17. HOPPING
We have just been onstage for six minutes and fifty-two seconds, from the second movement straight into the third without an exit. This is an incredibly long entrance for any dancer in any ballet, and the final minute, when we are already tired, is the most physically strenuous of all. While ballet dancers are certainly the ultimate athletes, we are sprinters, not long-distance runners. (This brief “spurt” of energy quality is one of the reasons so many dancers over the years have been able to smoke and yet can still dance—though during my years at NYCB there was no smoking that I saw; a former smoker, Balanchine did not approve.) After a six-second respite—yes, only six seconds—we charge, full force, back onstage, joining three other groups of four that have spun onstage to make us sixteen once again.
Following this controlled mayhem, we align ourselves in four rows across, each four dancers deep, and do the first series of “hops.” Though we hop in opposite directions: the two rows on stage right hop in arabesque away from center toward the right wing, while the two rows on stage left do the same toward the left, parting into two groups and emptying the whole center of the stage. Creating a vacuum. It was at this very moment in the ballet that I executed the worst onstage faux pas of my entire career.
It is one thing for a dancer to slip and fall, for her headpiece to come loose, or for a seam in her costume to rip. But to actually do the wrong choreography is something else again: rather than a chance mishap, it is a kind of moral failing, especially if it’s the choreography of George Balanchine that you bungle.
When I was asked to join the company after a year of being an apprentice, I was immediately assigned to be an understudy for one of the four Russian Girls—an exciting honor for a new recruit. The transition from lead dancer in the School to bottom-of-the-totem-pole in the company was abrupt. Occasionally the brief, but intense, attention on the “new” girl translated in Balanchine’s world into immediate recognition within the company, evident in casting. A few of us—very few—would then commence an inexorable climb to the top, while most of us stayed in the corps de ballet: top dancers all, but without ascending to that higher plane where ballerinas reigned.
Along with learning a Russian Girl, I was soon also called to rehearsals to learn several roles in Jerome Robbins’s ballets, danced by Patricia McBride and Gelsey Kirkland, who had recently left the company (I was in the petite, quick, good-jump category like them): Scherzo Fantastique, Dances at a Gathering, and Goldberg Variations. Elation and panic in equal measure. The powers that be—in this case Robbins, a company balletmaster alongside Balanchine—were always testing out newcomers. In the end, I never danced any of these principal roles that I learned, and within a few months I was no longer even called to their rehearsals. I never knew what had happened but could only conclude that somehow I had not been up to snuff. I never asked anyone why, being too timid among the greatness all about me—likely the problem itself. Though I, like many of us at NYCB at that time, certainly did not feel that Robbins was top-notch: he was a second-, if not third-rate, artist—and man—beside Balanchine, and unlike the world at large, we all knew it. He got no special attention in a crowded theater elevator, while the waters parted if the door opened and Mr. B stepped in. But Robbins was also less approachable than Mr. B, known for his temper and vicious outbursts at dancers. I kept away. Meanwhile, I was learning and dancing in about twenty Balanchine ballets, so onward was the call.
But I remained an understudy for Serenade—this was Balanchine casting, not Robbins—and spent the rehearsals for the next months in the back of the studio alone, learning the role of the specific Russian Girl I was told to watch. However, I never danced the role with the whole cast, much less in a performance.
Then, as was a not-infrequent occurrence, the Russian Girl I understudied hurt herself midafternoon one day and suddenly I was “on.” A hastily tossed together rehearsal was called for me onstage after regular rehearsal hours at 6:00 p.m. Show at 8:00. Per usual in an emergency rehearsal, not everyone in the ballet showed up, and certainly not any of the three lead dancers. Since it is a run-through with only one purpose—to put in the new girl—many arrive in robes and soft toe shoes, hair down, and simply mark the dance by walking it and indicating the steps by waving their arms and hands about: everyone is tired after an already long day.
This single, straight run-through of the whole ballet was the first time I actually danced the role with everyone else. Whoa! This was an entirely different experience from just practicing the steps in the back of the studio by yourself. It felt like an onslaught at Grand Central with the after-work crowd rushing to the same train about to leave the station, all aiming for different compartments. The thirty minutes was focused not at all on actual choreography, the steps—I was supposed to know all that by now, and I did—but entirely on placement on the stage, so no actual collisions would happen during the endless entrances, exits, running, crisscrossing, and weaving. And hops.
After the run-through, a quick costume fitting—I would need to wear the costume of the girl I was replacing, and any last-minute adjustments, like shortening the shoulder straps, would be made immediately by the ever-on-hand costume ladies. Back at my dressing room cubby, I down three bites of tuna fish and a few more of my breakfast corn muffin, brush my teeth, take a quick shower after a whole day in the theater rehearsing, sweating. Then whip my hair up into a tight bun, put on my lashes, pancake makeup, blush under the cheekbones, and pale pink lipstick. Finally, a long search, sitting on the linoleum floor in front of my theater case, for the right pair of toe shoes—hard enough boxes for a lot of difficult dancing on pointe, but soft enough to not make a sound onstage, the ever-precarious balance. At 7:00 p.m., a twenty-minute warm-up at the barre in the little fifth-floor studio in three layers of leg warmers, then down to the stage-level greenroom at 7:45 p.m. to get cinched into the beautiful costume.
We drop our robes over the backs of various chairs, emerging in our pink tights—and occasionally pink tunic pants, if the costume’s crotch is just thin netting, as it was with most tutus. We then find our costume on the rack, hanging in alphabetical order—our last name written on the inside waistband label reading “Karinska.” I look for the name of the girl I am replacing. Stepping carefully with pointed feet into the two leg holes, we pull up the front and put our arms through the thin elastic straps, usually pink or beige, designed to disappear onstage. We wait our turn for one of two or three greenroom ladies to hook up the back of the bodice as we hold both arms up to the sides, clearing the way for their job. There are as many as thirty hooks on the outside, along with some larger, strategic ones inside to keep the waistband anchored in its place despite the endless movement that threatens to raise it. Mme Pourmel, a short, immaculate Russian woman, a tight, gray bun at her neck, is boss here, sweet like a grandmother but totally vigilant about our costume etiquette.
These Russian ladies peopled Balanchine’s world, our world, from our teachers at the School to the costume shop. If Mme Pourmel, or any of her staff, caught you with your hands on your hips in your costume, they were quickly tapped down—she was like a beloved but strict Mother Superior: Karinska’s costumes were expensive, handmade works of art that had to endure huge amounts of wear, tear, and sweat onstage, so backstage fingerprints from touching rosin or smoothing our hairsprayed hair were forbidden.
After retying my toe shoe ribbons several times for exactly the right tension—tight enough for total support but not so tight that one’s ankle is strangled and goes numb—and sewing in the ends with a few quick stitches, I move on to the rosin box ritual: rosin on the heels of my tights, inside the toe shoe heel, and then all over the bottom and front tips. Onstage at 7:55 p.m. to practice a few pirouettes and do my own run-through of the thirty-three-minute ballet in the ten minutes before the curtain would rise: a last Hail Mary. We can hear the orchestra tuning up and some general rustling of coats and programs and chatter as the audience files in and takes their places on the other side of the enormous brocade gold curtain. Perry calls, “Places, please!” and I take my place all the way downstage left, in front, no one in front of me to follow should my memory falter. The orchestra begins, the audience is silent, the strings of the violins cut the air. Final toe shoe ribbon check, feet in tight parallel, right arm lifted, palm out, fingers separated and soft. The curtain rises. My God, it is exciting. Absolutely terrifying. But I look calm.
All had gone well until now—I’d made it through half the ballet with no mishaps—until these hops. I was one of four girls in the front row, splitting center. But now, as the sea of sixteen clouds of tulle parted, moving toward opposite wings, my posse hopped away from me, while I distinguished myself by hopping, big and proud, right at the front of the stage, in the direction of the group that was not mine. I recognized instantly—mid–first hop—my colossal blunder, but it was too late. I was center stage, alone. All alone. All wrong. Mortified. I might as well have been standing in court, all eyes on me, just convicted of a gruesome crime. Unlike most small choreographic mistakes, which much of the audience might well miss among the masses of moving dancers, I was, at this very moment, the only dancer on center stage, like a character in a Saturday Night Live skit of ballet bloopers. But this was no comedy. This was Balanchine and Tschaikovsky, our immortals, and I was AWOL.
Explaining the feeling of realizing what one has done at such a moment is like trying to describe the silent scream in a dream that, if heard, would prevent otherwise sure death. I died, but worse, I was still alive, hopping away in a void of humiliation. My group hopped back in toward me, and I rejoined the proceedings for the remainder of the ballet without further trouble. But everyone knew what I had done: the ballet mistress, the conductor, and 2,800 people in the audience. And, I found out when the ballet was over, someone else had been watching in the wings, awaiting his lead role in the last ballet of the night, Cortège Hongrois.
This illegally attractive Dane had recently been imported by Balanchine, as he had imported others from the Royal Danish Ballet, to shore up the always thin ranks of lead male dancers. Of all the great classical schools—including English, French, Italian, and Russian—it was the Danish Bournonville training that Balanchine liked best, the meticulous, fast, precise footwork, and regal yet subdued attitude most suited as a base for his own training and aesthetic. This dancer, however, was not cut from the same cloth as his fellow recruits. Both physically and egoistically, this one derived from the superstar, powerhouse model of the two great Russian defectors—Nureyev and Baryshnikov. He was dripping with animal charisma, sex appeal, serious muscles, and gasp-inducing jumps and turns that begged for applause mid-solo: the kind of thing Balanchine abhorred. Predictably perhaps, his tenure in Balanchine’s world was short-lived. But not before he cut a small, but notable, path of conquest, and I, for reasons still unclear, was one who landed on his path.
Barely holding back hysterical tears once the curtain came down on Serenade (those came once I reached the relative privacy of a bathroom stall), I was gathering up my leg warmers at the backstage bench, and this man, whom I had never spoken to, came up, his navy terry-cloth backstage robe hanging open over his warm-up garb, and asked me to dinner after the performance. I was thunderstruck. I was a virgin who had been kissed just once—the vigor of it had frightened me—and he was known for his vigorous womanizing. Dinner? How insane. I said yes. Of course. Not only had I just messed up onstage in a royal manner and he had seen it; I was simply not, in my view, one of the most attractive girls in a company of stunners. But his blue eyes trapped me, and the curiosity that compels love ignited in a flash. I called him the Duke in my journal.
I have since always associated my great onstage gaffe—tellingly, a directional error—with the loss of my virginity. Now, this did not happen for three more months, during which time he took me to dinner regularly, and put me on the bus home, where I still lived with my parents on the East Side, without so much as ever touching me. But then one night he said, “You know I would be happy to just keep having dinner with you like this, but I don’t think it will stay this way.” Was he alluding to the unthinkable, what I only knew from books, from Anaïs Nin and D. H. Lawrence? After a short negotiation, over yet another post-performance dinner, I stated my terms. Being realistic and yet prideful—and knowing an adventure was imminent—I had a single requirement, as I detailed in my journal: I needed to know that he did not already know who the girl would be after me. (I was, perhaps naively, assuming there wasn’t one already running alongside me.) This amused him greatly and produced the predictable response. He blew out the two tealight candles that were on the restaurant table and, when the melted wax had hardened after a few minutes, pocketed them. I knew why later when they were relit. Once his apartment door was closed, he touched me for the first time. Then kissed me, and everything, everything, happened, and those few hours changed my life forever. And I knew that they had. I noted in my diary that I had “not known that rational human beings could lose all reason in thirty seconds.”
This grand, operatic introduction—he had the audacity to play Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus for my debut, melodious, gladiator-sized music with one crescendo after another between occasional adagios of alluring sweetness—into the erotic realm, where two bodies and two minds crash into each other, producing a third state, showed me the only other theater, besides Balanchine’s, in which I wanted to reside. Both these places were—still are—“real life” to me, the quotidian merely a necessity. This unprecedented power captured me whole. He was the second great astonishment of my life.
While it has been said that the “high” art of Balanchine and the “lower” activity of the sexual self are opposites, to me they are so deeply connected as to emanate from the same source. Balanchine’s work portrayed, in endless forms, the erotic and spiritual plastically melded into public art, while the erotic does the same, only privately.
I will never forget walking near Lincoln Center with this man and seeing Mr. B on the other side of the street. It was known that Balanchine didn’t like this particular dancer sexually cycling through the ranks of young women. Three months later Balanchine fired him—he stopped being cast—after he insisted on accepting guest appearances with another company without NYCB management’s approval. He returned to Europe for a long and successful career—and never came back. So that is how it ended for me with him. But if he hadn’t emigrated, he would shortly have just moved on to that next pretty girl. I knew it was doomed from the start—which didn’t stop me from airmailing him, for two years, boxes of my homemade almond crescents addressed to various opera-house stage doors around Europe where he was performing. Insistent young love. I never heard a word.
I have always wondered if it was my onstage blooper in Serenade that night that made him notice me, ask me to dinner, and then become my first great love, introducing me to romantic suffering within hours of deflowering me. He showed me in a single night a place of profound, ever-ongoing mystery—which, until then, was a purely literary affair for me—thus igniting my lifelong fascination and exploration of the uncertain science of desire. I see now that my first calamitous Serenade; my first date; my first man; my first love; my first amorous grief are now, however arbitrarily—but so goes love—intimately linked. Serenade, for me, is strangely inseparable (or perhaps not so strangely) from this other corporeal awakening. I will never know if it had not been this particular man—one of outsized magnetism—and the magnificent theatrical drama that was sex for him, but some other, more ordinary, fumbling young lover as equally inexperienced as myself, whether this enduring passion would have emerged in me. I wonder. He showed me not an act but a world. And broke my heart so as to remake me.
Minute 17:56.