A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  I feel a reverence for this ballet; it’s like a sacred text to equally sacred music. But what I love most about it, and find so moving, is its history: Its first performances, at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1877, were choreographed by a gentleman of insufficient talent. Though the ballet remained in the repertory for six of the next seven years, it was a great disappointment to Tchaikovsky. After hearing Léo Delibes’s score for the ballet Sylvia, he wrote to his patron, “Swan Lake is poor stuff when compared to Sylvia.”

  Then came its stunning resurrection in1895, two years after Tchaikovsky died, never to know that his Swan Lake was to become the most beloved and famous ballet ever created. Often, the “most famous” of anything is viewed by insiders as merely commercial, but Swan Lake has garnered the utmost respect and status within the dance world, where it is universally hailed as a masterpiece. The Principal roles are taken on with pride, care, and passion to meet its demands. Odette, the white swan that the prince falls in love with, is considered the ultimate role for a ballerina. It is also the hardest. I have seen all the ballerinas with whom I have danced Swan Lake in a frenzy of nerves before the curtain goes up. Dancing its difficult roles is as rewarding as it is challenging.

  Now I was going to dance those steps to that music and become a part of its history. I felt ready for the challenge, trusting that Kevin wouldn’t have given it to me if he felt I wasn’t up to it. But I needed every bit of physical and mental strength I could muster. That is why, with the pressure of the past and the demands of the present, doubt seeped in and dominated my psyche.

  * * *

  MY DEBUT WAS scheduled as a double debut; I would be partnering Michele, who had never performed Swan Lake’s taxing female double role of Odette-Odile.

  Our show was a children’s matinee in Chicago. Though we would be taught the entire ballet in rehearsal, at the matinee we’d be dancing a shorter version designed to hold the kids’ attention. Nevertheless, this matinee was my first chance to portray a character whose task it was to lead the ballet through four acts, from the very beginning to that final suicidal jump off the cliff that sends him to his death with his swan queen.

  I immersed myself for months with my coach, Guillaume Graffin, a former ABT Principal and, prior to that, a protégé of Rudolf Nureyev during the historically significant years when Nureyev was the director of the Paris Opera Ballet. Guillaume is a deeply insightful artist, and was an exceptionally refined and romantic dancer. Fluent in many languages, he has thorough knowledge of dance, music, literature, art, and philosophy. He is one of the few truly analytical artists in the world of ballet. All of that suffused his coaching and allowed him to offer many insightful shadings of Siegfried’s character.

  The great classical roles like Siegfried have been passed down since the nineteenth century from one dancer to the next. Generation to generation. There is a beauty in that tradition. An artist who has danced Siegfried, as Guillaume did, will teach it to someone like me through words, ideas, and physical demonstrations. He also learned the role from someone who danced it; this chain extends all the way back to Pavel Gerdt, who, in 1895, was the very first to perform the Petipa/Ivanov version that every Swan Lake since has been based on.

  Ballet is essentially movement and expression. To create a complete character you need someone who can explain all the nuances and shadings that they themselves have worked out. That’s why it’s so important to have the right coach passing this information on to you.

  When I was a student, Mr. Han told me what to do: how to stand, where to look, what to emote, when to emote, when to catch my breath, where to place my finger. When students become professionals in a ballet company, we have the same sort of dependence on our coaches. A good coach leads you in the right direction technically and artistically. But there are also coaches who don’t have the dancer’s best interests at heart. Coaches are always former dancers, some of whom had huge careers but sadly never get over the glory of being onstage and the feeling of being a star. In the studio, such a coach can be more interested in nurturing his or her own ego than in nurturing the dancer, and will deliver belittling corrections and critiques geared primarily toward bringing the dancer down while building the coach up. Dancers are vulnerable in the studio as they present what is at that moment their best work. Some coaches take advantage of that and chip away at a dancer’s confidence.

  Guillaume’s sole concern was the dancer. I was lucky to have him in my first years with ABT. He guided me through the first important and formative steps of my professional career. He thought only of the work. He pushed me just as Mr. Han had, accepting no excuses but elevating me closer to my ideal potential. He didn’t have patience for lazy or relentlessly insecure dancers. He could be very short-tempered at times. Blowouts would ensue if a dancer had an attitude. Some couldn’t handle his bluntness. He thrived on a good fight because he wasn’t afraid of the truth. He expected those who worked with him to not fear it either. He gave me what I have craved and needed throughout my career: brutal truth, even when it hurt.

  I would rather a coach tell me that my show was horrible than just give air kisses and insincere congratulations. When a dancer cannot hear the truth, he or she ceases to grow as an artist.

  * * *

  ALWAYS, WHEN DISCOVERING a new work of such complexity, the process is arduous and long but begins with simply learning the steps.

  There are many different versions of the great classical ballets. I would be dancing Kevin’s new reworking of the classic, strongly based on the 1895 work created by Marius Petipa, Premier Ballet Master of Russia’s Imperial Theatre, and by his assistant, Lev Ivanov, who choreographed Swan Lake’s second and fourth acts, known as the White Acts because they feature the swans.

  It is so vital to approach each move in the right way: slowly, with sufficient time to absorb the myriad technicalities. This can and should take months. If it’s hurried, bad habits seep in and quality suffers. The steps look hollow and lack meaning, the performance lacks texture. The more deeply dancers work on debut roles, the stronger are the roots that ground them. You build on those roots throughout your entire career, enhancing your performance—or so one hopes—each time you dance that ballet.

  Once you have learned the steps, absorbing them one by one in the mind and body, there comes the far more difficult and time-consuming process of developing them, finding the flow of a work, the nuances, the refinement. Through the rehearsal process, you work on achieving a performance level and summoning the necessary degree of stamina, which differs from one ballet to the next. Guillaume taught me when to push hard and when to save energy. He told me that if I gave 100 percent the whole time, I would run out of steam by the end of the first act and wouldn’t have energy to finish the four-act ballet. I had to pace myself, establish the character at the start and build from there. The audience should see an arc in the interpretation, not the same shading during all four acts.

  I am often asked how I remember all the steps in a ballet like Swan Lake. But remembering is the simplest aspect, largely because dancers have kinesthetic memory; when we see a series of movements we can immediately replicate them. The challenge lies in the way you dance the steps and put them together. What do you personally do with those classic movements? How do you make a ballet danced for centuries your own? The answers to these questions will determine whether yours is a character with depth or a hollow, vapid interpretation. They are questions I continued to ask for years.

  * * *

  SOME DANCERS WALK into their first rehearsals with an idea of how they want to interpret a role. For example, they take some aspects they like from dancers they’ve observed or they have ideas about how they want to dance a certain variation. I admire people who have that conviction, but I have never been one of them. I enter with nothing. When I began to work privately with Guillaume, I was too young and too naive to comprehend the feelings of Siegfried. The ballet revolves around his search for love. He yearns for true feeling, honest emotion. He
doesn’t know what that is, exactly; he simply knows that he feels a certain emptiness. His first true feeling comes to him when he sees a vision of perfection in the form of a beautiful swan at a lake in the woods. He throws caution away and experiences deep and impassioned love.

  These are difficult emotions to convey, especially through mime and dance, and in rehearsals, my portrayal was only surface and frantic nervous energy. I just wanted to get through each scene, dance well, not screw up, and somehow make my partner happy (which of course I was struggling with). I needed to learn how to use my body to express emotion, how to gesture in mime in a way that made sense to the audience and appeared natural. It was a struggle to control myself physically, and sometimes the last thing on my mind was finding the depth and nuance of my character. The steps and partnering were difficult enough.

  * * *

  I WOULD ASK Guillaume repeatedly about certain steps or nuances. Anything that could be improved. He would give me a number of choices and I would then decide what I thought was right for me. He never told me that there was only one way to do it. At times he told me to leave it alone; that it was good enough and I could move on. I learned that I could trust what he told me. He had a sharp, clear eye and always meant what he said.

  One of the key stylistic nuances he taught me is that a ballet set in the Middle Ages requires particular manners and a particular carriage of the body. You can’t act as we do today. The connection between partners can’t look too familiar. It must retain the formality of an era when class distinctions and modesty between the sexes were of paramount importance. Certain gestures can look too casual or too feminine. The roles of man and woman are not merely traditional but also archaic. This isn’t to say that these ballets are not modern. The gestures may be of a certain era, but the human emotions are timeless. Love. Loss. Betrayal. The responsibility is then ours to portray those emotions honestly.

  It is through that honesty that audiences can connect with a ballet set in a completely different time.

  * * *

  AS GUILLAUME TAUGHT me the role, he explained who Siegfried is. I had assumed that Siegfried was a two-dimensional prince, the balletic version of a Disney character. But Guillaume revealed the complex undercurrents of Siegfried’s psyche. He had probed them when he danced the Prince, and required that I do the same. He asked, for example, what I thought the Prince’s Queen Mother represented. I answered feebly that she is a mother figure who tells Siegfried that, at his upcoming birthday celebration, he needs to choose a bride. But Guillaume took me deeper into Siegfried, explaining that the Queen represents responsibility, and Siegfried subconsciously despises her because she embodies the life that he hates: a life of privilege, money, opportunity, ease. Responsibility but no real substance. The Prince wants more, Guillaume explained. He wants to feel alive and experience things that have nothing to do with privilege or a caste system. He craves a raw, unabashed love. And here is the Queen Mother, reminding him of his dreary and loathsome duties as Prince. She wants him to be exactly what he was born to be. He wants the complete opposite: to be a free soul. As he begins to realize the demanding pressures he was born to, he becomes ever so slightly aware of his hatred for his mother. And so, on the eve of his birthday, when his mother reminds him that he must choose a royal bride the next day, he flees. He runs away to the lake, away from responsibility. This is the kind of psychological explanation I would get from Guillaume. Not only about the Queen Mother, but also about the adherence to long-established rules that the Prince’s tutor symbolizes, about the frivolity of his closest friends. And, above all, about Siegfried’s yearning for the swan who embodies the promise of true love.

  For Guillaume each step had meaning. Even the smallest gesture was a mirror into Siegfried’s soul. He gave me the intellectual nourishment I needed to plumb the depths of Siegfried’s character, not just for that abridged performance but so that I could continue to find new meaning as I matured in years to come.

  * * *

  MICHELE AND I worked on the Swan Lake partnering in the studio with Kevin. The patience and generosity that make for a good partnership were rare between us though I felt I tried to provide them. Nothing was ever verbalized. We didn’t fight. It was simply clear to me how uncomfortable she was.

  Increasingly, I began to dread my time in the studio with her. I was constantly walking on eggshells and repeatedly being told that my best attempts at partnering weren’t working. I was absolutely deferential to her requests. The more she dominated, the more I stood down.

  She barely spoke to me before and after rehearsals, just a quick hello before we started. We never joked or chatted. We were awkward around each other. I didn’t know what to say or do.

  Even after we had been rehearsing for months, each time I saw our names together on the rehearsal schedule my heart would drop and beat faster. As time passed, I felt like she regarded me less as her partner and more as an annoyance she had to tolerate. There were other men in the company, more experienced as partners, whom I knew she preferred. When I would see her dance with them, she was a different person. She smiled. Laughed. Joked. Looked comfortable in their hands. Between us, there was unbearable tension.

  I went to Guillaume for guidance. I was at a loss as to how to handle her or myself. He had seen the woeful dynamics of our relationship firsthand and told me, “You must stand up for yourself. That’s the only way you’ll be able to move forward and balance the partnership out.”

  I knew he was right. But somehow I didn’t have the courage. Both Michele and I avoided confrontation at all costs. And so our partnership staggered along, with the same imbalance.

  * * *

  IN BALLET, THE divide between artistry and technique can be a chasm. Artistry connotes the dramatic and emotional values you bring to a role; technique is concerned with the quality and level of your dancing.

  What makes classical ballet so challenging is that you must dance the steps precisely as they are meant to be danced. The steps can be altered by the choreographer, or even by the person staging the ballet. Or you can have input when a new ballet is being created. But with an existing work, the steps are rarely changed by the dancer.

  You become a part of the history by adhering to this entrenched custom. If a step doesn’t look right on you, if you can’t do it well, your only choice is to work on it.

  At the beginning of my career, I perceived certain ballet traditions as a form of rigidity. There is a box, and you are expected to soar to great heights within that box. The first box I questioned was Swan Lake. I was driven to dance it well, but found no intense personal feeling in what I danced. I was who people told me to be and, more significantly, who I thought I should be. From my first foray into Siegfried, and for years to come, I would walk, act, and dance around the stage with an unnatural aplomb. It was my attempt at doing it “the way it had always been done.”

  I tried too hard to conjure the feelings of a prince. I forced my emotions. Guillaume continually encouraged me to relax and be myself.

  “You don’t have to act the Prince. You already look like the Prince. So just stand there. Feel the weight of stillness and what that can mean. Do nothing. Just be.”

  I didn’t believe him. I felt like I had to be doing something. Whether I was moving my arms, shifting side to side, even cocking my head a certain way. What I didn’t understand was that the dancers who had excelled as Siegfried had found the character through simple and basic emotional honesty. Erik Bruhn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anthony Dowell each filtered the Prince through their own unique personality. In fact, Guillaume was right: I just had to be. But I lost my true self in my perception of the rigidity of history and what I thought my place in it should be. Physically I executed. I didn’t embody. It’s the difference between doing the steps and being the steps—a crucial distinction that separates the good artists from the transformative ones.

  * * *

  I BARELY REMEMBER that first Swan Lake performance. The show was a blur of nerv
es and doubt. Beyond the point of no return, once the overture started, I charged full steam ahead and tried my best not to mess up, miss a lift, or fall. Although adrenaline propelled me forward, I wasn’t completely present in the moment. I went through the actions and movements that I had rehearsed so thoroughly with Guillaume, Kevin, and Michele as if on autopilot. I tried to shine, but the sheer shock of it all overrode any natural feelings of deep character or connection. Nor did I have the confidence to take risks. I just didn’t want to fail. I gave up the idea of trying to soar in the moment. All I cared about was getting through it.

  The performance seemed to fly by in an instant. Nothing catastrophic happened. And most important, no missed lifts with Michele. As we took our final bows I felt shell-shocked from what had just happened. I think she felt the same.

  Any lead couple dancing Principal roles follows an elaborate, traditional protocol for bows. Although the show is over, the bows are just as choreographed as the performance. The male dancer presents his ballerina, moving her forward and then taking a few steps back, ceding to her the closest proximity to the audience. After she slowly bows, you come together again, then separate and bow to each other, essentially thanking each other for the performance. During our bows for Swan Lake, that mutual acknowledgment, which is meant to be heartfelt and gracious, wasn’t particularly genuine. I knew I hadn’t lived up to expectations, not my own or Michele’s. Though I hadn’t missed any lifts I had struggled with some of them; they looked strained and laborious. The partnering as a whole lacked finesse. I certainly had tried my best, but I knew it wasn’t good enough.

  After the curtain came down, Kevin and Guillaume walked onto the stage. I have always been able to tell when Kevin truly enjoyed the show and when he thought it was just adequate. Although I had conquered my first full-length ballet, it was lacking in the polish that would come with years of dancing it. So while there was the celebration of having gotten my first Swan under my belt, it was evident to us all, without anything needing to be said, that I had a lot of work ahead of me. Especially when it came to partnering.