A Body of Work Read online

  Though we become professionals at an early age, we paradoxically remain juvenile in many aspects of our lives. Our schedules are dictated to us, our ballets are chosen for us, our touring schedules are arranged by others. Our conversation revolves, for the most part, around the ballet we’re learning, the ballet master we’d rather not work with, the performance we wish we could give or the one we already gave. Our colleagues are not only our friends; they become our husbands, wives, one-night stands, occasional enemies, enduring affairs. For dancers throughout the world, all of life seems encapsulated within the confines of their own companies.

  But unity of the tribe also has a dark side: our devotion to one another is inevitably trumped by our individual desire to succeed. A group of dancers drinking at a bar at night can revert to bitching about other dancers like a clique of chatty schoolgirls ensconced at the popular table. I have been subject to my own demons of jealousy when someone else got a role instead of me, or when I danced the second performance instead of opening night, or when someone else was invited to a ballet company I hadn’t yet danced for. All of us are extremely vulnerable, which leaves us craving support from our peers and opens us to moments, in class and rehearsal, when we can laugh together about the silliest, most ridiculous things. We encourage each other through those rehearsals that run late into the evening when we’re delirious from the long day’s work. We share collective discovery in rehearsals that are euphoric; we remain united through rehearsals that are a living hell. I miss the way that, on an opening night, we huddle together onstage just before the curtain rises and share a moment of “we did this together.” Even when we hate the ballet we have created with a choreographer, we still stick together, soldiering on to make the experience something constructive. It’s a remarkable and invaluable intimacy.

  * * *

  SOMETHING ELSE I miss: the routine that characterized every performance day. Each dancer has his or her own preshow rituals. No matter where in the world I danced, mine started invariably with morning class, with setting up my body. Then home, or to my hotel, where I’d have a relatively large lunch. Chicken, rice, salad. Not too many carbs, no sugars. Filling enough to last me through the performance but light enough to not feel like a weight in my stomach.

  Soon after eating, full of food and feeling dozy, I would take a nap. One of the ballerinas I have partnered, Gillian Murphy, is famous for her two-hour sleeps. But sleeping for that long before a show would make me too groggy. So my naps lasted half an hour, or an hour at most. The moment I woke to the sound of the insistent alarm, the anxiety and stress of the show rushed into my mind. It’s happening, I would think. The wait is over.

  In the shower, hot water warmed me as I mentally reviewed the steps I would soon dance. After the shower, always a shave. I have a superstition that if I don’t shave before the show, it means I have slacked off somehow and am not fully committed to the performance. I normally dressed nicely: suit, good shoes, all intended to emphasize the evening’s event, the sense of occasion. Usually there was a dinner afterward with family or friends, or a special treat when I could slip away with my manager and have a couple of drinks and dinner alone at our usual place.

  I always packed clothes to sweat in when I warmed up before the show, and a greeting card for my ballerina in which I would write a merde note. “Merde” is the word dancers use when wishing each other good luck. Obviously, we’re not going to say “break a leg,” as actors sometimes do, but that we came to settle on the unlikely “merde” still amuses me.

  Before I left the apartment, my feelings were a jumble of anticipation, excitement, and dread. Yet nothing compares to it. The nerves you feel with the show fast approaching. The pressure to dance your absolute best. Troublesome questions would seep in at the last moment, attacking my mind like some plague I didn’t know I’d contracted. I would careen between confidence and fear.

  I can do this, let’s conquer this!

  What if I miss this turn? Mess up that lift? Do I have enough stamina? Will I get it right? I have to get it right. I cannot miss this lift! It will all be over if it goes wrong!

  No matter how much I’d prepared, the performance was always a risk. Anything can happen on that stage. Ballets have passages that are incredibly tricky, even potentially dangerous. One misplaced step of the foot and it can painfully twist. One slightly off-kilter landing from a high jump and something can crack that shouldn’t. Dancing virtuoso steps can feel like traversing a darkened room trying to avoid a trip wire.

  * * *

  I’VE ALWAYS DREADED that moment when the show is over and the coaches, director, and staff come onstage to talk to the dancers. I’d look into their eyes as if to say, “Was it good? Did I do okay?” When you perform, you subject yourself to judgment and criticism from everyone.

  And when people who attended the show would praise a performance, I often suspected they were lying. I knew they felt the need to be complimentary and I understood why. They know you’ve given everything you’ve got onstage, and not to say something nice would be rude. But most times their praise produced one reaction in me: I wanted to hide. Which is perverse, considering that dancers who can’t take a compliment annoy me.

  Still, their well-meant words would make me want to run up to my dressing room and see no one. To be alone with a beer. I could even feel guilty about drinking that beer. I’d think, I don’t deserve it. I didn’t dance well enough. I only deserve to work harder. Or give up.

  After more than two years of not having felt that vulnerability, it strikes me that I could have been less harsh in my judgment. I wish I had focused on the sheer enjoyment of dance that I felt as a child. Accepted that nothing is ever perfect.

  Yet I also believe that my harsher judgments had value. Because unless I kept questioning and recognizing my shortcomings, I couldn’t learn and I couldn’t evolve. The trick is to be realistic, balanced: to not overpraise or be easily pleased yet not judge myself too harshly, as others often tell me I do.

  Once, in a rehearsal with the prima ballerina Diana Vishneva for American Ballet Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty, I danced my variation while she looked on. As I toiled away at the jumps and turns, incorporating notes from our coach, I could feel Diana peering at me from the side of the studio.

  Finally she said, “You have everything ballet needs of a dancer, but you don’t know it.”

  Her comment left me speechless. I will never forget those words. They made me realize that not acknowledging your own potential or talent isn’t modesty. It’s a disservice to yourself and your art form.

  * * *

  THESE DAYS, I am consigned to watch from the sidelines. As I try to recover, my daily routine of rehabilitation places me in the building during rehearsal hours, peeking in on a studio where a new ballet is being created or an old one is rehearsed. I take company class with the other dancers. But the difference is that I am in a cocoon, healing. After class, I watch them head off to rehearsals that I no longer have the privilege to participate in. They complain just as I did. They stress just as I stressed. But they also feel the happiness and satisfaction of having a purpose. Their goal is the final product onstage. My goal is to be able to call my dancing my own again. To execute steps proficiently enough to rehearse, let alone perform.

  So what keeps me going even now, when the path is so rough and uncertain? Hunger. Since childhood I have had an insatiable hunger for dance. I cannot control it. It controls me. And it has set me on a path dictated by one essential principle: never be afraid to go where your passion leads you.

  CHAPTER 2

  The drive that spurred me on was not forced into me. It was never someone else’s dream. I didn’t have stereotypical stage parents pushing me to work, insisting I take class, telling me I needed to make something of myself. It was my own dream and I was fortunate that, although my parents had never been involved in the arts, they came along wholeheartedly for the ride.

  * * *

  I GREW UP in a typical suburban h
ousehold. My mom and dad were hardworking Americans trying to create a harmonious home for me and my older brother, Brian. We lived first in the small town of Rapid City, South Dakota, where my parents owned three restaurants, all of which eventually closed. After that we moved to the suburbs of Minneapolis.

  My mother went back to nursing and worked her way up the corporate ladder to become CEO of a hospital. She is a born leader, democratic and fair.

  My dad had a number of professions: he was a clothing salesman, a food broker, a real estate agent, and finally the owner of a used appliance store. One thing I inherited from him was his visually creative sensibility, which you could witness throughout our houses. We lived in seven different ones over the course of my childhood. It wasn’t that we needed to move; my dad just got bored with spaces quickly and would seek out new renovation projects to tackle. Each of our homes was decorated with original taste and flair. My dad’s favorite hobby was to rearrange the furniture, and pieces would come in and out: couches, paintings, lamps, chairs, everything. It was a constant rotation to fit the mood of the month, coinciding with the changing color of paint on the walls, which went from eggplant to burgundy to azure to gold.

  On weekends he blasted loud music throughout the house, anything from Dire Straits to Beethoven. My mother loved it; my brother and I tolerated it.

  Brian and I were polar opposites from the starting line. Very close in age, we fought constantly. He had little tolerance for my annoyances, which made me enjoy them even more. I knew exactly how to make him explode. My favorite way was to sing a song. He would then ask me to stop. I’d hum a few more notes.

  He’d look at me contemptuously and say, “I asked you to stop singing.”

  “I had to finish my song,” I’d reply.

  When I had exhausted his patience he would punch me and I would cower away in tears. We each had our own ammunition. I would annoy. He would hit.

  * * *

  MINE WAS A true American childhood, at least for a while. In the first years of elementary school I went to classes, came home, did my homework, and played with friends in the backyard, riding my bike with a pack of other kids, building forts with them in the woods. Summer evenings were idyllic, long events when we would run all over the neighborhood until the escaping sun put an end to that day’s activities.

  All of that was changed one evening by a mysterious man gliding across our TV screen. His name was Fred Astaire. His talent and effortless charisma ignited a flashing spark within me. I stared at the screen, unsure of what he was doing but certain of its significance. I was mesmerized. I wanted to be him. Move the way he moved. He skimmed across the stage smoothly, calmly, effortlessly. It was so clear to me that that was what I wanted to do.

  Fred’s dancing was the birth of it all for me. He became an obsession. With that obsession came the vision of myself dancing. Jumping, turning, gliding across the floor. Dance is a force that has always been stronger than myself. Even when I was eight years old, that force pulled me into its world. I knew nothing about it but wanted to know everything. And from that moment of seeing Fred on the screen, dance has stayed with me every day of my life.

  * * *

  I BEGAN DANCING in my family’s basement in Minneapolis, in the long rectangular laundry room, which had a door that closed off the music and noise. I started alone: no class, no peers, just me on the cold concrete floor next to the washer and dryer and shelves of detergent and bleach, lightbulbs hanging over me.

  For tap shoes, I had my Sunday-school penny loafers, some duct tape, and a handful of nickels from my mom. I looped the duct tape around to make double-sided tape and stuck it to the bottoms of the shoes. I carefully lined up the nickels one by one, row by row, and affixed them to the soles and the heels. I had tap shoes.

  The nickels were heavier than pennies and made more noise, replicating (to my naive standard) the tapping sounds Fred’s shoes made on the TV. I paced back and forth, alone in the laundry room, making up the steps as I saw fit. No technique, no names for steps, just the joy of moving and the sound my feet made when I struck them on the concrete.

  As Halloween approached, I pulled together what was then my sartorial ideal: a bowler hat, a white shirt, and black pants. And my makeshift tap shoes. I was officially Fred, if only for a day.

  Dancing came to me naturally. Like eating or sleeping, it felt like second nature. It was simply a part of me. I answered its call because I had no other choice. Ignoring it wasn’t an option. The force was too great. I never imagined in those early days that dancing would become my profession. I didn’t even know that dancing was a profession. I just knew I had to do it.

  * * *

  WHEN CHRISTMAS ROLLED around, my parents got me a pair of proper tap shoes. It was by far the most exciting gift under the tree. Even better than the Nintendo that Brian and I had begged them for.

  Opening that rectangular package, seeing the red shoe box and, inside it, the black patent leather Capezios, was the official starting point. No more nickels on the bottoms of my penny loafers, but true sound, from true shoes. No more imitating Fred, but being Fred.

  My parents enrolled me in an after-school tap program. Once a week, a noncommittal forty-five minutes, just a class where I could express my desire to dance with like-minded kids.

  I could not have pursued that desire without my parents’ support. They had no idea where it would lead. They didn’t know if I had “talent.” All they wanted to do was show their love for their son and help him fulfill his desire to dance like Fred. From the very start, they were on board, never asking me if I wanted to play T-ball like the other boys. They took the road that parents often do not take. I hear frequently from young boys who have the exact passion I had when I was their age. They just have to move. They fall in love with dancing, with its beauty and athleticism and rigor. But their parents think a dancing boy does not fit society’s norm, the role of a normal boy. They don’t want their kid to endure the pains of teasing and being the outcast. They figure sports are the better option. The road more traveled.

  I understand the predicament parents face when their son wants to do something they know nothing about and no other boy in their neighborhood is doing. But kids’ natural inclinations are what they are. When I played sports I would make excuses to go to the bathroom in the middle of games, my disinterest showing in my lack of motivation. I knew these sports—soccer, baseball, basketball—weren’t for me. But dance was my outlet, my purpose, my joy. And my parents could see that in me. Which is exactly why they nurtured it.

  How lucky I was that my parents chose to help me pursue what made me blissfully happy. That it didn’t matter to them that my happiness started with putting on tap shoes and eventually led to ballet shoes and tights.

  * * *

  THE FIRST PERSON to teach me proper dancing technique was a tapper named Maxine Vashro. She was a spitfire, energetic and lively. Her class was held in the basement of the local community college. Maxine would demonstrate and we would follow: shuffle, ball change, flap (learning it sounds more like fa-lap, striking the floor twice). Then picking up the pace, flap ball change, shuffle ball change, flap heel, all in repetition. I remember the students going “across the floor” one by one, and seeing my reflection in the mirror as I made my way. I was not terribly focused at the beginning. I was still a kid who liked to hang with neighborhood friends, and at times I would call my mom at work to ask her if I “have to go to tap today.”

  Nevertheless, my interest grew into intense fascination. I would show people my tapping skills without apprehension or self-consciousness. When I was at the grocery store, I would tap down the long aisles, a perfect length of space to try newly invented moves. I was never ashamed of or embarrassed by what I wanted to do. I never felt I needed to hide it or lie to friends about what I was doing after school. It came so naturally to me that I naively assumed everyone had a similar desire and passion.

  My third-grade crush was a girl named Amanda. To express my
devoted affection I gave her a photo of myself dancing in the basement. It was maybe a tad unique to give my crush a picture of myself tapping away, arms swung to one side of my body, smiling at the camera. Unfortunately, my little present provoked a mildly horrified response from her and her friends.

  * * *

  I QUICKLY CAUGHT on that the boys in my class didn’t approve of my passion. But it was hard to understand why they wanted to pick on me. A couple of them would regularly chase me around the classroom and act as though they were going to do something far worse. I was never a kid who fought back, nor did my dad ever give me that traditional talk: “Stand up for yourself, boy. Come on, punch me! Let’s see what you got!”

  So when bullies approached me, I had no idea what to do. My instinctive reaction when facing danger is to run, and I did exactly that. It didn’t work. I suppose I could have just ignored them, but it’s different in the moment when you’re a little kid being taunted by your contemporaries. They seemed to get pleasure out of my inability to fight back.

  I just wanted to fit in. Like every kid, I wanted to be accepted by my peers. But there was a fundamental difference that made me a target. A weak target, at that. I was effeminate. I wasn’t wearing sparkly shoes and prancing around the classroom (which is perfectly acceptable)—I was just different. My best friends were girls. I could always hang out with them more easily than with boys. I had a constant flow of girl friends, so many that my fourth-grade teacher took me aside one day and said they were distracting me from my schoolwork. Other boys would be trying to gain attention from the girls, and I was seen as the effeminate roadblock to their desires. They didn’t want me in their way.