Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet

by Ringer, Jenifer

  I went to the side of the studio to collect my bag, my feet aching and my muscles stiff from continuous dancing. The masking tape I’d wrapped around my toes to prevent blisters had disintegrated over the long hours, and I thought I might have a blister. I was fatigued but felt wired and knew that I couldn’t allow myself to let down until the performance was over. Ballo was the first ballet of the evening, so I had two hours to make sure a costume would fit me, put on my makeup, fix my hair, warm up, and then go over the ballet as many times as I could before the curtain went up.

  Rosemary walked over to me before I left the room and said, “I just wanted to let you know that this will be your fifth ballet, so you will be getting your contract. You are a company member now.”

  There it was. All those months—years—of preparation, doubt, agony, hard work. A thrill zinged up my spine upon hearing those words. I was in. I was done with the uncertainty of being an apprentice. But I tried to seem self-assured and nodded happily to Rosemary, thanking her and attempting to sound mature and businesslike. Anyway, I needed to focus on this performance. I wanted to be perfect and prove that I was good company-member material.

  The performance went well. The ballet was a sunny, fun ballet to dance, and though I was concentrating fiercely on the steps, I managed to have fun during the sections that I felt confident in. And I did do an almost perfect performance, with only one small misstep that I was aware of—I hit one of my poses with the wrong arm up. Monique and I both felt great about our accomplishment. I don’t know why it was so important to me to be perfect; no one was expecting us to be flawless with so little rehearsal. But I expected it of myself and wanted to show that I could be relied on. After the performance that night, I felt proud and relieved and fell asleep reminding myself that I was a full company member at last.

  I didn’t have long to enjoy my new status. That week in mid-January actually held three milestones for my sixteen-year-old self. I got the official notice that I had graduated from high school half a semester early, I became a full company member, and I began my first semester as a freshman in college. Since my whole family and I had always assumed I would go to college, and since we had thought I would be an apprentice with a lighter dance schedule for quite a while, my parents had encouraged me to go ahead and enroll right away. I’d heard of other dancers starting to attend school while they danced, and I figured if I started young, even if I went part time, I would eventually graduate before I was finished dancing, whenever that might occur. Fordham University had a campus right beside Lincoln Center; they had classes that met once a week and even offered the City Ballet dancers special summer courses that worked around their touring schedules. Plus, a group of City Ballet board members led by Robert Lipp had come together to start a scholarship called Dance On to help City Ballet dancers with tuition. So I started with one course a semester on Mondays, City Ballet’s one guaranteed day off a week. Though I am so glad I went to college and am grateful for the education, looking back now, I cannot help but wonder if had perhaps taken on too much all at once.

  Now that I was a company member, my life at the theater exploded. Since I wasn’t an apprentice anymore, I could be put into an unlimited number of ballets. With all of the injuries, new dancers were needed to take up the slack. And I had a new reputation as a fast learner.

  My days were as long as before, but I was no longer stuck in the tedium of understudying ballets at the back of the room. I was right in the center of the room, learning different ballets all day long, dancing full out from ten thirty in the morning until six at night. And I was performing more and more at night, until I had a full corps member’s schedule of eight shows a week. It was exhausting, but it was all so new and such a dream come true that I didn’t mind.

  I loved the performances. I loved the sense of belonging in the company and starting to feel like I had a place there. One of my favorite times of the day was the two hours before the show, when rehearsals were done. The crowded girls’ dressing room was often filled with joking and laughter as we all started our preperformance hair and makeup rituals. We knew that the work part of the day was over, and all that was left was the reward for our diligence: we were about to get onstage and really dance. The performances for the most part were not stressful for me. I knew the steps, and none of them were difficult. The ballets might be physically taxing, but the steps in my roles as a new corps member were not tricky. I got to go out there and just dance.

  On the other hand, I was still learning how to navigate company life. I was making friends with some of the younger dancers and dealing with my fear of the older dancers. The senior members were not mean, but for the most part they didn’t have much time for the younger company members. We shared barre space and might dance side by side, but generally the more experienced dancers didn’t bother with us first- and second-year corps members. Some of the older women would go out of their way to offer help when we needed it, but most of them rarely cracked a smile in my direction. It wasn’t out of dislike or superiority, usually. They were just too busy and focused on their work; a senior corps member worked similar hours to mine but had more difficult parts to dance. A couple of years into the company, I discovered that most of these senior women were very nice, and we became friends. I often jokingly reminded them of how they used to terrify me in my early years.

  And then there were the scary principal dancers, the ones who had made it all the way to the top rank of the company and danced lead roles every night. They probably were not scary in reality, but I had no way of knowing. We didn’t interact with them much because they were always off rehearsing separately from us. But when they were around, I was very nervous and made sure to stay out of their way. If a principal needed to put resin on her pointe shoes while I was at the resin box, I stepped aside.

  I became good friends with the ice bucket. After nine or ten hours of dancing in pointe shoes, my feet and ankles would be swollen and achy when I got home. Though the muscles in other parts of my body might be stiff and sore, I found that my real pain was located from the calf down. One of the girls told me how to do the ice bucket: fill the biggest container I could find with cold water and a large quantity of ice and then put my feet into the liquid for ten minutes.

  It sounded easy enough, and the other dancers swore it made a difference in how their feet felt the next day. So I bought a knee-high plastic trash can and put it in my kitchen. After hobbling home from the performance one night, I dumped all of the ice from my freezer into the trash can and poured cold water over everything. I lugged it into my living room and placed it in front of my couch on top of a towel. Then I just stared into the bucket for a while, gathering up my courage.

  I put my hand into the water. It was frigid. I looked at my red feet straddling the bucket and saw all the veins sticking out around the hard-worked metatarsals. I picked up my legs and put my toes into the water, immediately jerking them out and putting them back onto the towel. This was going to be horrible.

  Finally, promising my feet that they would feel better afterward, I plunged my feet into the bucket, sinking them all the way to the bottom so that the freezing water came up over my calves. My thighs seized up, and I clenched my fists to fight the urge to pull my feet back out of the bucket. The cold water felt like knives. I looked at my clock. One minute had passed. Nine more to go.

  After the stinging knives came a dull, achy pain that I had to hold my breath against. I hit my legs with my hands, trying to distract myself from what my feet were going through. I flapped my arms in the air and made weird noises as I tried to breathe normally. I glanced at the clock again. Only a minute more had passed.

  I needed a real distraction. I snatched up my remote control and pointed it at the television, flipping the channels just to keep my mind off my legs, which, strangely, now felt like they were on fire. The rest of my body was tense, and my shoulders were pressed up toward my ears. I heard myself humming odd li
ttle tunes through my clenched teeth.

  Suddenly, around the three-minute mark, my legs went numb. And then, around four minutes, they started to feel pleasantly warm. My body relaxed. Had I given my legs hypothermia? I looked at my feet in the ice water, and they seemed quite intact. I turned my attention back to the television, able to breathe normally again. Finally the clock hit the ten-minute mark, and I took my feet out of the water.

  I touched my ankles. The skin was ice cold. Strangely, they felt warm, and they were a bright pink up to the waterline. I sat on the couch a while longer, but when I finally did get up, I happily realized that they felt better than they had before. Perhaps they were just glad to be out of the freezing water. But I did think that the icing had done some good. And the next morning for ballet class, instead of starting off the day with already swollen feet, I felt that I had brand-new, well-working feet.

  Soon I grew very accustomed to the ice bucket and actually looked forward to ending the day with my cold friend. I worked out a system where I would make a large dinner of my favorite foods and place the plate on a TV table; then I would make my ice bucket and place it under the table, sit down, turn on the TV, and plunge my feet into the water. And instead of crying out in alarm every time I put my feet into the bucket, I would actually say, “Ahh.” Those dinners and that ice bucket were my comfort and reward at the end of days that were often both physically and emotionally difficult. There was constant pressure to prove myself and please the ballet masters in the studio, and every day was different and unpredictable. Much of the time, the one constant in my life was coming home to my TV dinner with the ice bucket.

  For my first year in the company, I stayed at home in my parents’ apartment. However, we soon learned that they were going to be transferred away again. They would first be going back to Washington, DC, for a year of language training, and then they would be heading off to Europe. My sister and I would stay in New York because we both had our work there.

  We thought it might be a good idea for me to move out of my parents’ apartment for a while before they moved away so that I could begin to get my footing alone while they were still in town, just in case I needed them. So in 1991, my second year in the company, we started looking for my first apartment. Since my parents were worried about leaving their teenage daughter alone in New York City, they wanted me to have a doorman building in a very safe neighborhood, preferably close to the theater.

  Out apartment hunting on our own nickel, with no government subsidies, we discovered what New York City apartments were really like. We quickly learned that if we really wanted to meet all of our criteria, we would have to raise our price and reduce our spatial expectations. But for all of us, safety was our biggest concern, so I ended up getting an overpriced studio apartment in a doorman building one block away from the theater. I could afford it on my salary, but I would not be saving much money every month.

  I was ecstatic to have my own apartment. I was eighteen and itching for some independence. I had my own money, and I could decorate however I wanted, buy my own groceries . . . I was a grown-up. I was making a paycheck and paying all of my own bills with my own checking account. No one would be keeping tabs on what I ate or when I slept or what shows were on my television. In reality, my parents didn’t really watch me in that way, but just living in the same house with them made my teenage self feel watched. I wanted to be out on my own, with the freedom to make private decisions however I wished.

  I decorated my apartment “rustic country” with lots of fishing memorabilia, which my New York friends found hilarious. I made a giant mobile out of baby sand dollars that I’d found on the beach in South Carolina. My refrigerator was mostly empty because I would just buy what I needed day by day; there were two delis within a block of my apartment and a grocery store six blocks away. Two bookcases divided up the apartment and hid my sleeping area. My sister bought me a fish tank with two fat goldfish in it—my first pets.

  That second year in the company was even busier than the first. I was now established as a corps member and had a regular rep of the larger ballets that demanded bigger groups of dancers. I rehearsed all day and performed almost every night. I saw my parents regularly but not every day, and my sister was busy with her own life of piano and teaching.

  I often didn’t make it to church; Sunday was at the end of a long, physically grueling week, and there was still a Sunday matinee and evening performance to get through. My parents put no pressure on me to attend, and I think we had all subconsciously bought into the idea that ballet was a valid reason to miss church. I had access to God everywhere, right? Being a Christian wasn’t just about going to a building every Sunday. Ballet was a rare and special thing, something to be pursued and something to sacrifice for. But my priorities were becoming skewed. I was losing out on a Christian community that would have helped me to stay grounded, and my new individual adult life wasn’t being founded on patterns that would give me some continuity when work became difficult. I was allowing God to slip away, and it was too easy to let ballet fill the void left behind.

  Mondays, my day off, were spent cramming in my homework, getting a massage, and then going to my night college course. My world was narrowing to focus largely on City Ballet alone. Sometimes after the performance I would go out to dinner with my company friends, but much of the time I was just too tired and looked forward to the solitude of my apartment.

  I started to get small featured parts during that second year in the company. One of the first was a part in Peter Martins’s new choreography that would premiere during the regular repertory season. In addition to being the ballet master in chief, Peter also choreographed regularly, almost one ballet a year, and it was considered an honor to be called to be in one of his ballets. This ballet would eventually be called Fearful Symmetries, a twenty-seven-minute work that would be one of Peter’s most successful. He had organized the ballet into different groupings: two principal couples, one soloist couple, three demi-soloist boys, four corps couples, and six corps girls. The music by John Adams was fast and driving and the choreography was quick and ate up space, with the dancers rushing on and off the stage. Every part in the ballet was a good one because every part had exciting, visible dancing.

  I was originally called to understudy the six girls, but after a couple of days two of the girls pulled out of the ballet. I was one of the girls chosen to replace them, and suddenly I was being choreographed on by the director. Working with Peter was nerve-racking at first but ultimately very exciting.

  So far, I hadn’t dealt with Peter that much. He occasionally taught company class, giving steps that were often impossibly difficult. He watched every stage rehearsal to make sure he approved of what was going to be seen in performance, sometimes offering corrections and sometimes not saying much at all. During these stage rehearsals he could be moody, and I could rarely figure out why he was in a good or bad mood. But all of the dancers tried to please him no matter what mood he was in.

  When he began working on Fearful Symmetries, he was upbeat for every rehearsal and seemed inspired by the music and the dancers. He liked to move the rehearsals along quickly and appreciated when his ideas and rhythms were picked up rapidly. The only times he got frustrated were when he couldn’t get his ideas across. It was fun for me to see this side of him, involved and energetic, rather than the more removed persona he often adopted for stage rehearsals.

  As a new corps member, I knew I had to do every rehearsal full out, no matter who was running the rehearsal at the front of the room. I was still proving myself and couldn’t come in and mark rehearsals like some of the more senior dancers did. Marking, I learned, was when dancers saved their bodies by just indicating the steps without actually dancing them to the fullest; senior dancers could do this because they had years of trust built up between them and the ballet masters. I didn’t. However, everyone in the room danced at a higher level when Peter was watching, especiall
y when he was choreographing. We all pushed ourselves for the duration of the rehearsals, and I would be red-faced and exhausted after them. It ended up being a very difficult ballet physically; some sections, once we started putting them together and running them, were nearly impossible to get through.

  This ballet even included my very first solo on the New York State Theater stage. It was minuscule, only six musical counts long, as I led the progression of six girls onstage for one of our entrances. It only had three ballet steps in it, but I counted it as a solo. It was My Moment, and I was very proud of it.

  As we got closer to the premiere, a sense of tension grew in the studio in both the dancers and Peter. The time was coming up when we couldn’t laugh at our mistakes and experiment with different solutions for certain technical or choreographic problems. Soon we would be onstage, performing for an audience, and we would need to appear perfect. And then there was the question: Was it even a good ballet? It was hard to tell because we were all so wrapped up in it.

  I remember one rehearsal when we had done a run-through and then taken a five-minute break while Peter talked some things over with Rosemary, the ballet mistress. I was depleted, my legs ached, and I was having trouble with shin splints because of the movement style of the ballet. Peter didn’t look happy, and the premiere was the next week. We still had an hour left in the rehearsal, but I was hoping we would just go back and work on a few problem sections. Better yet, perhaps he would let us go, and we would come back tomorrow freshly rested to work on things anew.

  “Okay,” Peter said from the front of the room. “From the beginning.”