Holiday Nutcracker Guest Post

My Experience in The Nutcracker Ballet by Natalia, Age 8



Natalia

School was finished and I was free, but I still had a performance. It was opening night at Lincoln Center. I was nervous. The bus finally came. I got on. After a while my stop came. I got off at 66^th Street and went backstage. All the kids who were dancers at The School of American Ballet and had parts in the Nutcracker were there. I played jacks and tag while we waited to go onstage. The person who played Clara’s Uncle kept coming back to tell everyone to "shut up" or the audience will hear us. But it didn’t work because we were too excited. Finally the lady with the makeup came and she put big round red circles on our cheeks.

It was time. I went on stage and the curtain went up and I saw thousands of people in front of me. I was a soldier so I was running around saluting in a battle with the rats.  After that was finished they carried us away. They were bigger than me. They ran with their tails dragging behind them. They scared me, especially the e King Rat because he had so many heads. But the Nutcracker Prince killed him.

So then the kids who were soldiers went home but not me. I had another part. I had to run to the bathroom and wash off my cheeks because I was an angel and had to be very pale. I had this itchy halo on my head and tons of slips. I led the angels across the stage and I had to bend my knees and slide my feet and pretend I was floating. I felt strange. I had silver wings on my back and I was carrying a plastic bush. When all the angels were in two rows we had to walk across the stage to switch places. Patricia MacBride, a famous dancer, was the Sugar Plum Fairy and she danced around us. I saw one angel trip her and I heard the Fairy say, “Oh my gosh!” But she kept on dancing just like you are supposed to do in a performance.

Finally we had to bow with everybody on the stage and instead of our trees we got instruments to hold. As he walked by us, Fritz would say all these weird things like “This is boring” or “I saw you already.” Sometimes David Richardson who was in charge of us would watch from the side of the stage and would open his mouth and point his finger to the right or to the left telling us to move. Mr. B. was usually there.
 

After the end of the performance I got three bunches of flowers with notes on them like “Congratulations on Opening Night.” I felt happy and proud of myself.

 

Ballet Students Dance Too Close to the Edge

I see them walking down the Avenue past my building, their postures erect, the younger ones with their mothers in tow. As a parent of a ballet dancer, I easily recognize those girls. They’re the summer program girls at the School of American Ballet, all of them slender, agile, strikingly pretty, selected for those very qualities.

I don’t think they realize what is in store for them if they become one of the elect. I’m sure my daughter didn’t. Neither did I. Yet over the years, I have learned that behind the idealized onstage world of graceful and ethereal women lurks a darker side.

So I wasn’t shocked to hear the recent news about eating disorders in the ballet field that came in the wake of the death of Heidi Guenther, a 22-year-old Boston Ballet professional. It always seemed to me that professional schools should sound emphatic notes of caution to the unsuspecting entering student and her parents. Perhaps they should even put out a sign like the warning labels you see on cigarettes: “A dance career may be hazardous to your health.”

Yet all too conveniently, it seems, company directors and schools continue to overlook the fact that they are the ones who set the standard for the field: In the breaking story about Guenther’s death, we were told that her dance company is actually accepting of all body types – that it even features a “voluptuous” dancer. (But why then, any casual reader might question, was the petite Guenther told by her company director to lose 5 pounds?)

In the world in which my daughter moves, directors and schools have long promoted the image of the delicate, slender, long-limbed ballet dancer. “The Balanchine Look,” they call it. In a field where openings are few and competition is keen, dancers know they have to conform to that aesthetic ideal. Tellingly, I have often seen the nation’s most elite professional school referred to as “a stable of thoroughbreds” – that is, not a place where talented and impressionable young people are encouraged, but where they are carefully selected for their physical traits and then trained in the manner of racehorses to perform. Undergoing the relentlessly intense physical training, conforming to an intangible aesthetic, many end up navigating that fine line between being slender, but not too much so, between being healthy and malnourished. Under all these pressures, it’s not surprising some lose their balance.

It’s true, as companies and schools declare, that one’s well-being is, after all, an individual matter. Yet I have observed over the years that eating disorders and the dance world are intertwined. These problems continue to haunt even the best and most established professionals. In fact, I cannot say I know any dancer who has been untouched by unhealthy eating habits – the ballet world’s endemic affliction.

It’s also true, as the company directors, schools and medical professionals concur, that some parents push their daughters too aggressively. I’ve seen that side, mothers urging daughters to be thin – daughters never made to be thin – forcing them, as though they were Cinderella’s stepsisters, into a mold that just won’t fit. But these are not your typical parents.

“You look thin,” a more concerned parent may say, as I have said to my daughter on occasion after a rough “Nutcracker” season. But the dancer, I have learned, listens only to what the director tells her. This, in fact, is the heart of the matter: Dancers need to hear concern for their well-being articulated by those in charge of their artistic development, and they most often don’t.

“I want to see the bones,” the disgruntled Balanchine dancer Gelsey Kirkland attributed to the master. But even if the quote turns out to be apocryphal, the substance of it is anything but: Walk into a company class, and you do see the bones. “I want to see the ribs,” one of Balanchine’s proteges, now a company director, says. Parents are quite properly terrified to see those bones and ribs, but dancers are terrified at the idea of gaining weight, and no wonder: “No one wants to see a fat person dance,” these slender sylphs are often told. Isolated from the real world, depriving themselves of food and extracurricular activities in order to dance, spending most of their time in the mirrored studio, clinging to every word their teacher or director says, dancers are prone to developing distorted body images of funhouse proportions. Is it all that surprising that – as medical statistics show – eating disorders among dancers are five times more prevalent than in the general population?

As I observe my daughter’s company class, I notice all its female members conform to the aesthetic ideal. I watch them hone their perfect bodies, go through their daily paces, stretching, pirouetting, leaping, soaring across the studio floor. Their movements are captivating, enormously pleasing to behold. Unlike us ordinary folk, they do not seem earthbound. Yet I am not drawn into their display. I have become all too aware that beyond the world on the stage is a real world, where the quest for such perfection can take a terrible toll.

(c) Olya Thompson, first published in Newsday.













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