Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (12 page)

That’s what you need to stand out on the stage. Many dancers have a body that’s capable, that has the facility to perform, but they get onstage and they don’t have “it,” that blissful spark that makes it impossible for the audience members to get the performance out of their heads. For me, even in the classroom, it was always showtime.

When I was seventeen, I went to New York to participate in ABT’s summer program. Lupe Serrano, a woman whom I still love, was one of my first teachers. She had been a prima ballerina in her day and was now a ballet mistress.

After I executed various combinations, she walked over to me, disapproval creasing her brow.

“Why are you giving so much at the barre?” she asked me with exasperation. “This isn’t a performance!”

“Oh,” I said, surprised and more than a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

In ballet, every step has a million moving parts. Your head must be in the right position, your body in alignment, your feet turned just so. It requires precision to get it all right. But for me, ballet has always been more than a technical matrix. It’s fun.

Cindy had an incredible ability to really showcase the music in her movement. She was both an actress and a dancer. I emulated it because it was all I knew. Her arms, her
épaulement
, her elegant and feminine style, definitely rubbed off on me. That became my approach when I danced. Though this was not the way most schools taught you to approach ballet—prioritizing a basic understanding of your placement, lines, and strength—my training at the San Pedro Dance Center was based on movement, music, and performance. Very few develop these qualities, even after a lifetime of training. I had it from day one. In preparation for Kitri, I studied Gelsey and Paloma endlessly. I paid close attention to the way their heads moved, the way their elbows were always in a forward position ahead of their wrists when their hands were on their hips. Kitri was strong and in control. I understood it all!

Cindy said to me during one of my rehearsals for the
grand
pas de deux
in the third act, with Charles Maple, “How do you know when to lift your chin? I never told you.” She was stumped. I didn’t really have an answer. The accent in the music came and with it so did the lift of my chin to match. I never questioned or quite understood how: I just knew. It was my instinct, and the marvelous thing was that it was usually right.

Not a performance? Of course it was. Always.

BUT WHEN I WAS
fifteen, in the final days before the Spotlight Awards, I began to stumble. I was having trouble completing my full series of turns. The morning of the competition, I felt something I’d never experienced before a performance: nerves.

It was a feeling that was so new in connection with dance that at first I didn’t even know what it was. I suppose the difference this time was that I’d never felt so pressured before when it came to ballet. There were thousands of dollars on the line, and an entire city watching me.

Cindy had begun to worry during my final practices. Then, the morning of the performance, during the dress rehearsal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, she seemed almost frantic.

I couldn’t get through the
fouettés.
It’s a classic bravura move that is one of the prima ballerina’s staples. You’re supposed to keep going and going and going, through thirty-two exhausting turns, and I couldn’t complete them. I was probably just exhausted, but seeing the way Cindy reacted—the tension and fear on her face—panicked me.

“You have to get this,” she said nervously. “This is your big chance. Gerald Arpino will be there.”

Gerald Arpino was the artistic director and cofounder of the Joffrey Ballet, one of the world’s top dance companies. He would be one of the judges.

We only had fifteen minutes to practice, and then we had to get off the stage and give the next competitor a chance to rehearse. I was freaked out, and Cindy saw it.

Then Cindy had an idea.

She hurriedly took me down into the underground garage where her car was parked. She opened all the car doors to create a makeshift screen, then stuck a cassette of the music I would dance to in the car’s player. She calmed me, reassuring me that even though I had a decade less training than my competitor, I had something she didn’t: a sparkle, a will from within that wasn’t about the number of
fouettés
I did, or how high I kicked my leg, but the passion and potential the judges would see in me.

Right there, she rechoreographed my variation.

Instead of thirty-two turns, I would do sixteen. And then I would go into a
piqué ménage,
a circular traveling step, to finish out the music.

It was a backup plan, which I embraced gratefully. Cindy cranked up Kitri’s music, and we got to work. Instead of in my pointe shoes, I learned and rehearsed the new routine in my sneakers.

That taught me something. When I’m on the stage, I always want to appear clean, and strong, never out of control. That is what it means to be a professional. And that day, at the Spotlight Awards, I learned you should always have a backup
plan, so you can always deliver a performance that is sharp and refined. Even if your body fails, your performance never will.

There are dancers who believe that you won’t try as hard if you know there’s a safety net. But I don’t agree.

My life in the ballet studio is devoted to the goal of perfecting the impossibly precise and rarefied steps of a centuries-old technique. You teach your body to depend on its muscle memory with repetition of the steps in rehearsal so that when you are onstage and are presented with the unpredictable elements of the theater you can still thrive.

Onstage, the lights change your balance and focus and warm the air enough to soften stiff pointe shoes. A costume adds weight and restrictions to a dancer’s movement. The live orchestra and often temperamental conductor challenge you to now think on your toes if there is a sudden change in tempo. And then there’s your own excitement, the rush that comes with a live performance. Often, instincts tempt you to react in opposition to the choreography your body knows so well.

And with all these outside and internal pressures, dancers are still expected to meet the standards of classical “perfection.” I’ve had to create my own standard. As a professional (and a perfectionist), my goal is to be consistent in giving an exciting, emotionally charged, and technically sound performance. The rehearsal studio is the time where I take risky chances and fall on my face so I can learn where to rein it in. I would never take those risks on the stage in front of a hungry audience. They deserve better.

Some dancers feel different, taking gambles onstage in pursuit of that chance that a risk will pay off and create a
once-in-a-lifetime performance. I guess that’s why live theater is so exciting.

But that day, at the Spotlight Awards, I learned to be prepared and focus on what’s important.

It was finally showtime. I took the stage, dressed in a red tutu edged with golden lace that Cindy had made just for the competition.

Mommy, Lindsey, Cindy, and Bubby were all there. The theater was dark despite the white spotlights. I felt cool and determined, even as I congratulated the performer who finished just before my entrance.

I went to my backup routine and performed it flawlessly. Up and down on my toes, twirling across the stage, brandishing a ruby-red fan that I flung aside before I began my turns. I became Kitri, fire in my eyes, flirting fiercely as though I were batting my eyes at every last audience member. As I finished my performance, I threw my arm into the air with my head thrown back, a smile nearly splitting my face, and one hand cocked saucily on my hip. I had danced—happy, free.

Then it was over. I was relieved and joyful.

“I got through all my
fouettés
!” I said to the program producers standing backstage. “I’m really happy.”

From there it’s all a blur. I won the top prize—five thousand dollars—for ballet. I have the trophy in my apartment to this very day.

Then, after the other winners were announced, we all gathered backstage.

It was bedlam.

Gerald Arpino ran up to me. He grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.

“You’re my baby, you’re my baby,” he said, hugging me tightly. “You have to come dance with me! You have to come to the Joffrey!”

There were camera flashes galore, and the KCET film crew was there, too. A photograph of Mr. Arpino hugging me appeared on the cover of a local TV guide the week that the
Beating the Odds
anniversary special aired, as well as in several newspapers. It was a huge deal, Gerald Arpino’s embracing me, wanting me.

I began to see the vista to a world beyond what I had ever previously imagined.

WITH A BURST OF
confidence from winning the competition, I began to go on auditions for the summer programs offered by the most prestigious ballet companies.

Cindy felt it was important for me to audition for as many as possible, both to gain the experience of being in intense situations around elite dancers and for these various companies to get a look at me, in the hope that I could join them one day.

After the Spotlight Awards, I was offered spots by the Joffrey and ABT, whose Summer Intensive director, Rebecca Wright, had also been a judge. But I still had to audition for both in order for them to determine how large my scholarship would be.

I also tried out for the summer programs offered by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet.

In the subjective hierarchy of the ballet world, ABT reigns supreme and is known as America’s National Company. You have to go overseas to find its peers—the Paris Opera, Royal Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, La Scala, English National Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, and the Stuttgart Ballet.

Back in North America, the New York City Ballet follows close behind ABT in prestige, though it stands a bit apart as its company primarily dances the distinctive works created by its founder, George Balanchine, rather than a traditional, classical repertoire. Next comes San Francisco Ballet, followed by the National Ballet of Canada, Boston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Joffrey, and the ballet companies of Miami and Houston.

I received offers from all the ballet companies I auditioned for, except for one: the New York City Ballet. Every single company awarded me a scholarship. The New York City Ballet didn’t even want me to attend. This news was extremely confusing to me. Cindy has praised my “Balanchinesque” physique as the ideal figure for a ballerina to possess. We thought I’d be perfect for its vision and distinctive style. I showed up for the audition in a pale pink leotard and pink tights. With my hair pulled into a bun on the top of my head, I even looked like that music box ballerina image that every girl envisioned.

Or so I thought.

Ballet summer intensive programs are moneymakers. If you have the body and can pay the fees, you generally have an automatic in. Then, once you get there, talent and ability is what determines if you will be asked to stay year-round and train at the school.

So, when I got their rejection letter, Cindy’s analysis was stark. They didn’t want me because I was black.

That was the note she made me keep, and I dutifully tucked it in a photo album.

The others did want me, though—San Francisco Ballet, perhaps, most of all. The director called Cindy to tell her how thrilled they would be to have me. They also offered the most generous package—not only tuition, but room and board and my airfare to fly up the coast.

I also liked the idea that, compared to the others, it was closer to home. It would be the first time that I would be going so far away.

So I chose them.

A few weeks later, I was off to San Francisco.

Chapter 5

SUMMER IN SAN FRANCISCO
is an oxymoron.

I arrived in June, but it was so cold that I had to buy bulky gray sweatshirts with the city’s name on them to keep warm. I might as well have scrawled
TOURIST
on my forehead with a Magic Marker. But I didn’t care. Wearing the dorky garments was still better than freezing. My face stayed moist from the gauzelike fog that was thick enough to skim off the bay. It swaddled the city through the night and skittered off in the morning with the sun.