a bit both to stay warm and to generally look like I knew what I was doing. The Scherzo was the third movement, so I waited backstage during the first two movements, the butterflies in my stomach increasing in their violence with every passing moment.

  Finally I realized the second movement was winding down and it was time to take my place in the wings for my entrance. I saw my opposite and fellow apprentice, Inma, in her place across the stage in her wing. We stared wide-eyed at each other. We were waiting for our music—there were only four very fast counts of music before we were supposed to leap onto the stage, and we needed to be ready.

  There was applause after the second movement and then an anticipatory silence. I was so nervous I thought I would either throw up or explode.

  Then one-two-three-four, and I was suddenly leaping onto the stage. It was glorious. I felt as if I were dancing above the ground and flying across the air. This is what I was meant to do, I exulted to myself. Everyone must be able to see!

  Quite soon, however, I started to have trouble breathing. This is kind of hard, I thought. I was only a quarter of the way through. I kept my feet moving, but they were definitely grounded now. Shuffling, really. Halfway through, my arms felt oddly heavy, as if they had lost the blood that was supposed to be in them. Did that mean my body was going into shock?

  Three quarters through, and I looked hazily over at Inma, dancing across from me. Her lips were blue. I wondered if I looked the same.

  Finally the Scherzo was over, and I was one of those panting beasts in the wings, doubled over and wondering where the oxygen had gone. I made my way shakily to the dressing room, thrilled that I’d survived but a little surprised by how hard the ballet had been. The tissues I used to remove the thick stage makeup on my face revealed stripes of bright red, sweaty skin.

  I later said to Meg, “I thought you said the Scherzo was a puff.”

  “It is,” she replied. I stared at her until she said, “Well, here at the theater, that means it’s really hard. You get really out of breath, or puffed.”

  Ah. I had much to learn, apparently. But still, I was here. I was doing it. I was a professional dancer.

  —

  Soon after my first performances of the Scherzo, the company got ready for The Nutcracker. Christmastime in New York is about giant Christmas trees, shopping, and huge snowflakes made of lights hanging over the avenues. But for City Ballet dancers, it is all about The Nutcracker—eight shows a week for six weeks straight.

  As the time for our first performance of the ballet drew near, I looked every day for a Nutcracker rehearsal on the daily schedule but none showed up. At SAB we had rehearsed for months for the Workshop performances; for the Scherzo, we had only a week. But certainly for a big ballet like The Nutcracker they would rehearse far in advance? The days went by, and I started to panic. Nutcracker was only a week away!

  Finally, three days before opening night, we had our first rehearsal. The older dancers all knew the ballet well because they had danced it every December for years, but for us new dancers, there was a lot to learn in very little time. I was to be a Maid in the party scene at the beginning of the ballet, a Snowflake during the transitional snow scene, and one of the Hot Chocolates dancing the Spanish divertissement in the second-act Land of the Sweets. I also understudied the famous second-act Waltz of the Flowers.

  That initial week of Nutcracker performances was a shock to me; to suddenly jump into eight consecutive performances, where I was expected to perform every single minute onstage at my highest level, was exhausting even as I was exhilarated to be working a real dancer’s schedule. A couple of days into the run, there were multiple injuries among the corps ladies, and Rosemary discovered she didn’t have enough dancers to cover all of the roles. The solution was to have Monique, an apprentice along with me, and I do something very unusual. In the second act, we were to dance in both the Hot Chocolate dance and the Waltz of the Flowers. Normally dancers do only one of these at a time.

  My schedule, therefore, was very busy. The only part I alternated with another girl was that of the Maid in the party scene. Otherwise, I did every Snow, every Hot Chocolate, and every Flowers. After Hot Chocolate, while the other divertissements such as Marzipan and Candy Canes were being performed, Monique and I would run to the greenroom, where the ladies’ costumes were kept, get out of our Hot Chocolate dresses, colored tights, and specially dyed pointe shoes, put on pink tights and the Flowers costume, and run out to the hallway without our shoes on. Before the mirror just outside the greenroom, we would take off the giant Hot Chocolate headpieces, smooth anything out of place on our hair, and then put in the Flowers headpiece. Then we would run to the pointe shoe station on stage right with our pink pointe shoes, resin up our tights so they would not slip inside our shoes, put paper towels around our toes, stuff our feet into our shoes, and then quickly tie our ribbons around our ankles. We would resin up the outside of our pointe shoes to prevent any slipping onstage and then run to the wing through which we would enter the Land of the Sweets as a Flower. It was hectic.

  The worst was doing it all over again in reverse order so that we could come out in the finale of the ballet as Hot Chocolates once more. The company simply cut out some of the Flowers from the finale so that the numbers would work out evenly. Monique and I did this every show for the rest of the run that year. It was an eye-opener to see how hard it was possible to work as a ballet dancer, and even as I thrilled to be living out my dream, I was taken aback by the grueling schedule.

  Every subsequent year of The Nutcracker was slightly different, but every year was also the same. During my early years in the company, my experience with Balanchine’s Nutcracker was a whirlwind of tinkling music, colorful costume changes, swollen feet, and deli runs in full stage makeup and hair. I always had multiple parts in every show, and after my hundredth Waltz of the Flowers, things began to blur together.

  There were, of course, particular shows that stood out. There was the time Michael Jackson came to the performance and appeared backstage at intermission. The dancers were in a frenzy of excitement; the boy dancing the Toy Soldier wore only one glove in Michael’s honor. Since it was one of my first seasons, I always had my camera at hand, and I ran down to the stage level determined to get a picture of myself with Michael. I gathered my courage, approached the giant houselike bodyguard, and asked if I could take a photo with the star. I was given permission, and Michael was very nice, gently placing his arm on my shoulders.

  Then there was a long, tense moment when my Spanish friend Inma said in her sweetly accented voice, “Oh, Jenny, I can’t figure out how to work your camera.”

  Sweating behind my placid smile, I gritted, “Just push the top button . . .”

  There is another performance, however, that will forever be my most memorable Nutcracker. In our production, a great number of the young beginning students from the School of American Ballet dance a variety of the children’s roles in the ballet. The two plum parts are the little girl who gets to be Marie and the little boy who gets to be the Nephew/Nutcracker Prince. All of these children are rehearsed for months in an almost military fashion. They are taught to do every movement perfectly through repetition and minute correction. Before the show, they are kept down in the basement of the theater, where they run around wildly and eat too many sweets, as children do. But once the curtain goes up, they are little professionals.

  On this particular evening, I was warming up backstage during the first scene before putting on my Snowflake costume. There was a sudden commotion in the wings. Apparently the boy playing the Nutcracker Prince wasn’t feeling well. He calmly walked to the back of the stage where the Christmas tree was, threw up, and then walked back to the front to continue his starring role.

  Now, our tree weighs one ton and eventually grows forty-o
ne feet tall, but during the party scene, most of the tree is hidden down a deep hole in the stage, and a fake carpet covers up the hole. The Nutcracker Prince’s vomit was on the carpet. My friend Dena Abergel was playing the Maid that night, and she was the lucky one given a mop and bucket by the stage crew so that she could go out and mop during the performance. She did a good job.

  However, during the transition into the battle scene, when the fake carpet was pulled away as usual, it revealed a stubborn blob on center stage that had obviously gotten through the seam. It was on the giant trapdoor that rises out of the hole when the tree grows. Since it was toward the back of the stage, it didn’t get in the way of the battle, which was largely fought up front. However, this was bad news for the Snowflakes because we were dancing next, and the blob remained intact.

  All sixteen of us stood in the wings with our eyes on the throw-up. It was in a well-danced part of the stage, but we figured if we just kept our eyes on it, we would be able to avoid it. We had forgotten about the paper snow that is part of what makes our snow scene so beautiful. Slowly, magically, to the majestic and surging music of Tchaikovsky, the snow fell. And slowly, inevitably, the puddle on the stage was hidden.

  At the beginning of our dance, some of the Snowflakes run in and out of the wings as “flurries” of snow, lightly fluttering our arms as if windblown. I was one of the first flurries. I ran out for my entrance, eyes lifted, face glowing, arms flowing, as my feet flitted across the stage. Then suddenly my feet flitted no more. They slipped out from under me like lightning. I flew through the air and landed with an echoing thud on the trapdoor—in the vomit!

  I heard the girls in the wings burst into laughter. I giggled when I went offstage too. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to find that one spot in my brief entrance. Then I heard another thud. I peeked out of the wings to see another Snowflake on her knees—someone else had fallen. The slips and skids became periodic, and I’m sure the audience must have wondered what our problem was. At one point, when we all formed a giant swirling snowball toward the end of the dance, one dancer ended up on the floor scrabbling around with her feet and gasping, “I can’t get up! I can’t get up!”

  When we got back to the dressing room, we counted eight complete falls and countless other mishaps. And while we all had a good laugh once we were offstage, I remember looking at the other girls during the performance and noting that although we were dancing in unusual circumstances, everyone was trying to give the best performance she could. From the sick Nutcracker Prince to the slipping Snowflakes to the Maid with the mop, we all knew that every performance was special and deserved our best effort, no matter what.

  —

  After the six-week-long run of The Nutcracker, the company went directly into eight weeks of mixed repertory, which was the main part of our season. My first year, I thought that Nutcracker was hard. But the whirlwind of being in the rep performance season was a different thing altogether.

  The days suddenly became very long. We would show up for class at ten thirty and then rehearse from eleven thirty to six, with an hour off somewhere for lunch. Then there were two free hours when the company members would fix their hair and makeup and then warm up again for the performance. As an apprentice, I was allowed only four individual ballets in one season, though I could dance in every performance my particular ballets were on the program, so if I was in a ballet that night, I would join the company members in preparing for the show. If I wasn’t involved, or “on,” as everyone called it, then I would go home. Apprentices usually had only about two shows a week.

  Outside the theater, I didn’t have much time for anything. I was still living with my parents, and at the end of a long rehearsal day, I usually just went home and got on the couch with a book, happy to have the weight off my feet. Life seemed extremely full with everything that went on at the theater, and I felt no need to add to it just yet.

  That early January of 1990, I was mostly understudying still and would spend my days standing in the back of the studio, trying to pick up what I could. Often it felt tedious, and it was hard for me to concentrate, especially by the fourth and fifth hours of standing on swollen feet squeezed into tight pointe shoes. When the dancers already knew the steps to the ballet they were rehearsing, I just watched. But I still had to stay standing up; it wasn’t acceptable for apprentices to sit down during rehearsals.

  If the dancers were learning the steps of the ballet for the first time, I perked up because I felt that I could actually do a good job here; I would dance the steps as fully as I could in the back and make sure I knew what I was doing, just in case the company needed me to step in. From time to time a dancer was sick or double scheduled, and the ballet mistress would ask one of the apprentices to step into the empty spot for the rehearsal. There was nothing worse than being asked to join the group only to reveal that you had not been paying attention. If the chance came for me to dance in a rehearsal, I wanted to make a good impression.

  There was no guarantee that apprentices would eventually be asked to join the company. No one knew how many dancers City Ballet was looking for, or whether they knew they would eventually take us in or were still debating about us. Company members loved to darkly remind apprentices of the previous ones who hadn’t made it into the company and had left the theater with their dreams shattered.

  This particular January was an unusually tough one on the company. For whatever reason, a large number of girls were on the injury list and couldn’t perform. Another dancer seemed to get injured, or go “out,” every day, and casts were shuffled around like crazy all the time to cover the absences. Then one day the injuries directly affected me. Two girls went “out” in the morning, and there was no one left to replace them in that evening’s performance of a Balanchine ballet called Ballo della Regina.

  Rosemary chose Monique and me to step into the girls’ spots. The only problem was that this ballet had been in the current rep for a while, and therefore Rosemary hadn’t had to teach it that season, but Monique and I didn’t know a step of it. The ballet mistress would have to teach us the ballet from scratch during the day, and then we would have to perform it that night.

  I was very excited to be chosen. It meant that maybe I’d made a good impression on Rosemary, and that she felt she could trust me with this responsibility. I also thought that this might be my fifth ballet, over the apprentice’s limit of four ballets per season, and that I might get my contract out of this. It might mean I was about to become a full member of the New York City Ballet. I wasn’t sure, though. What if they took another ballet away from me, so I still had only four? I didn’t know how it worked, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. I focused on learning Ballo, determined to do a spectacular job, and figured I would find out eventually if I had won my contract or not.

  The rehearsal schedule was changed so that Rosemary, Monique, and I had a studio to ourselves for two hours. Then at the end of the day a rehearsal was added that included all of the girls in the corps of Ballo so Monique and I could fit ourselves into the formations. After that, it would be up to us to do a good enough job onstage in front of 2,500 people.

  It seemed like an impossible task, but we plowed ahead, and with someone as focused as Rosemary, it even began to seem possible that I might learn a complete seventeen-minute ballet in only two hours. At least it wasn’t one of our longer, forty-minute ballets. During the first rehearsal with Rosemary, I forced myself to concentrate and be analytical. I used the mental tricks I’d learned when I was memorizing for tests in school, trying to lay down tracks in my memory so that the sequence of the steps would run together properly. We were never taught how to learn choreography at SAB, but I’d discovered some ways that worked for me.

  Luckily, Rosemary was a gifted teacher who understood how to teach choreography so that it could be retained. She would teach a sequence of steps and then go back to the beginning and watch us to see if we had it. Then she
would teach the next sequence, but again go all the way back to the beginning, so we could link the two together in both our bodies and our minds. She would continue in this manner, sometimes making the parts larger or smaller, until we finally reached the end of the ballet and could run the whole thing through to the end. When the two hours were up, Monique and I had a good idea of the ballet. We could get through it, still with occasional mistakes, but well enough to do a capable job and cover up any errors.

  We had a small break before the next rehearsal with all of the girls, and I obsessively went over the steps, feeling as if the sequence were trying desperately to get out of my brain. I felt nervous about the group rehearsal; suddenly the environment would change from the safely empty studio with just Monique, Rosemary, and me to a room filled with older, critical company members.

  The rehearsal began at the beginning of the corps section, and we worked our way through the entire ballet. The other corps members—exhausted after a long day of dancing—just marked their steps, making sure they were in their correct positions so that Monique and I could understand where we were supposed to be. We stopped and started as Monique and I made little mistakes or got into incorrect formations, but there was no time to go through the ballet twice. After we had worked our way to the end, Rosemary dismissed the other girls.

  “Okay, well, do you have any questions?” she asked.

  Monique and I looked at each other and shook our heads. I was thinking, Well, yes, I have many questions, but at this point I’m not sure your answers would do any good.

  My head felt as if it might burst from having a whole ballet crammed into it in two and a half hours. Surely ballet steps were trickling out of my ears. I knew that not only would I have to go onstage and remember all the steps and formations correctly, but I also would be expected to dance like the professional I’d become so that the audience, which had come to see one of the world’s greatest ballet companies, would never guess that I was a last-minute replacement.