Ballerina
Page 14
But even artistic directors can get the blues. Patricia Neary was a gifted dancer before she became a ballet teacher and then director of several of the world’s leading ballet companies, including Geneva Ballet, Zurich Ballet, and La Scala Ballet. A Balanchine protégée, Neary had all the right attributes: long legs, loose hips, musical sensitivity. But she also had a big mouth, at least where the ballet world is concerned. When she became artistic director of the fledgling Ballet British Columbia in 1989, the wiry blonde, who had hip replacement surgery before the age of forty as a result of her dancing, was characteristically outspoken when describing the real world of ballet to a reporter who had come to interview her about her new top job. Her troupe was then on a Canadian tour and Neary was in a hotel room surrounded by cans of peas, a jar of instant coffee, and a growing pile of artificial sweetener packets. She had no money, she said, and was struggling to live on the $30 per diem the company allotted her while on tour.13 When members of her board of directors read that Neary had lifted the veil on the unglamorous life of the ballet dancer, they soon after gave her the boot. Neary was out of Ballet B.C. within a year, punished for speaking out.
Outspokenness, body image, and ageism were the main issues affecting ballerinas post-Balanchine. They all seemed to come to a head in the case of Kimberly Glasco, the American-born ballerina fired in December 1998 for daring to speak out on behalf of fellow dancers about working conditions at the National Ballet of Canada, where she had been a much loved principal dancer, one of only four in the company. It was a devastating blow that precipitated an abrupt end to a brilliant international career launched when Glasco had won the silver medal for overall dancing excellence at the 1981 Moscow International Ballet Competition, one of her profession’s most esteemed events. Born in 1960 in Eugene, Oregon, into a working-class family, she had been with Canada’s largest classical dance troupe for eighteen years (she had left briefly to dance with American Ballet Theatre, returning to the National Ballet of Canada in 1983), rising steadily through the ranks following her graduation from the Toronto-based National Ballet School in 1979. A dark-haired beauty with a clean, solid grasp of balletic technique—a 24-karat ballerina—she had, before her dismissal, performed majestically in the company’s fall season, dancing, to laudatory reviews, the notoriously difficult role of Nikiya, the spectral heroine of Petipa’s nineteenth-century crystalline classic, La Bayadère.14 She was, from all appearances, at the peak of her powers. “At this point in my career, I feel fantastic,” said Glasco, who was thirty-eight at the time. “I am not ready to retire.”15 But James Kudelka, the celebrated Canadian-born choreographer who also trained at the National Ballet School before becoming a National Ballet dancer himself, thought otherwise.
He had been the company’s artistic director since 1996 and had frequently cast Glasco prominently in his ballets, including as recently as the fall of 1998, when the company made a long-awaited return to New York City, presenting mostly Kudelka ballets, which Glasco had performed to widespread critical acclaim.16 But less than six weeks later, in a December 1 meeting in his office lasting all of five minutes, Kudelka abruptly informed Glasco that her services were no longer needed.17
Kudelka told Glasco that he would not be renewing her three-year contract when it expired at the end of June. Until then, for the remainder of the season, he would cast her in nothing save one performance of Manon, a ballet about an eighteenth-century Paris courtesan, which she would dance in April in Montreal, far from her devoted fan base in Toronto. It would be her final performance.
Kudelka had given Glasco six months’ notice as required by the company’s collective agreement, but she felt he had fired her without cause. Soon after that meeting, she launched a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal, which seized the attention of the ballet world. Ballerinas rarely complain about their employers or their working conditions; they seem almost incapable of speaking out against abusive practices within their profession, let alone contemplating litigation. This is what makes Glasco noteworthy: she represents a rare example of a ballerina who staged a rebellion in the name of justice.
That she is remarkable in this respect is borne out by the fact that, throughout ballet history and continuing to today, there is scant evidence of ballerinas ever fighting back against exploitation within the art form. There’s even less evidence of ballerinas fighting back successfully.
Star Bolshoi ballerina Anastasia Volochkova was twenty-seven when she was fired in September 2003 for failing to sign a reduced contract; management had said she was too big for her partners to carry. The highly publicized contract dispute attracted the attention of Russia’s Labor Ministry and its Culture Ministry, generating a turf war between the two authorities over the dancer’s body and rights.18 Even though she was eventually reinstated to the Bolshoi in November 2003, and paid an estimated $9,000 in lost wages, Volochkova was not given roles and had to leave the company to find work elsewhere.19
Vienna State Opera soloist Karina Sarkissova was also twenty-seven when she lost her job in 2010 for appearing nude in the Austrian men’s magazine Wiener and in Penthouse.20 The Sarkissova case illustrates how ballerinas, even today, are subject to a higher moral standard than that applied to other women. She fought to get her job back and won when she was able to show that her artistic director, Manuel Legris, had himself posed nude for a series of erotic photographs involving both men and women that were published in books in the 1980s while he was a star dancer with the Paris Opéra Ballet.21 Sarkissova fought her case in the court of public opinion in the form of an open letter published in the local press rather than through the judicial system. She got her job back after successfully showing that the Vienna State Opera, and to some extent Viennese society, had been guilty of naked prejudice by having automatically sided with the male artistic director over the female ballet dancer.
Barbara Moore was fired from her position as principal dancer of the Alberta Ballet shortly after having a baby in 2000, at age thirty-two. Then director Mikko Nissinen said the reason was not because she left ballet to have a child but because he did not think she suited his vision for the company. After she launched a lawsuit, Moore and the Alberta Ballet reached a financial settlement through mediation, the terms of which were never disclosed. After Nissinen left the company to take over the Boston Ballet in October 2002, his successor, Jean Grand-Maître, invited Moore back to the company as a coach, a job she performed briefly before leaving to have a second child. She never danced professionally again.
By comparison, Glasco’s case is unique. She did not wage her battle quietly behind the scenes, as Moore had done, but publicly, in the courts. In suing her employer, the National Ballet of Canada, Glasco launched a celebrated legal battle, which yielded a series of unprecedented legal successes. For eighteen intense months, from December 1998 to July 2000, she was the world’s most controversial ballerina, with the eyes of her profession keenly fixed upon her. She was fighting for her rights against a company that, in an attempt to belittle her, called her an aging ballerina who couldn’t accept the inevitable: “I don’t think her work was as strong lately,” said Kudelka in a newspaper interview, hitting the ballerina where it would hurt most. “Dancers want to dance forever, and I don’t think that they can.”22
In Canada in 2005, dancers were still close to the bottom of the pay scale for professional artists, earning a median employment income of $19,767, down from the $26,912 reported in 2000, according to the most recent census data compiled by Statistics Canada.23 In the United States, the situation is similar: full-time dancers had a median income of $25,000 in 1999, based on the most recently available national data from the Census Bureau.24 Salaries can vary. According to the Canadian Ballet Agreement with the National Ballet of Canada, 2010–2013, weekly incomes can range from $884 for a member of the corps de ballet to $1,362 for a principal dancer. Not all dancers are paid a fifty-two-week salary, however, causing annual incomes to fluctuate greatly
. Only principal dancers and dancers with more than a six-year association with the company qualify for a yearly salary. Those with fewer than six years have unpaid leaves from the company, mostly during the summer months. Glasco was one of the highest paid dancers of her day, having successfully negotiated her own contract above scale. Kudelka made an issue of her earning as much as she did. In the same interview, Kudelka also criticized Glasco’s annual salary, which, at around $96,000, was far above the industry average for ballerinas. Kudelka said that Glasco didn’t merit the cost. She was a classically trained ballerina excelling in tutu roles; as such, Kudelka claimed that she was something of an anachronism, incapable of moving with the times: “I just wish people [meaning Glasco] would be more realistic about the fact the world is changing,” he said.
Kudelka’s stated plan was to replace Glasco with four younger dancers at $24,000 apiece for the cheaper-by-the-dozen corps de ballet; Kudelka would also terminate four other senior dancers who, like Glasco, drew high salaries; their names were not disclosed. His objective, he added, was the creation of a new generation of National Ballet dancers who could dance every ballet in the National’s mixed repertoire, particularly his own contemporary works. Except, and it should be noted, Glasco was a versatile artist. She danced classic and contemporary ballets, including Kudelka’s own. A few weeks before her firing, in fact, she had received glowing reviews for performing his work, in which he had personally cast her, during an important company tour to New York City.
Chief among them was his new version of Swan Lake, with sets and costumes by frequent collaborator Santo Loquasto, which Kudelka was eager to unveil for the upcoming 1999/2000 season. The budget for the ballet had been set at an estimated $1.75 million, an exorbitant sum for a company then struggling with a $3-million deficit, the highest incurred by the National during its then forty-eight-year history.
At the time, morale was at an all-time low, as Glasco well knew. In 1997, her peers had elected her as one of two representatives authorized to speak on behalf of her fellow dancers at National Ballet board meetings, and in that capacity she suggested the dancers were increasingly losing confidence in the company as a result of dwindling finances.25 The chief problem was reduced wages for more work. As a cost-saving measure, management was proposing to reduce the dancers’ paid work weeks to thirty from fifty-two, essentially laying them off for five and a half months without pay. This the dancers, as a whole, found unacceptable.
Glasco made more money than the majority of her colleagues and so wasn’t herself at risk of financial ruin should the National Ballet start laying off dancers; her concern was for colleagues who would suffer if their salaries were cut. She presented their concerns about wages and the terms of their employment in two Dancers’ Reports the board requested from her in 1997—the first in May, the second in June. During these meetings, she openly questioned the financial cost of mounting a new, expensive production of Swan Lake, positioning it as a gross misplacement of priorities that would result in reducing dancers’ wages. Glasco cited the example of Kudelka’s relatively new 1997 version of The Nutcracker, which had cost the company close to $2 million, but which in its first season had resulted in a $560,000 loss.26 Besides, the company already had a Swan Lake in its repertoire as staged by Bruhn, which it had been performing for years and to critical acclaim—it wasn’t broken so it didn’t need fixing. In any event, Glasco said that dancers’ salaries shouldn’t be sacrificed for company expenditures on new, even superfluous, ballets at a time of severe belt tightening. She pleaded for fiscal responsibility, pointing out that the orchestra represented a larger percentage of the payroll than did the dancers, so why did they have to take the fall?
Glasco appears to have had an impact. The board decided that as a result of losses sustained by The Nutcracker, all future new productions would have to be self-financed, their budgets secured separately from regular fundraising efforts. Kudelka threatened to quit as artistic director if he didn’t get his ballet, and the board reversed its decision.
Even though he ultimately got his way—the ballet would have its world premiere in May 1999—Kudelka was obviously smarting from having to fight for what he considered his right to plan ballets as he pleased—but especially Swan Lake, which he had been contemplating for three years prior to the Glasco fiasco, as the ensuing melee came to be known.27 When he summoned Glasco to his office in December 1998, following yet another October board meeting at which the budget for Swan Lake had again been on the agenda, he made his feelings clear. He fired her, telling Glasco that her lack of support for his ballet showed that she did not support him as artistic director.
Kudelka had delivered a death sentence, but Glasco refused to simply fade away like Giselle or any of the other frail heroines from the nineteenth-century ballets for which she was internationally known. Uncharacteristically for a ballerina, Glasco fought back. She filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, claiming reprisals as a result of her advocacy work on behalf of other dancers, and took her case to arbitration, hiring one of the country’s top lawyers to represent her.28 Glasco also sued in the courts for libel and slander (the National Ballet had publicly called her “deadwood” and repeatedly insinuated that she was a liar) and filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission alleging age discrimination.
At thirty-eight, Glasco was considered old for a working ballerina. But there were plenty of examples of ballerinas who had successfully defied the odds: Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet danced until age fifty-nine; the enormously gifted Soviet ballerina Ekaterina Maximova, a Bolshoi alumna married to the male dancer Vladimir Vassiliev, danced until she was sixty; the Italian-born Alessandra Ferri retired in 2007 at age forty-four; in 2010, illustrious French ballerina Sylvie Guillem was still on her toes at the ripe age of forty-six. The National Ballet of Canada’s history also includes senior ballerinas of its own, among them Karen Kain, one of her country’s most popular dancers, who retired from dancing in 1997 at the age of forty-six; Kain’s former colleague and fellow principal dancer Veronica Tennant danced until she was forty-one, quitting the stage in 1989. Glasco was young in comparison with some of these ballerina stalwarts; she felt she had many good years left in her. Even her coaches and teachers thought so, among them fabled Canadian ballet mistress Betty Oliphant: “I think that Kim has many more years of dancing,” the founder of the National Ballet School said in an interview at the time of Glasco’s dismissal. “She is a fine classical dancer who has also danced well in contemporary ballets. For me she is one of the superb artists of her generation.”29
The issue at hand was really the right of a ballet dancer to speak out about working conditions. But the National Ballet deftly shifted the focus to the role of the artistic director in the twenty-first century, which suddenly became the all-important issue.
The National’s lawyers argued before the courts that the very future of ballet itself depended on artistic directors having ultimate authority over a company and its dancers; there could only ever be one authority in ballet, and it belonged to the person at the top of its hierarchy, hurt feelings be damned. “I can only quote Nureyev,” said National Ballet of Canada founder Celia Franca who had publicly thrown her weight behind Kudelka. “ ‘Celia! Ballet must be autocrat!’ There has to be one person. The artistic director is the one who has to make the choice and take the blame. You can’t have a democracy in a ballet company.”30
Pending a full hearing of the merits of the case, Glasco’s lawyers had applied to the arbitrator for interim reinstatement, arguing that a ballerina prevented from dancing for any length of time risked losing her artistic skills, reputation, and even identity. Glasco by this time had turned thirty-nine and didn’t have many years left to dance. She couldn’t move to a new company because the National Ballet had effectively seen to it that no one would hire her; Kudelka himself had publicly declared her as a ballerina past her best-
before date.31 “There was no way I could go to another company and find work elsewhere,” says Glasco. “I was labeled a troublemaker. I was regarded as the bull in the china shop that is ballet. But I wasn’t. I was just the mouse that squeaked.”32 Much legal wrangling ensued, and although Kudelka was ultimately required by the arbitrator to take the ballerina back, he steadfastly refused.
The case held the nation riveted; ballerinas were suddenly being talked about in ways they hadn’t been since the nineteenth century, when society was glued to their every move, both on and offstage. The Glasco story amply demonstrated that there seemed no limit to the public’s fascination with the backstage realities underlying the ballerina’s idealized image. The case did feel curiously old-fashioned, especially with regard to the national debate involving the rights of the ballerina versus the role of the artistic director. Glasco was the underdog, the David fighting the Goliath of not just a government-funded cultural institution but also an art form with a history of female oppression committed in the name of art. For that, she should have been celebrated. But a great many observers saw fit to chastise her for not knowing her place. A headline on a story about Glasco at the time referred to her as “an uppity ballerina.”33