Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (25 page)

Peter stopped and looked at me for a second, and then, never changing facial expression, he went into a wild, spontaneous, fast-moving solo. I stood there watching him for a second and then started my own jiggling improv behind him, giggling uncontrollably. Finally, when it was apparently time for us to leave the stage, Peter mercifully danced around behind me, picked me up, and carried me offstage. Thank goodness he could think on his feet!

Dancers aren’t the only ones who blank; sometimes our musicians blank as well. At City Ballet, we’re privileged not only to dance to some of the most beautiful music ever composed but also to have some of the finest musicians play that music for us. These artists are dedicated to their craft and will spend hours practicing, obviously because they want to play the music beautifully but for another reason as well: they feel an intense responsibility to support the dancers by playing the music
consistently, precisely, and artistically. And the musicians are truly wonderful and rarely make mistakes that affect the dancers.

But every now and then, it happens, because nobody is perfect. During a performance of a Balanchine ballet called
Robert Schumann’s
“
Davidsbündlertänze
,” I was dancing a section with three other dancers. Peter Boal was once again my partner. The music is scored for a single piano, and the piano is placed right on the stage with the dancers. The music for this section is slow and contemplative and has many repeats built in. The pianist must have forgotten whether or not he had already played one of the repeats and was trying to make up for it, because he repeated one of the phrases a third time. This was extra music for the dancers, and we had no choreography for it. We all realized what was happening and looked into each other’s eyes, wondering who was going to take the lead. We all knew someone had to decide to do something, and no one wanted to be that person. Plus, two dancers could have decided to take control with different solutions, leading to a disaster that would have made the mistake obvious to the audience.

Thankfully, Peter Boal took the initiative, but I wasn’t happy with how he chose to fix the problem. He gallantly took my hand, gently turning me to face the audience, and gave me a gentle push forward toward center stage. Then he stepped back, gestured in a way that said, “Please, dance,” and looked at me. The other two dancers remained motionless, smiled, and waited for me to dance. So I danced. I’m not sure now what I did, but I managed to fill up the time until the familiar music came on again. Maybe this was Peter’s revenge for my blank during Twyla’s piece.

We have to be ready to catch whatever is thrown at us when we perform. I had a bit of a challenge once during a performance of Jerome Robbins’s
Dances at a Gathering
while we were on tour in Tokyo, Japan. The ballet is done by ten dancers, differentiated only by the soft shades of their costumes. I was dancing the part of the Mauve Girl, and the Green Boy was my primary partner in the piece. However, when I came to the stage level during the intermission before
Dances
to put on my
pointe shoes, I discovered Amar Ramasar in the Green Boy’s costume. Amar wasn’t the dancer I’d been scheduled to perform with in that performance, and Amar looked a little stressed out.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Your partner just pulled his calf and can’t do
Dances
. I was here anyway to do
Symphony in Three
,
so I’m doing
Dances
,” Amar replied.

Well, this was a surprise. But I wasn’t that worried about it. Yes,
Dances at a Gathering
is a difficult hour-long ballet, but I’d performed it for years, and Amar and I had danced it many times together. Amar was a great partner, and I knew we would be fine, even without any rehearsals. I told Amar that.

“I know this will be okay,” Amar said. “I’m just worried about doing
Symphony in Three
afterwards.”

I understood.
Dances
is a challenging piece, and to then turn around and do the pas de deux in Balanchine’s
Symphony in Three Movements
would be very hard. I knew now why Amar looked worried.

“Just take it one entrance at a time,” I suggested, and Amar nodded.

“Yes. I’ll get through it. I just want to do well in both.”

By the time I had my pointe shoes on, there were only a couple of minutes before the curtain went up.

“Should we try anything?” Amar asked.

“No, I really think we will be fine,” I said. “Let’s just dance and enjoy it.” Plus, I figured that if we did try some moves and they went badly, it would just make us nervous.

Amar agreed. He gave me a hug and a wink and said, “It’s going to be fun.”

He was great in the performance, and we had no problems except for the one musical surprise that happened during our mazurka pas de deux
.
This time, instead of having too much music, we had too little. The pianist mistakenly cut out one of the repeats in the music, and we were suddenly dancing the wrong steps to the wrong music. Amar and I kept doing the choreography in sequence, not sure how to pick up where the music was in a coordinated fashion.

Finally I heard something in the music that sounded like a good place for us to join in, and I turned around and said to Amar, “Flip me.”

After the fact, I realized that this was actually a cruel place for me to decide to pick up the choreography. The “flip” was one of the more difficult partnering moves; Amar had to pick me up, toss me into a half turn, and catch me in midair. There were many things I could have chosen that didn’t require split-second timing and coordination between the two dancers. And as I went into the preparation for the step, the thought occurred to me that because Amar and I hadn’t rehearsed this pas de deux
since the last time we had performed it over a year ago, there was a chance that this flip could go very badly.

Luckily Amar knew exactly what he was doing, and the flip went just fine, as if we had rehearsed it that afternoon. Caught up with the music, we continued with the pas de deux, trying to look as if nothing unusual had happened. The pianist felt terrible, but we assured her that all was fine and that everyone makes mistakes. And Amar went on to do a stellar
Symphony in Three Movements
; he was exhausted afterward, but what a story to tell.

—

P
erhaps one of the strangest performances I was a part of took place while I was on a gig in Verona, Italy. Nikolaj Hübbe, a Danish ballet star who had moved over to City Ballet, asked me to dance with him in a string of five performances for Carla Fracci’s company. It was a wonderful and thrilling opportunity, especially because it was a difficult period in my life personally; I was discouraged and in the early throes of my struggle with weight. Nikolaj had always been supportive of me and we had danced together often; I think he was trying to give me some inspiration and encouragement.

The pieces we were dancing were way out of my realm of experience. They were from the older, traditionally classical ballet world, not the neoclassical Balanchine world. The first ballet I was performing was the famous
Pas de Quatre
, choreographed in 1845 on the four greatest ballerinas of the time. It was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London
only four times by the original cast of ballerinas, who were each worshipped as stars and had tremendous egos; apparently it was a miracle that they all danced in the same ballet at the same time. The ballet is laden with history and needs to be danced subtly with proper romantic port de bras and demure grace. It is romantically classical and not the kind of modern ballet that dancers from New York City Ballet are trained to dance.

The other ballet Nikolaj and I were dancing was
Giselle
, another ballet I had no experience with, but at least here we were not doing the entire thing. Three other couples were splitting the pas de deux with us, so that each couple did a section in turn. Carla Fracci, one of the most famous ballerinas of her generation, and her partner danced the final section.

The whole experience was amazing for me. We arrived a week in advance so that we could rehearse with the other dancers. The costume shop there made brand-new costumes just for us. I had to learn how to fix my hair in the old-style bun where the hair drapes in front of the ears before sweeping to the back. The other dancers tried to help me attain the proper romantic style and classical body shapes for the ballets, and Nikolaj was supportive with his big laugh and passion for dance. And then there was Verona itself, home of Romeo and Juliet, with its pink streetlights glowing in the misty nights.

The performances were a thrill, and all went well until the last performance. Susan Jaffe, a beautiful principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, was one of the four ladies in
Pas de Quatre
along with Carla Fracci, a very young Lucia Lacarra, and me. Right before the performance, Susan hurt her calf. She wasn’t going to be able to dance full out, but she had gotten into costume and was ready to perform the piece in whatever limited way she could. We had no understudies.

However, because of the insurance policies of the theater, the stage manager would not allow Susan to perform injured. Suddenly,
Pas de Quatre
had become a pas de trois. Because of Susan’s part in the ballet, there were several times when she would dance while the rest of us
watched. Just before the curtain went up, she tried to teach Lucia one of those solo parts. And then, with but a brief warning, the curtain suddenly rose.

The three of us popped into the famous opening pose. We were supposed to be peacefully grouped around the center girl, who balanced
en pointe
, like petals of a flower. But I was so flustered that instead of hitting the position with a more romantic style, my body instinctively went into what it knew best: Balanchine style. I was meant to be peering under my arm poetically, but instead I arched my body back, face lifted proudly to the balconies. As I stood there, I realized my mistake and slowly tipped my body over into a more appropriate line. Right away in the first section, we came upon our first moment when Susan was supposed to dance by herself.

I settled gracefully to my knee, thinking that surely this was not going to be my problem. I was the least experienced in this ballet, so no one would expect me to take any initiative. They had already tried to teach Lucia some steps to another part, so perhaps she would take on the responsibility for all of Susan’s solos. Furthermore, Carla Fracci was the major star of the evening. If anyone should have extra featured dancing, it should be her, and I was not about to step up when it might offend the important ballerina.

But then, after we had all knelt onstage for a few counts of music with no one dancing, Carla turned those famous giant brown eyes on me, made a grand gesture that in ballet mime means “Get up,” and said to me, in a very low commanding voice, “
Move
.”

Well, I moved. I stood up immediately and started dancing around, racking my brain for the steps that I’d seen Susan do in previous performances. I knew there was a slow arabesque in there. The trick was to keep myself in the style of the piece and not go on autopilot and look as if a time machine had transplanted a Balanchine dancer into the 1800s. I’m not sure I succeeded, but my efforts seemed to satisfy Carla. During my little impromptu solo, I heard Nikolaj’s rumbling chuckle from the wings. He was loving this, especially because since he came from both
the classical tradition of the Royal Danish Ballet and the Balanchine style of New York City Ballet, he knew exactly how wrong I was getting it and the reasons why.

The piece progressed, and we made it through to the finale. I thought that the excitement was over, but then before my own entrance I realized there was yet another solo for Susan. A feeling of inevitability came over me even before those huge brown eyes swung in my direction again. I had no idea what Susan did at this point in the ballet; I was usually preparing for my own entrance and not paying that much attention to the other dancers’ steps.

What did ballerinas do in these romantic ballets when the music was fast? I only knew what Balanchine or Robbins would do. Didn’t those romantic sylphs run around on the tips of their toes a lot? I took a deep breath and plunged onto the stage. I ran
en pointe
from one side of the stage and back again, trying to look like a flitting fairy. I must have run around
en pointe
for about four measures of music. I heard Nikolaj’s laugh boom out from the wings. I was trying to look serene and joyful, but I had the feeling that I really just looked harried. Finally Susan’s music was over and my own was starting; I could start doing steps that I’d actually rehearsed. With relief I continued the finale as my own self, and the curtain came down.

After the applause was over and the curtain was down for the last time, Nikolaj burst from the wings, running on his tiptoes and laughing in imitation of me. He proceeded to reenact the whole ballet for all of us with great enthusiasm. Little did I know that Nikolaj would continue to relish retelling this story for the rest of the time he was in City Ballet. At least my frantic fish-out-of-water moments had brought him a great amount of lasting joy. And moments like these are what make live performances so exciting. You never know what might happen, bad or good.

I
n July 2000 my life was in a completely different place from where it had been two years before. I was now a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, and I was about to be married. My mother was horrified when I informed her that I wanted to be married in New York City. She didn’t think she could ever pull off a New York wedding, and our budget was very limited. But I’d become the person I was in New York City. It was where James and I had met and walked and loved, and no other place felt like home to me. So my mom gamely accepted the challenge, and the two of us started the planning ten months in advance.

James was named after his father, who was from Connecticut; his mother, Benita, was from Spain. His family was Catholic, and though we wanted to be married in a Protestant ceremony, it was important to James and his family that the Catholic Church recognize our marriage. We were able to find a Catholic priest from the church James had attended in the city who was willing to take part in our Protestant wedding, led by a pastor whom I’d known at All Angels’, the Reverend Jonathan King. The Catholic priest would be able to give the blessing of the Catholic Church to our marriage. Both priests wanted us to attend premarital counseling with them, and the Catholic Church required us to go to a group couples counseling seminar. Needless to say, we felt very well prepared by the time we got married.

We were married in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the largest Protestant cathedral in the world. We chose the cathedral as a nod to James’s Catholic family tradition and also because Reverend
King was on staff there. Since we wanted a smaller wedding, with just eighty guests, we decided to have the ceremony in the front choir section of the church, which made that huge space feel very intimate.

Looking back on it now, there are probably things I would change about the events before and after our wedding. But of the ceremony itself, I would change nothing. Little things certainly went wrong during the day: we thought at one point we had run out of wine during the reception, and our car never came to pick James and me up from the reception. But I didn’t care about any of it. I was so happy, I felt that nothing could ruin my day once it had finally arrived. I have the dearest memories of this time: my sister quickly marking my leg with a blue magic marker right before I was to walk down the aisle because I’d forgotten the “something blue”; my dad touching my arm as we walked down the aisle and murmuring, “Walk slower, honey”; the happy tears bright in my mother’s eyes; James’s face looking pale and serious and full of love as I walked toward him; the sniffles of my bridesmaids and beloved friends from the company, Elizabeth and Yvonne, as they sat behind us; watching my friends and family take communion, even those who were not churchgoers, out of a sense of honor and celebration; praying beside James for the first time as man and wife. At the reception, my sister, the matron of honor, played a Gershwin prelude on the piano for our first dance. I felt tremendous joy.

I also felt huge relief because, to my surprise, I was actually wearing a wedding dress. Though a wedding isn’t really about The Dress, sometimes it feels like it is, and just days before, it had looked like I might be a bride wearing a sequined prom dress.

I had chosen to wear the dress my mother wore at her own wedding, thirty-three years before. She had bought it off the rack for herself in the 1960s, and it was a beautiful long-sleeved, empire-waisted gown. My sister had worn it when she got married, and I knew I would feel special wearing the same dress my mother and sister had both gotten married in. The problem was, I also really wanted a strapless dress, and I casually thought that it would be easy to alter my mother’s dress.

My parents were living in Virginia at this time, and my mom found a seamstress who was willing to convert the dress into the style that I wanted. She seemed to know what she was doing. We had some fittings at Christmastime while I was in Virginia guesting as the Sugar Plum Fairy at a local school’s performances of
The Nutcracker.
However, when I returned to her shop in March during City Ballet’s spring layoff period, the fitting didn’t go so well.

I stepped into her dressing room, eager to see how I looked in the dress in which I was to be married. I slipped it over my ankles and moved it over my hips—where it stuck. It would not move. I tugged. Here we go again, I thought. But this time I knew it wasn’t my weight that was the problem; I was at my post-performance-season thinnest and it appeared that the seamstress had just made the dress too small. She promised me that she could fix it and that I didn’t need to be worried. I decided to trust her and put it out of my mind. The next time I would see my dress was a couple of days before the wedding, when my parents brought it to New York City with them.

July was a bit of a whirlwind for James and me because the first three weeks of the month were spent in Saratoga Springs performing with the company during their regular summer season there. We were to get married during our week off before the rehearsal period for our summer tour. My parents arrived in the city, and my mom and I ran around doing various last-minute errands for the wedding. My mom was still very nervous about being in charge of a New York City wedding and was driving me a little nutty with her anxiety about everything going perfectly. And since we were trying to save money, we were doing a lot of the small things ourselves. Finally on Wednesday night, three days before the big day, I excitedly tried on my wedding dress alone in my apartment. It was a disaster.

Not only was it still too small, but the seamstress had also created a strange asymmetrical line running down the back of the skirt in her attempt to correct her previous mistake. I was dumbfounded and had no idea what to do. The wedding was on Saturday.

Early the next morning, I placed a frantic call to the costume department of City Ballet and left them a message pleading for their help. Then I dashed off to the restaurant to attend my bridesmaid’s brunch. I told no one what was happening because I didn’t want the whole brunch to be about my dress. And I really didn’t want to tell my mother because she had so much on her mind and I knew it would upset her. But after all the girls had left I took my mom aside.

“Mom,” I said, holding her arm. “I have to tell you something. I tried on my dress last night, and it does not fit.”

I watched my mom’s face go slack and the blood drain away. I saw a look of dismay and pain in her eyes that clearly showed she wasn’t worried about the dress or the wedding, she was worried about
my
being disappointed. In that moment I realized that all of the anxiety she had expressed over the wedding was really her fear that I would not have the perfect day for myself.

“It’s going to work out,” I told her. “I’ll either buy a different dress or get this one fixed. Don’t you worry about it, because I’m not.”

I realized then that I really wasn’t worried about it. The wedding was more about marrying the man I loved and celebrating the support of my family and friends than having the perfect dress and the perfect food and the perfect music. My bridesmaids were wearing silver dresses, and I had a silver dress in my closet, left over from a City Ballet gala. I could just wear that if I had to, I thought.

Just in case, I walked home from the brunch and stopped in every dress shop along the way to look for a white dress. The only one I found was tight and mermaid-style and covered with sequins. I thought the silver dress in my closet would be better.

Just as I had given up my search, I got a call from Dottie and Norma, the wonderful ladies from City Ballet’s wardrobe department, and they told me to come right over with my dress. I rushed to the theater, and we assessed the situation. Dottie and Norma discovered that the seamstress from Virginia had actually cut material from the dress rather than folding it back as a seam, in case it had to be adjusted. She had
tried to cover up the mistake by pulling the material up and tilting the zipper off-center. Basically, it was a complete mess, and they really didn’t know if they could fix it.

Dottie and Norma looked at the dress, looked at me, and told me to go away and come back in the morning, and they would see what they could do.

I came back Friday morning, the day before our wedding. Dottie and Norma had performed a miracle. In a bin of discarded fabric they had found some white lacy material and inserted it into the back center of the dress to make a kick pleat. It was actually lovelier than before. I could hardly believe what a beautiful job they had done.

So I was married in my mother’s wedding dress after all, thanks to those amazing ladies from the costume department. They were accustomed to working last-minute miracles to make ballerinas look just right onstage; it shouldn’t have surprised me that they could work one more miracle to make me look just right on my wedding day. And my mother really was able to give me a wonderful New York City wedding!

—

J
ames and I enjoyed being married in the same way that any regular couple would; we made dinner together, went for walks in the park, went out to movies or Broadway plays, and took care of each other when we were sick. One real difference for our marriage, though, was that we also worked together, very closely. We were one of the few married couples in the ballet world, and we were partnered often in performances. For five years we danced together as a married couple, and James will forever be my favorite partner onstage.

In 2002, however, James began to think of retiring. He was thirty-two and had been offered a job with the American Guild of Musical Artists, the dancers’ union. He had always been an active member of the Dancer’s Committee at City Ballet and had caught the attention of Alan Gordon, the head of the union, who asked him to come and work full
time as the New York area dance executive. However, just before James was to tell Peter of his decision to stop dancing, Peter surprised James after a performance one night and promoted him to principal dancer. It seemed like a “God thing.” James felt that he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to be a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, so he ended up putting off Gordon’s invitation and dancing another three years.

Eventually, in 2005, James felt that it was truly time for him to retire. Male ballet dancers tend to retire in their midthirties because of the wear on their bodies; principal women tend to retire around age forty. His body was hurting, and he was weary of a dancer’s unpredictable schedule. Plus, he wanted to have a “real” job before we started trying to have a family, something we both hoped for. Since a dancer’s career ends so early, he wanted to feel like he had established himself in another job and could support our family before we began trying to get pregnant.

His last performance was in Saratoga Springs, where the company has its annual summer residency at the outdoor Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The new job hadn’t been finalized until the spring, so James didn’t give anyone very much notice of his retirement. The program for his last show happened to be perfect: he was already scheduled to dance principal roles in both Peter Martins’s
Barber Violin Concerto
and Balanchine’s
Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.
The second-movement Intermezzo section of
Brahms-Schoenberg
was a part that James and I had danced together for years, and it was very special to both of us. It is wildly romantic and requires a very strong man to do all the lifts, throws, and dips that the choreography requires. James and I were so coordinated together after years of dancing this movement that we were able to take many of the steps to the extreme. It was very satisfying for both of us and was a part that really showed off James’s skill as a partner.

Barber
was another ballet that James and I had danced many times
together, but only in guest performances outside the company. Unlike James, I had never been cast in this ballet at City Ballet because Peter felt that a taller ballerina should dance the role. James was cast to dance this last performance with Darci Kistler, but we made a special request to Peter that I be allowed to dance the pas de deux with James just this one time. Peter agreed amiably, and Darci as well, so we were allowed to dance both of these pas de deux that had become personally important to us for James’s last show.