Every Step You Take (14 page)

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SERVES 8

1½ cups very good brewed coffee, cooled

4 tablespoons rum

½ cup sugar

1 pound mascarpone cheese

2 teaspoons vanilla

24 ladyfingers

Very good dark chocolate

Unsweetened cocoa powder (for dusting on top)

Add the rum to the cooled coffee and set aside.

In a large bowl, with a handheld mixer, beat the sugar, mascarpone, and vanilla until creamy.

Place the ladyfingers on the bottom of a 3-quart dish and pour your spiked coffee over the ladyfingers. Spread your mascarpone mixture over the ladyfingers and shave a good amount of chocolate over the top of whole thing. Then dust with cocoa powder.

Chill in the fridge for at least two hours so everything gets settled.

See? Easy peasy!

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To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth, and it is yours for the taking.

—A
GNES DE
M
ILLE

M
y mother and I used to call each other whenever
Dancing with the Stars
was on during its first season. We would discuss the contestants and giggle and talk about everything and nothing at all. Recently I was sitting at home having dinner alone while I watched
So You Think You Can Dance?
and it made me miss her so much. What was even sadder was that I was brought to tears at least four times by the silly show. Even though it was not ballet, the passion I felt for the dancers as they performed was unimaginable.

I try to share my passion for dance with my students at the School of American Ballet. Dancing is not something that earns one millions, I tell them, and a dancer should never take advantage of or exploit his or her art. Whenever I see someone perform halfheartedly it makes me sad and embarrassed—imagine not having greater respect for the creative work you are representing, and for your audience, when every person in it has paid good money and put aside precious time, hoping to experience the transformative power of art.

Dancing is something that takes pure dedication and an unshakable belief in what you are doing—if you do not believe the story you are dancing, there is no way your audience is going to believe it. Achieving this takes so much more than you might think. As a dancer, every step you take must mean something. There can be no neutral gestures and no empty moments. When a dancer performs, he or she must do his or her best to bring beauty and intelligence and meaning to every moment in time. Every performance offers the possibility of new stories with new meanings, and as a dancer you can never exhaust these possibilities—you can always do something differently.

The infinite creative potential of dance has always thrilled me, and from a very early age the place where music and movement intersect has seemed a nearly mappable territory to me—a magical junction that offers precise and reliable entry to a separate realm where I can act with confidence and freedom. I discovered my first “dance doorway” to another realm when I was a toddler performing the hoop dance with my mother, and I have been searching for and exploring similar access points ever since. But in the days when I was a teenage rookie with the NYCB, I was using dance for more than artistic expression—I was using it as an emergency-escape route from the messy turmoil of my teenage insecurities and confusion. I leaped into the worlds that the marriage of music and movement created as a refuge from real life. Exploring the endless possibilities within a scripted ballet filled me with a heady sense of freedom and competence, and when a passage went well I could sense myself brushing up against something profound and mysterious and spiritual that was otherwise inaccessible to me. It was a thrilling, almost religious, sensation, and addictive in its own way.

I knew that there were other dancers who were technically better than I and physically more perfectly aligned. But I was a very natural dancer—things came easily and quickly to me, and when I danced well all the confidence I lacked in everyday life would come rushing through me with an explosive physical sensation that I can only compare to what I imagine flowers must feel when they bloom. I was ready to try anything anyone asked of me and I was willing to put in as many hours as necessary to get it right. After a while my intensity and focus paid off, and I was thrilled when, even as a first-year member of the corps, I began to get cast in a few solo and even lead roles.

Some of these early first roles—such as the pas de trois in Peter Martins's new ballet
Capriccio Italien
and another pas de trois in Jacques d'Amboise's
Irish Fantasy
—came to me through the normal casting process, and I was able to hone my performance through the standard method of countless rehearsals. Other opportunities came to me as the result of the double-edged nature of one of the ballet world's most dread demons: injury. Injury is a constant threat to all dancers, of course—but an injury to an established principal can turn into a lucky break for some lesser mortal who then gets to dance a role he would never otherwise have been cast in. Although these out-of-the-blue “lucky breaks” could be thrilling if they came your way, they were almost always extremely challenging and stressful, too. One of the most painful memories of my entire career came during my first year with the company, when Balanchine chose me as the last-minute emergency substitute to dance the “Gigue” solo in his ballet
Mozartiana
, after both Victor Castelli and Christopher d'Amboise were injured. When Rosemary Dunleavy explained to me that I had to learn the solo that afternoon and perform it that night, I just gulped. I was terrified, but I kept quiet and did as I was told, trying my best to tap into my talent for absorbing the steps in a few short hours.

When the moment of truth came that night, I ran out onstage in my costume and stood there, a little boy with long hair, smiling out at the audience—and then I completely blanked. I freaked out. I didn't know where I was or what I was doing. The conductor looked at me expectantly, and began. But I didn't move. I was completely alone onstage for the first time in my life, staring back at six thousand eyeballs. I felt like I was in a football stadium with everybody waiting for me to sing the national anthem. When the music kept going, I finally started kind of wiggling and hopping—and eventually I made my way to some semblance of what I had learned that afternoon. I was supposed to head offstage very slowly when I finally finished, turning and bowing to four ballerinas who had just made their entrance. It was so incredibly painful, and the moment I was finally offstage, I ran into the hallway and collapsed in a heap, convulsed with sobs and hyperventilating. Everyone around me kept telling me not to worry, nobody noticed, nobody noticed. But I knew this was not possible. And I felt completely humiliated. So much for what Kisselgoff had called my “magnificent stage presence.” (If I ever want to really punish myself, I could probably go to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and dig up a film of that awful moment—and of many others as well. So far I haven't wanted to.) I went on to dance the “Gigue” solo of
Mozartiana
successfully many times in my career after that disastrous first attempt, but for dancers it is always the failures that come back again and again, in vivid Kodachrome detail.

Another unexpected challenge during that first year came when the company started rehearsals for Balanchine's holiday favorite,
The Nutcracker
. For my first “
Nuts
,” as everyone in the company called the famous ballet, I was cast in the corps of the Spanish dance section called “Hot Chocolate,” as a parent in the party scene, as a mouse in the fight scene—and as Mother Ginger. Mother Ginger may be a highlight for the children in the audience and for the other children who are dancing, but I have to say, the role is not a highlight for the boy who has to don the makeup and red wig and bonnet that make you look like a white Aunt Jemima on steroids, and then climb into a huge dress and walk onstage on stilts in drag. By the way—there is a big tambourine attached to the dress and you must carry a giant mirror and powder puff too. If you are not already humiliated enough, you soon will be as all of your colleagues begin either to snicker or give you that sad puppy-dog, wrinkled-eyebrow face. I remember thinking, “Boy, is this what I worked so hard for, to be a twelve-foot-tall drag queen?” But then I began to get into the role. By my fifth or sixth performance I had everyone in the wings cracking up so much I thought I might get myself fired.

Fortunately, I was given an opportunity to prove myself in a more serious role that winter season when Darci Kistler and I danced the leads in the company premiere of
Magic Flute
, the ballet Peter had choreographed on me and Katrina Killian for the school the previous year. I had been a last-minute (as in, day of the performance) choice to dance this same ballet with Darci for the annual gala performance only a few weeks earlier, after both Ib Andersen and Helgi Tomasson were injured—but shortly after I was chosen, Balanchine realized that at a major fund-raiser the audience members expected to see major stars. In a decision that was a big disappointment to me and a shock to Peter Martins, Balanchine changed his mind and informed Peter that he would have to dance his own ballet that night. “But I don't know it!” Peter had objected. “Well, dear, learn it,” Balanchine had answered. “Do something, dear—make something up.” That afternoon, instead of rehearsing to dance
Magic Flute
myself that evening, I helped Peter learn his own ballet. “You will get your ballet—don't worry,” Peter had reassured me, and I was thrilled when he made good on his word and cast Darci and me for the company premiere of
Magic Flute
.

Afterward, Jennifer Dunning of the
New York Times
had nice things to say about the ballet and about me: “Mr. Soto, making his company debut as Luke on Saturday opposite a daredevil Darci Kistler, turned in a dream of a performance—all clear, easy classical line, beautifully finished multiple turns and an attack that had all the mingled buoyancy and gravity of youth. Still a teenager, Mr. Soto has impressive technical gifts. What is most remarkable, however, is that he never seems to push or strain for it, and dances with an unfailing sense of character. At times his manner was touchingly reminiscent of Mr. Martins.”

Ms. Dunning was certainly right about one thing at least—I was enthralled with Peter, as a dancer, as a teacher, as a choreographer, and as a mentor in life in general. I was learning so much so quickly under his watchful eye, and it was thrilling to have a front-row seat as he explored and developed his own talents as a choreographer. Peter was a beautiful dancer, classically trained in Denmark in both ballet and pantomime, and his comments on even the simplest details—such as how one cupped one's hands over one's heart to express love—were revelatory to me. Peter also had (and has) an incredible musicality—meaning, he is blessed with a visceral and natural understanding of music, even in the most complex of scores—that helped me find and trust a certain native musicality in myself. I remember a story Peter once told me about an exchange he had with Balanchine when Balanchine was pressing him to choreograph a complicated passage of Stravinsky. Peter was unsure of himself and felt he lacked the musical sophistication that Balanchine, as an accomplished pianist and reader of music, could bring to the choreography for such a score. When he expressed his doubts to Balanchine, Mr. B replied, “Dear, you see—I can't trust my ears. I only trust my eyes—I have to look at the score. You are lucky—you just listen.” At sixteen I did not have the training or the sophistication of a Peter Martins, and I would never have his classic tall, lean ballet physique. But I did share some measure of his natural musicality, and it gave the two of us a special shorthand form of communication when we worked together.

I was excited to feel this special relationship developing between Peter and me—he understood what I could do and he knew how to get me to do it. I understood what he wanted and sometimes even seemed to help him advance his vision further than he had expected. But despite this growing rapport, I was stunned when later that spring Peter called me into his office to tell me he had decided to choreograph a new ballet,
Concerto for Two Solo Pianos
, on Heather Watts and Ib Andersen and me. Ib Andersen was an established principal dancer and Heather was a star ballerina, both of them already dancing everything when I came to the company, and both of them my idols for some time. Heather's powerful and edgy presence onstage followed her into her private life—she had an aura that a dance critic once compared to “a dry martini,” and a reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker. The rumor was that when she was at SAB the school had been on the verge of throwing her out because they couldn't handle her (she was always chewing gum or rebelling in some way) until Balanchine intervened and offered to take charge of her himself. He brought her into the company class, where he could keep an eye on her, and then he brought her into the company.

Heather and Peter had been romantically entwined for some time, in a high-voltage relationship that seemed always to be in its stormy season, and in 1978 Peter premiered his first ballet for the company,
Calcium Light Night
, with Heather and Daniel Duell as the leads. Peter's choreography in this ballet was startling—fresh and sharp edged and different, yet still within the Balanchine aesthetic—and Heather was stunning: a skinny, beautiful ballerina with long, long legs and gorgeous feet doing things that nobody had seen before.
Calcium
became a huge success, and the first time I saw it I was amazed. I had allowed myself a private and far-fetched fantasy that someday I might dance this ballet with Heather. As a result I was more than a little excited when Peter chose me to work on his new ballet with Heather—but I was also terrified. I had worked with Peter as a choreographer in the school, but this ballet was being made for Balanchine's company, with plans for a premiere at a special Stravinsky Festival that June. Three thousand people would see the premiere. I had just turned seventeen.