KRISTIN LONG
When I was really little I danced around like a nut. I was probably a lot like Kai in that way. We used to go to country-western concerts. We’d sit in the front row, and I would never be in my seat. I’d be standing up and totally getting down.
My mom was a housewife. My dad worked for the family bus company. I wonder how I got this far in the arts, because they had nothing to do with the arts. We didn’t even listen to music that much. We listened to music like every other family, but it wasn’t a big part of our lives.
My mom and dad enrolled my older sister and me in gymnastics. My dad was very athletic; I’m sure he wanted us to do something athletic. They decided to enroll us in ballet, just to check it out. So I did gymnastics and ballet, and went back and forth. After a year, that was it: no more gymnastics. I wanted to do only ballet. I was eight. It was weird that there was a good ballet school in Altoona, Pennsylvania. I probably became the first dancer who ever made it from that school, professionally. I was just obsessed.
My older sister quit ballet about a year after she started. She just didn’t like it; she essentially became your normal teenager. I was never your normal teenager. I went to ballet immediately after school, and I was there from 4:00 to 9:00 p.m.
By thirteen I would go away every summer to study. The School of American Ballet was very hard to get into; I got in one summer and I hated it. It was all about how you looked rather than how you danced. Down to “Your head’s too big for your body.” It didn’t make you feel like you wanted to dance. It was all about if you were skinny enough, if you had arched feet, the whole thing. If I’d grown up in New York, where they were concentrating on your head size, I might have quit. I was never your beanpole little girl. Growing up in a small town and not knowing how scrutinized you could be in this profession pushed me to keep doing it, to keep loving it.
I came out here to San Francisco when I was fifteen to study with the San Francisco Ballet. I had a great time, and I loved it, and then I got a full scholarship for the year. My parents knew from my ballet teacher that if I was going to pursue ballet, I needed to do these sorts of things.
It happened perfectly. I couldn’t ask for anything more, because I got here, and Helgi [Tomasson] really, really liked me, right away. He saw me in our student demo, which happened in May, then I started working with the company. A dancer got injured before they were going on a tour to the Kennedy Center, and so they took me. Then they were going to Hawaii, and someone else got injured, and I essentially did a soloist part. Helgi had faith in me. He liked the fact that I was gutsy and I seemed so natural.
When I was about twenty I went through a really hard time because I suddenly realized: Oh, my God—this is all I’ve ever done all my life, and I don’t have another life. When I was going through that period, it was bizarre to me that the only place I really felt comfortable with myself was onstage. Outside of that I didn’t know who the hell I was. I didn’t have Kristin without the ballet. That was really scary. It was a horrible time for me.
By the time I was twenty-three, I thought, You know what? I don’t love to dance. I was dancing only to be thin. I’d go to aerobics class before ballet, at six o’clock in the morning. So I took a leave of absence. I said to Helgi, “I don’t want to dance. I’m not happy dancing. I need to be happy. I need to figure this out.” That’s when I got to know that Kristin could be someone other than a ballet dancer. I didn’t need to be so overly obsessed with dancing, because it brought me down. Balance was good. And then it was thrown in my face when I had Kai, because I had to have balance. Had I not had Kai, I might still be obsessive.
I’d just come back from my leave of absence in 1995 when I broke my foot. I was living in San Francisco, and Michael was living in New York. We were engaged. I went to New York for the holidays. A month later: pregnant. Total surprise. I thought, “This is not the greatest timing to have a baby,” but I still wasn’t sure I wanted to continue with my career. I was struggling, sort of burnt out. So we decided to have the baby.
There was a part of me that wanted to stay in New York, where Michael was selling stocks on Wall Street. I’d take care of the baby, we’d stay there for two years, and I’d slowly get back in shape and figure out what I wanted to do, dancewise. I really wasn’t sure I wanted to come back to San Francisco. That was the plan until a month before I had the baby, when Michael said, “I am so unhappy. I can’t work on Wall Street. I’ll be a terrible father.” It was wearing him out physically. At that point I hadn’t danced for half a year, so I was really ready to go back, and I said, “Yeah, let’s give it a shot.” I had missed it a lot.
Three weeks after I gave birth, I started taking class. I had the mornings with Kai, then I would drop him with a different person every day—Michael’s friends and mine. My little sister also was living in New York. It was getting to be winter, and there Kai was in his little snowsuit on the subway. I could drop him anywhere, and he was fine. He was the easiest kid.
I loved the teacher. He had his own little modern company in New York but taught a ballet class. It was all modern dancers. Not one single classical ballet dancer—so healthy for me. All Mark Morris type of dancers. Totally cool, accepting of their bodies, and here I was trying to get back into shape. The body-issue thing was hard for me, but I never felt pressured. The weight came off easily. I don’t think I would have had the confidence that I have if I’d been here doing it, in my environment around all the ballet dancers. I needed to be away.
We came back to San Francisco when Kai was four months old. I felt things would be different because I had Kai. It inspired me. I think with anything in life, if you’re really excited about it or really driven, it comes. I would advise everyone to take a leave of absence, although every director would kill me. I would say, “Go for it, take a year.” Dancers freak if they’re out for four months; they think they’ll never be able to dance the same again, but I’m dancing better than I ever have. And I think it’s because I took that break. I took yoga, I read a lot, I hung out in New York. I needed to do that. Then I had the baby, and Kai is amazing. He added so much to my life.
I was surprised how easy it was to get back. I wasn’t working six-hour days like I am now. It was a nice schedule. I’d work for a few hours, and then I’d come home and be with my baby. I’d get to see him, I’d get to hang out. What could be better?
A lot of that had to do with Michael being so incredible. He had the time to be with Kai, and he loved it. So I had the freedom to do what I needed to—and the biggest thing: I never had to worry when he was sick. Michael worried more for everyone. I never felt that way. And Michael brought Kai to see me dance, which made me happier than anything in the world. Just knowing they were out there.
I find it harder to be a mom now that Kai is five. When he was six months old, I could be rolling and stretching on the floor and still doing something with him. Now I have to go home and play basketball, play soccer. I work hard to find activities with him that aren’t physical. I don’t want to go home and say, “Mommy’s too tired,” but I played baseball with him one weekend, and I totally wrecked my arm. I was swinging so hard. Every muscle in my body hurts from dance, and I can’t afford to get injured. So I am really creative. He’ll cook with me now. We do art projects, and we read, and I’ll throw the baseball to him.
Kai has gotten so much from watching me dance, seeing me do something that I love to do, which I think is so important. Also, hearing classical music all the time, being around the orchestra, he’s developed relationships with all the orchestra members. And he dances around like a nut. He definitely has it in his blood. He’s literally putting his ballet shoes on after dinner, but when I ask, “Do you want to take ballet class?” he says, “No.” I say, “So why do you dance so much?” “Because I love it.”
I always felt free on the stage. Hannah makes me watch—“Mommy, Swan Lake! I want to see again!” So we sit and watch it, and when I watch it, I really miss that feeling—despite the nerves beforehand—of just getting there, that moment of being onstage and feeling the audience with you. Portraying a role and getting really involved in that.
I was always about expression. If there’s anything that came most naturally to me, it was that. Maybe through the later years that shifted, which was a sad thing for me, because I lost sight of that a little bit. And I was technically fine, too. I never had the perfect body.
It wasn’t until after I had Kai that [Helgi] suddenly said, “You look different, you look better.” I had cheekbones, and what had been breasts that were higher up dropped down, which is, of course, what they want a ballerina to look like. I guess that had stopped me, in his mind, from making me a soloist or principal. Because I had done so much soloist work and principal work as a soloist but never got the title. And then when that shifted, I got promoted. And of course, in your mind you always think, Oh, everything goes better when I’m thinner. It’s such a strange mentality, isn’t it? Martin will say, “Will you stop talking about yourself in that way—you’re being ridiculous.” He can’t stand it. But any other ballerina—same thing, the way they talk about themselves.
There’s something wrong with the way, in dance, they can just up and one day say, “You know, I don’t like the color of your hair. You were fabulous, and I don’t like the color of your hair.” I used to say to Helgi, “I get that I’m not there for you anymore at the top. And I get that you need to push these younger ones or that you have new dancers coming over from Europe.” But there’s a certain respect that I deserve, and I’d say, “I’ll let go of this. But can we make sure I’m dancing something worthwhile?” Because it became, after a while, nothing worthwhile.
My situation there was that he loved me, and it was great even after I had Kai—I got promoted, really did well. Truthfully, some of it started going downhill around the time of the separation [from Michael]. Then, suddenly, I was having some personal issues, and then I had to fight, fight, fight…and I never really got back after that. I felt that I didn’t have anything to lose. I was going to go in there and just say how I felt, because I’d really done everything I wanted to do with dance, and I just wanted to end it on a great note. It didn’t work at all.
Could I have just stuck it out? Could I have pushed through? It could have been that I didn’t have the temperament for that side of it. It came so naturally to me that I didn’t have that part of my personality that would just fight tooth and nail to the end. Same thing with my divorce—I could have just kept fighting and fighting. But truthfully, letting go made life better for everyone. So it’s hard to know: Is that my flaw? Should I have just pushed? I just wanted to be happy—I didn’t need that drama in my life. When I finally started teaching, I’d come home so excited. Because I was suddenly in an environment where somebody respected me again. I quite enjoy teaching, more than I thought I ever would.
Hannah’s two and a half. She holds onto our oven door and, in first, plié, relevé, plié—she’s coordinated all those things. So it’s hard not to go with that, because it’s just fun. She’s dancing. All she wants to do is put on her tutu in the house. I look back at photos of when I was very, very little, and I just loved it, and you could see that somehow.
We decided once Kai was born that Kristin wanted to continue dancing, and I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of working on Wall Street for the rest of my life. It was a very stressful job I had. It had taken its toll.
So I thought I needed to step up, and I thought it would be better if I raised him. I wanted to be in Kai’s life 100 percent. It worked out because Kristin was so passionate about dancing—she wasn’t ready to give it up. It was so much fun to be an integral part of Kai’s life. I made sure Kristin saw him several times a day, so he was spending a lot of time at the ballet. Kai was surrounded by seventy new friends from all over the world. They loved him. They spent time with him. They cared for him. They were so generous with him and loving toward him. He ended up having a pretty extraordinary life. He has an intimate relationship with dance and music and how productions are put on, and he understands the discipline and the passion these dancers have. He got a chance to travel the world with the company and see the world at a very young age.
For as much as I loved being with Kai all the time, I realized that I needed to do something for myself, too. I needed to work a little bit. I had studied some bodywork in Manhattan, and I felt it was something that I was pretty good at. I started to go to school at night. If Kristin had to work while I was at school, a lot of the dancers were really great, and they would watch him backstage, or in the dressing room, or some of them might even go to the house and babysit him there.
I had been working on the dancers [at the San Francisco Ballet] because I needed bodies to work on. They got to know my work a little bit, and then it was serendipitous—there was an in-house massage therapist who quit on a Friday. It was the same day as my last class; I got certified on a Friday and hired on the Monday. The great part about it was the flexibility. My main reason to be there was Kai; when he was taking a nap or when Kristin could watch him, I could work.
I literally slept in my car for the first five days after the divorce. I rented a place in Marin for six months and several different places for six months at a time. I had nowhere to live, and I did not want to leave Kai, obviously, and Marshall [Crutcher, with Katita Waldo] took me in out of the kindness of his heart and the love for Kai, really. I went a year and a half without finding work. I’d never had a problem making money, ever. And then I went from that to nothing. I could find nothing—zero. I tried to get back into finance, and these guys would say, “Well, what did you do for these last ten years?” I told them I raised my son. Instead of seeing that as, “Wow, incredibly responsible guy, incredibly conscientious guy, someone I’d like to have here working with me,” they looked at me like I was crazy.
Kai went to a prestigious school in the city, and a lot of the parents of children at that school were from the East Coast. So when it came time for him to go to high school, he and I started to research the prep schools on the East Coast, and he ended up at Middlesex. There was nothing keeping me on the West Coast, so I just decided to go back, to be closer to him, live with my sister. I see him during football season: every Saturday I go to his games and then we talk for a half hour or so and then I take off. Every once in a while we go out for dinner or something like that. I haven’t missed any of his baseball games, either. So it’s great. It’s a bit of a trip for me. It’s a two-hour drive. He started on the varsity team as a freshman.
In 2004 I had become principal conductor at the English National Ballet. I’d had that job for six or seven months when they offered me the job [of music director and principal conductor at the San Francisco Ballet]. I was ready for a change. I was single. Life was not going in any particular direction, and I could have stayed at the National Ballet for the rest of my life, but there was nowhere else to go from there.
I came here in 2005. I started hearing that Kristin and Michael weren’t that great. There was absolutely nothing between Kristin and me. She was very friendly and nice to work with, but if you’re in a company of forty beautiful ballerinas, why would you even be remotely thinking of being interested in one that’s married, with a kid? It was stupid. She wasn’t even on my radar at all like that.
They split, and they kept the same place, so one would go there part of the week and sleep with Kai, and the other would stay with friends. I was still doing the job in England [with the English National Ballet]. I was going back for quite an extended stint, six or seven weeks. She was obviously a bit nervous about asking me, but she said, “I was wondering what you’re doing with your flat while you’re away?” I immediately said, “Nothing, do you want to stay? You’re welcome, please.”
So she did. She said, “I’ll get out of your hair when you’re back.” I said, “Oh, that’s fine. There’s plenty of room.” It was quite a big flat. I don’t know what it was—maybe the protective nature of how I was looking after her—but it all fell into place pretty quickly. We’ve been together ever since.
We wanted to have children. I was pushing forty; Kristin was thirty-six—she wasn’t that young. She wanted to have more children before she retired because she didn’t want to retire so soon, and she didn’t want to wait until forty to have children with me. And we discussed a lot with counselors what would be good for Kai. Would a child be good? Would it help him adjust? You don’t know. If ever Kristin brought it up with Kai, he was dead against it—absolutely not. He was a very angry kid at that time. It was really hard for Kai. Hannah’s so sweet, and now he absolutely adores her. He loves them both [Hannah and Jonah]. But it was hard for Kai when Hannah was born. And Michael was still very angry at the time.
We decided it was time, and we got pregnant absolutely immediately. [After Hannah was born] Kristin went back to work—she went straight into the gym every day. She lost all the weight pretty much straightaway. She was back in January. Her dancing was incredible, her work ethic. Halfway through that season, she was just starting to dance really well again and to be back in shape in the middle—totally kick-ass ballet. You’d never believe she’d had a child eight or nine months before. We’d just been shopping, and she walked up the stairs, and she said, “I feel so tired. What’s wrong with me?” That night the cat came and sat on Kristin’s tummy. We were laughing because she never does that. She sits on my tummy but not Kristin’s. And we just laughed and said, “The last time she did that was when you had a nice warm belly, when Hannah was in there.”
That wasn’t the plan. Jonah wasn’t planned then. We had it planned so that Kristin would do one more year of dancing, finish off. Then she would retire, and she’d get pregnant. That was the plan. So we had to go and tell Helgi. Then Jonah came in February. She was off all that time. But the plan was always to go back and finish off. We decided that she would go back and do one more year after that. Then when it came to it, I think Helgi wanted to be supportive, but I don’t think he was entirely comfortable either, and Kristin wasn’t really made to feel welcome.
It was really hard for her. Twenty-two years of amazing, dedicated work. She’d been there almost the same length of time as Helgi. The rise of the company coincided with the Kristin Longs, the Tina LeBlancs, and the Katita Waldos all arriving. That’s when they started becoming a great company—when he got those young girls in, and they became amazingly true artists really early on. For Kristin it was very, very hurtful. Her retirement was largely ignored until it was too late. Everybody who leaves the ballet ends up with Tiffany earrings or something. Kristin: nothing like that.
She’s very dedicated to her teaching now. When I finished the season, I was doing all of the child caring, and Kristin was teaching. Sometimes that was a lot. In July I’m going to be working quite a bit, and so is Kristin, so her mum’s coming out. I’ve always made it my thing to take Hannah to school. And Jonah used to come with us because it was nice for Kristin to have a bit of downtime, and Jonah liked it. That can be the only time I get to spend with the kids because in the season I get up, take them to school, and then say good-bye. I’d take Jonah home, go in to work, and I might be there until 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. or even 11:00 p.m. On an 11:00 p.m. day generally there will be time during the day to come back for a couple of hours to see them. But on a rehearsal day, when I’m there till seven, that’s it—I don’t see them. Mondays, when I’m off, Kristin will be teaching. That’s my day. It was very sweet. Hannah would come home. I’d say, “Let’s go to the park.” “No, I just want to stay here with you.” Very sweet. She misses me. In the season, Sunday evening and Monday are the only times we have free, and it can get really crazy, but then the off-season kind of makes up for it. Then I’m ready to go back to work.
I don’t know if having a child makes you a better dancer. But you’re probably a better dancer if you’re capable of having a child. You’re then a different animal. You’re a mother or you’re a father. You’ve got bigger things to worry about than just dance. You do your dance in a different way. It becomes a job, and it also becomes an escape, and it also becomes something you can give to rather than something you are striving to take from. I think that’s the best thing for any artist. I was desperate to be a great conductor. Having kids has changed my perspective. I realize there is more to life than only working with an orchestra.
Kai plays the piano with Kristin in a rehearsal room at San Francisco Ballet. He knew Chopin from Schoenberg by the time he was five; before he found baseball, it seemed as though he’d become a composer one day. (2000)
Helgi Tomasson, the artistic director of San Francisco Ballet, rehearses Kristin for Romeo and Juliet. (2001)
Kristin and Stephen Legate rehearse Romeo and Juliet (Helgi Tomasson) while Kai watches from the lap of Legate’s wife, Evelyn Cisneros, an extremely popular ballerina who had retired recently from San Francisco Ballet to start a family. (2001)
Kristin, with Kai and Michael Locicero, her first husband, before she goes onstage to perform Symphony in C (George Balanchine). (2001)
Experiencing back trouble, Kristin goes for an MRI at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. (2000)
Kristin and Kai bathe in their hotel before going to the Palais Garnier Theater in Paris, where she will perform. (2001)
Kristin reads to Kai in the waiting room at her physical therapist’s office in San Francisco. (2000)
After a dress rehearsal of Nutcracker Ballet (Marius Petipa), Kristin shows the stage to Kai and Michael. (2000)
Tina’s son Marinko; Kai (doing a split); Diane Kounalakis, the ballet’s associate director of public relations; and Kristin, with Tina behind her. Kristin is brooding about her marriage. (2000)
Before she performs, Kristin is brave enough to sneak me into her dressing room at the Palais Garnier, where no photographers are allowed. Julie Diana, with whom she shares a dressing room, does not complain. Kai hits his red balloon to his aunt, Gloria Terrell. (2001)
Kristin rehearses the suicide scene from Romeo and Juliet. She will perform this dance again in 2005, as her marriage finally dissolves. (2000)
Martin West, the very popular music director and principal conductor at San Francisco Ballet, has become Kristin’s partner. They are in Kristin’s dressing room; she is three months pregnant with their daughter, Hannah. (2009)
Kristin is in the early phase of labor at California Pacific Medical Center’s maternity ward. (2009)
Kristin has received the ten-minute warning before her performance, so she pumps milk in her dressing room. (2009)
Martin; Kristin; and Hannah and her little brother, Jonah (at the end of the row of chairs), between classes at City Ballet School in San Francisco. Kristin has retired as a ballerina and teaches here. Martin is still the music director and principal conductor at SFB. (2012)
