The case nevertheless brought to light some of the pressures put on modern-day ballerinas to reduce their weight beyond what is considered the societal norm, often at their peril. It also underscored the power and influence directors continue to wield over their dancers.
Few ballerinas, in fact, ever protested against the tyrannical hold Balanchine had over them. Balanchine was, if not their surrogate husband, their big daddy, the father figure many dancers felt compelled to respect: “We are all his children. But his adult children, his working, dancing, performing children,” Toni Bentley writes. “His power over us is unique.”58 Those who have eagerly jumped to Balanchine’s defense include Suzanne Farrell, the American ballerina with whom Balanchine fell in love and for whom he created many ballets. Among them was his full-length Don Quixote (1965), in which he played a lovesick Don to Farrell’s unattainable Dulcinea, a ballet that in many ways was true to his own life at that time—a man in pursuit of a dream disguised as a woman. “I’d kill myself for a man, but I ain’t gonna kill myself for a woman,” said Farrell around the time of Balanchine’s death in 1983. “I think it works well that way also. It’s not that a woman couldn’t... be president, but I think it works better if it’s a man with a very powerful woman behind him.”59
But such selfless devotion bred a sense of malaise among Balanchine’s dancers. Gelsey Kirkland underwent years of therapy to help her cope with the loss of self she felt during her Balanchine years; she also became a drug addict, later confessing that cocaine helped quell the hunger pains and kill the desire for food. It also made her dance faster, contributing not only to her superstardom but also to her breakdown. Kirkland, and other ballerinas who have likewise suffered, prove that dancers are not the creatures of lightness audiences like to think they are: “They are often miserably unhappy people,” Kirkland says. “How can you possibly deny yourself all those things you deny yourself in order to dance, and put your body through all that you do, and still be happy?”60
But it has been hard to shake off the expectation of denial imposed on ballerinas since the dawning of the Balanchine era. Dance critics have eagerly participated in keeping the ballerina down, attacking her for committing human transgressions like gaining weight, for instance, a practice that has continued into the twenty-first century. A powerful and influential voice during the Balanchine years, New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce was one of the master’s most devoted acolytes and a principal guardian of the myth that Balanchine could do no wrong. In her highly regarded dance writings, she preached the gospel of thin, admiring the way Balanchine used dieting as a form of social control. In her essay, “Balanchine’s Girls,” published in her book Afterimages, Croce praised Balanchine for taking the American woman, “whose athleticism, independence, and intelligence are a challenge to the female role in ballet,” and taming her. Balanchine, Croce said, had succeeded in getting “American girls to stop thinking and start dancing.”61
“In one sense,” continued Croce, “New York City ballerinas are like nuns: they’re a sisterhood. They survive in an atmosphere of an aesthetic style that happens to exist nowhere else in the world, that absorbs modern tensions and transcends them; and they put up with untold miseries because they know it’s the only way to look the way they want to look—ravishing like mortal goddesses, yet reachable.”62
It was a lie, of course. The dancers didn’t want to look like goddesses; Balanchine wanted them to look like goddesses, or celestial handmaids, who would aggrandize his own image as a god, Apollo of the dance. It was a megalomaniacal pursuit that, as far as dancers’ health and well-being were concerned, ended up causing more damage than good.
“The ballet is a purely female thing,” Balanchine once said. “It is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”
Cutting her off at the stem.
5. Laboring Under an Illusion
The Ballerina at Work Today
There is an enduring perception that ballerinas live on air, unfettered by earthly concerns, and so they are not in need of special protections. As artists specializing in wordless dance, ballerinas appear voiceless and are expected to be silent—an image exploited by their employers, who generally overwork and underpay them, confident that they won’t speak up or fight back. Ballet exacts docility from the dancer to achieve its superhuman feats; blind obedience to ballet’s rules is necessary in an art that contorts the body through early and methodical exercise to achieve the essential ninety-degree turnout from the hips. When dancers do speak out, the repercussions are often swift and career damaging.
The dancers of American Ballet Theatre in New York learned this firsthand when in 1979 they voiced concern over the small salary and benefit increase presented to them as part of contract negotiations. The dancers rejected the offer, and management responded by locking them out. With nowhere else to ply their trade, the situation was dire. Ballerinas took to the streets, carrying placards, drawing public attention to their plight. They also spoke to reporters and went on television, demonstrating that ballerinas could indeed speak and that what they had to say about their workplace conditions—one ABT dancer described their situation as nothing short of slavery—was deserving of attention. For outsiders, it was their first glimpse of how the ballet world really worked: “the long hours, low pay, paltry benefits, and occupational hazards.”1 The crisis ended ten weeks later when management finally conceded to some of the dancers’ demands, granting them improved wages and workplace conditions. “The starting salary for a corps dancer went from $235 a week to $495 a week by the end of the three-year contract; a fourth-year corps dancer, who earned $285, now [made] $420; and a tenth-year soloist, who used to earn $422, now earn[ed] $610.”2
It looked as though the dancers had empowered themselves. But within three years, back at the bargaining table for a new round of contract negotiations, it looked as though they would lose the ground they had earlier gained. In 1982, ABT ballerinas again took to the streets and marched en masse in the New York City Labor Day Parade, asserting their status as workers with rights. It was startling to see them out on labor’s front lines, dressed in their short classical tutus, faux tiaras, and running shoes and holding aloft a banner declaring them full-fledged members of the American Guild of Musical Artists. Still, crowds of onlookers cheered them on. To at least one observer, the appearance of dancers in the Labor Day Parade was a sign that ballet was itself marching into a new enlightened era of fair labor practices. But that was an illusion worthy of the stage. Within a few weeks of that event, ABT’s ninety-two dancers were again locked in a dispute with management over their collective rights as workers. A new contract was on the table, which the dancers were refusing to sign because it failed to meet their demands for increased pay. The company was crying poor, and when the dancers’ union asked to check the books, management refused it access. The dancers then filed unfair labor practice charges against ABT, prompting management to cancel the company’s season at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in October 1982. The dancers demonstrated outside New York’s Lincoln Center, their home base, and demanded that at the next round of bargaining their artistic director come to the table to negotiate directly with them.
Mikhail Baryshnikov had assumed directorship of the New York–based company in 1980 after an inspired period dancing under Balanchine at New York City Ballet, following his high-profile defection from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1974. Almost immediately, the Russian-trained dancer, among the best of his generation, began alienating other dancers in his charge. Baryshnikov was perceived as more interested in his own career than those of his fellow dancers. He was at the time a much sought-after guest artist and movie star who was also preoccupying himself with choreography—with lackluster results. Baryshnikov’s lack of attention to dancers’ needs was especially acute where ballerinas were concerned. He was known to fire them at will for not being young or thin enough. Ba
ryshnikov demanded discipline from his dancers and used putdowns in the classroom to put ballerinas in their place, and that place was beneath him (in more ways than one). If Baryshnikov felt that dancers did not jump to attention as he commanded, he simply let them go.
Among the casualties of Baryshnikov’s shoot-from-the-hip approach was his ex-girlfriend and frequent dancing partner, Gelsey Kirkland, then with a new beau, whom he dropped from the company after she failed to show up for a rehearsal. Taking her place was an ingénue ballerina, Cynthia Harvey, who showed she had the spunk to stand up to him. “Working for Baryshnikov is brutal,” it was reported in People magazine in 1981, the year Harvey first ascended the company hierarchy. “But that hasn’t intimidated Cynthia Harvey, the 23-year-old brunette he has chosen as his new partner. While rehearsing a tender pas de deux recently, he instructed her to ‘whisper something sweet in my ear.’ As the music swelled, she murmured, ‘Can I have a raise?’ She didn’t get one (her salary is $500 a week), but she has Misha’s number. ‘When he’s dancing with you,’ she reports, ‘he really stares into your eyes. I just look right back!’ ”3
Baryshnikov promoted another young dancer but only after he ordered her to lose ten pounds, fix her teeth, and change her name. The five-foot-five-inch Susan Jaffe agreed to everything he asked—save for the name change—winnowing her weight down from 112 to 102 pounds during a summer subsisting on iced tea: “I had to go in every two weeks,” she said, “and the management would look at me to see if I was getting thinner.”4 Jaffe ended up becoming one of Baryshnikov’s star dancers, gladly filling the hole created by Baryshnikov’s sidelining of two other ABT star ballerinas, Leslie Browne and Marianna Tcherkassy who were then (gasp!) entering their thirties.
But not everyone wanted to dance ballet Misha’s way. Baryshnikov’s fellow defector from the Soviet Union, Natalia Makarova, stormed out of ABT shortly after Baryshnikov took over, citing artistic differences. Meanwhile, the Dutch-born Martine van Hamel complained to the press that the company felt lost under Baryshnikov’s direction; at least that was how she was feeling after Baryshnikov started reducing the number of her roles she could dance, presumably because at forty she was no longer of much use to him: “It’s not an ideal situation,” van Hamel said at the time. “There has been disappointment at Baryshnikov’s lack of involvement in the company, but it’s difficult to find the ideal director.”5
Baryshnikov also locked horns with leading American-born ballerina Cynthia Gregory, another dancer then entering the prime of life; Gregory was already on Baryshnikov’s bad side for having openly questioned, in 1975, ABT’s preference for Russian-born dancers at the expense of homegrown talent. The defectors got more money and press than the American dancers at the time; Gregory wanted an even playing field. Baryshnikov never forgot the dancer’s outspokenness, and once he became her artistic director was said to have retaliated by reducing the number of roles she could perform in a season, essentially rendering her redundant. In 1985, their ongoing backstage battles started leaking into the press, and Gregory was soon seen licking her wounds. She was nearing forty and knew she had only a few years left on the stage. She was forced to eat crow to safeguard what was left of her career: “I know the performing isn’t going to last,” she said at the time. “I give myself a good four more years, then that’ll be it.” To make the best of those years, dancing roles that were challenging, stimulating, and satisfying, Gregory made her peace with Baryshnikov, agreeing to dance less at ABT and more with other companies: “In the past, I’ve gotten in trouble because I’m too outspoken,” the ballerina said. “So, I think it’s better to keep my mouth shut.”6
Baryshnikov left ABT in 1989, after promoting a new generation of young ballerinas to take the place of those whom he considered old for having turned forty. But despite Baryshnikov’s departure, ageism within ballet has remained firmly in place. National Ballet of Canada ballerina Gizella Witkowsky was told to step down as principal dancer after a twenty-year relationship with the Toronto-based company after she turned thirty-eight. Artistic director Reid Anderson pushed her into early retirement, saying he felt she was ready. But the ballerina was not anywhere near ready and made that clear in an embittered interview she gave at the time: “Even though I’m 38, I’m totally healthy, and in peak form as an artist,” Witkowsky said while fighting back tears. “ It’s not like I’m asking for ten more years. Just a couple at my peak. That’s all.”7 Her pleas fell on deaf ears.
But by today’s ballet standards, Witkowsky might even be considered lucky for having retired at age thirty-eight. She had a longer career than most ballerinas. A Dance/USA study published in the late 1990s showed that the average age of retirement for ballerinas had fallen to twenty-nine, down from forty. That seems grossly unfair, considering how long and hard ballerinas train for their careers, starting in childhood and pursuing their dance studies often to the exclusion of everything else, including a high-school education. For ballerinas, their bodies are their currency, the alpha and the omega of what they do. Their art demands youthfulness and vigor to execute it correctly and with élan. One of the biggest tragedies about ballet is that just as dancers are coming into their own as artists, they are often released from their responsibilities as professional company members precisely for having grown mature. “Seniority in a ballet company does you some good only if you can conceal it,” as the American dance critic Marcia Siegel has observed. “This means that a dancer’s experience and maturity have no value in the coin of [her] profession. Older dancers make good teachers, coaches, choreographers, but they cannot use their years on the stage, except in lesser roles.”8
But why does today’s ballerina have a shorter shelf life? A main reason is ballet itself: the art is increasingly more strenuous and demanding on the body, resulting in more career-ending injuries. Salaries have also dropped substantially in recent years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage of dancers was $12.22 in May 2008. Dancers who work with performing arts companies earned a median income of $15.30 per hour.9 Ballet is a low-paying job and it is hard for many dancers to sustain their lifestyle, especially in big cities where rents and food prices are generally high. In the dance capital of New York, for instance, it is not uncommon for professional dancers to wait on tables by day to afford the luxury of dancing on a theater stage at night. As dancers mature, they find they are less willing and able to carry the financial burden associated with their profession, and so they quit before they turn thirty to find a better life for themselves.
Contributing to the low income levels for dancers is an increased influx of female dancers. Dance academies yearly are churning out far more ballerinas than there are jobs, resulting in a highly competitive culture and marketplace. Bridgett Zehr is a principal dancer with English National Ballet in London, and she says that ballerinas’ opportunities to dance have diminished in recent years. “It’s a different generation than it was in the 1970s or 1980s,” Zehr observes. “Ballet seemed easier back then if you were a ballerina because at least you had guesting opportunities. People were willing to pay big money to see you because you were in demand. But today, especially for women ballet dancers, the guesting opportunities have practically dried up. It’s the men who are more sought after because they are more rare; there just are fewer of them to go round and so they get to dance more.”10
Although only twenty-seven years old, Zehr is already panicked about the end of her career and is intensively exploiting her capabilities, knowing they are short-lived. Born in Sarasota, Florida, to a former dancer and her construction worker partner (since divorced), Zehr comes from an impoverished background. She has risen through the ballet profession on the back of scholarships, which she worked devotedly to achieve, but is prone to injuries, having several times broken bones in her ankles and her metatarsals, which has put her on crutches and away from the ballet stage for months at a time. She knows firsthand that a ballet career is
fragile and easily felled and so has made a habit of company hopping, moving from the Houston Ballet to the National Ballet of Canada and now the English National Ballet, maximizing her chances at having a fruitful career. “The career is so short,” she says, “and I can’t stay in one place, knowing it will soon be over.”
Inspiring her is her sister who, before quitting ballet at age sixteen, was also a scholarship student, having trained hard. Rachel Zehr was reportedly as lithe and innately musical as Bridgett but she was unable to find her place as a ballerina and committed suicide. “She could have been so much but she didn’t take the opportunities she should have taken,” Zehr says. “Instead of being depressed I want to do something out of my comfort zone. I want to do what she couldn’t, in a way.”
Job security is not part of the job description for women entering ballet. Stateuniversity.com, a U.S. academic and career counseling website, is blunt in informing prospective dancers that the profession isn’t as pretty as it looks: “Dancing is very difficult, strenuous work, and the hours of rehearsal can be tedious and exhausting. Most dancers remain in the field only because they love to dance and would not be happy in any other occupation.”11 Even leading dancers in major ballet companies live precariously. If age and injury don’t get them, then there’s always the fear that a career will be cut short at the whim of the artistic director.
A native of New Westminster, British Columbia, who had previously danced with the Stuttgart Ballet, Reid Anderson cut a swath through the National Ballet of Canada after assuming the directorship in 1989. At least six dancers lost their jobs, apparently for reasons having to do with artistic discretion—often code for not being to the director’s liking. One dancer who got the axe, apparently for having done nothing more than look voluptuous, was principal dancer Kim Lightheart, who was fired for having big breasts—of that she was sure. As a naturally curvy ballerina—a Raquel Welch among Twiggys—Lightheart had early in her career rejected the fetish of flat-chestedness that had grown popular during the Balanchine era; encouraging her was the National Ballet’s previous artistic director, the Danish-born Erik Bruhn (1928–1986), one of the finest danseurs nobles of the twentieth century, who repeatedly urged her to be proud of her body, telling her she looked like a woman. But Anderson preferred the stick look and soon was dropping Lightheart from performances, including one scheduled for her hometown of London, Ontario. The stress only made things worse. Lightheart gained weight, growing to 112 pounds, seven pounds heavier than her ideal weight of 105, prompting management to intensify their criticisms of her body. When she was fired, she was angry because she felt she did not get any support; she also, for a period, felt lonely and unloved. Lightheart had trained long and hard for ballet since childhood, but then in a moment she was out. Pleasing the eye of one master, she shone; displeasing another, she withered and was banished from the stage, every ballerina’s worst nightmare.12
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