Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet

by Ringer, Jenifer

  So I spoke another word. “Spin!” I told James, and I got up en pointe and started turning around and around in the middle of the stage, hoping I still looked somewhat tragically in love with my Romeo. After the briefest of pauses, James started to run around me, looking ardent and as if he had intended to passionately run around me all along. Eventually, one of us was able to figure out where we were supposed to be in the choreography, and we resumed the real steps. James still blames me for the entire incident. But as far as I’m concerned, it was a meeting of the mindless . . .

  My other favorite blanking memory happened while Peter Boal and I were dancing Twyla Tharp’s Beethoven’s Seventh. Her choreography for us was lightning quick, and the music often rushed us along with its intensity; she had choreographed the ballet on Peter and me, and we knew it inside out. Many of our entrances began in a similar fashion, with Peter carrying me onto the stage in a grand jeté lift. After one such entrance, Peter put me down gently on the floor and moved around in front of me to begin our dance. I looked at him and said, “Blank.”

  Peter stopped and looked at me for a second, and then, never changing facial expression, he went into a wild, spontaneous, fast-moving solo. I stood there watching him for a second and then started my own jiggling improv behind him, giggling uncontrollably. Finally, when it was apparently time for us to leave the stage, Peter mercifully danced around behind me, picked me up, and carried me offstage. Thank goodness he could think on his feet!

  Dancers aren’t the only ones who blank; sometimes our musicians blank as well. At City Ballet, we’re privileged not only to dance to some of the most beautiful music ever composed but also to have some of the finest musicians play that music for us. These artists are dedicated to their craft and will spend hours practicing, obviously because they want to play the music beautifully but for another reason as well: they feel an intense responsibility to support the dancers by playing the music consistently, precisely, and artistically. And the musicians are truly wonderful and rarely make mistakes that affect the dancers.

  But every now and then, it happens, because nobody is perfect. During a performance of a Balanchine ballet called Robert Schumann’s “Davidsbündlertänze,” I was dancing a section with three other dancers. Peter Boal was once again my partner. The music is scored for a single piano, and the piano is placed right on the stage with the dancers. The music for this section is slow and contemplative and has many repeats built in. The pianist must have forgotten whether or not he had already played one of the repeats and was trying to make up for it, because he repeated one of the phrases a third time. This was extra music for the dancers, and we had no choreography for it. We all realized what was happening and looked into each other’s eyes, wondering who was going to take the lead. We all knew someone had to decide to do something, and no one wanted to be that person. Plus, two dancers could have decided to take control with different solutions, leading to a disaster that would have made the mistake obvious to the audience.

  Thankfully, Peter Boal took the initiative, but I wasn’t happy with how he chose to fix the problem. He gallantly took my hand, gently turning me to face the audience, and gave me a gentle push forward toward center stage. Then he stepped back, gestured in a way that said, “Please, dance,” and looked at me. The other two dancers remained motionless, smiled, and waited for me to dance. So I danced. I’m not sure now what I did, but I managed to fill up the time until the familiar music came on again. Maybe this was Peter’s revenge for my blank during Twyla’s piece.

  We have to be ready to catch whatever is thrown at us when we perform. I had a bit of a challenge once during a performance of Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering while we were on tour in Tokyo, Japan. The ballet is done by ten dancers, differentiated only by the soft shades of their costumes. I was dancing the part of the Mauve Girl, and the Green Boy was my primary partner in the piece. However, when I came to the stage level during the intermission before Dances to put on my pointe shoes, I discovered Amar Ramasar in the Green Boy’s costume. Amar wasn’t the dancer I’d been scheduled to perform with in that performance, and Amar looked a little stressed out.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Your partner just pulled his calf and can’t do Dances. I was here anyway to do Symphony in Three, so I’m doing Dances,” Amar replied.

  Well, this was a surprise. But I wasn’t that worried about it. Yes, Dances at a Gathering is a difficult hour-long ballet, but I’d performed it for years, and Amar and I had danced it many times together. Amar was a great partner, and I knew we would be fine, even without any rehearsals. I told Amar that.

  “I know this will be okay,” Amar said. “I’m just worried about doing Symphony in Three afterwards.”

  I understood. Dances is a challenging piece, and to then turn around and do the pas de deux in Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements would be very hard. I knew now why Amar looked worried.

  “Just take it one entrance at a time,” I suggested, and Amar nodded.

  “Yes. I’ll get through it. I just want to do well in both.”

  By the time I had my pointe shoes on, there were only a couple of minutes before the curtain went up.

  “Should we try anything?” Amar asked.

  “No, I really think we will be fine,” I said. “Let’s just dance and enjoy it.” Plus, I figured that if we did try some moves and they went badly, it would just make us nervous.

  Amar agreed. He gave me a hug and a wink and said, “It’s going to be fun.”

  He was great in the performance, and we had no problems except for the one musical surprise that happened during our mazurka pas de deux. This time, instead of having too much music, we had too little. The pianist mistakenly cut out one of the repeats in the music, and we were suddenly dancing the wrong steps to the wrong music. Amar and I kept doing the choreography in sequence, not sure how to pick up where the music was in a coordinated fashion.

  Finally I heard something in the music that sounded like a good place for us to join in, and I turned around and said to Amar, “Flip me.”

  After the fact, I realized that this was actually a cruel place for me to decide to pick up the choreography. The “flip” was one of the more difficult partnering moves; Amar had to pick me up, toss me into a half turn, and catch me in midair. There were many things I could have chosen that didn’t require split-second timing and coordination between the two dancers. And as I went into the preparation for the step, the thought occurred to me that because Amar and I hadn’t rehearsed this pas de deux since the last time we had performed it over a year ago, there was a chance that this flip could go very badly.

  Luckily Amar knew exactly what he was doing, and the flip went just fine, as if we had rehearsed it that afternoon. Caught up with the music, we continued with the pas de deux, trying to look as if nothing unusual had happened. The pianist felt terrible, but we assured her that all was fine and that everyone makes mistakes. And Amar went on to do a stellar Symphony in Three Movements; he was exhausted afterward, but what a story to tell.

  —

  Perhaps one of the strangest performances I was a part of took place while I was on a gig in Verona, Italy. Nikolaj Hübbe, a Danish ballet star who had moved over to City Ballet, asked me to dance with him in a string of five performances for Carla Fracci’s company. It was a wonderful and thrilling opportunity, especially because it was a difficult period in my life personally; I was discouraged and in the early throes of my struggle with weight. Nikolaj had always been supportive of me and we had danced together often; I think he was trying to give me some inspiration and encouragement.

  The pieces we were dancing were way out of my realm of experience. They were from the older, traditionally classical ballet world, not the neoclassical Balanchine world. The first ballet I was performing was the famous Pas de Quatre, choreographed in 1845 on the four greatest ballerinas of the time. It was perfo
rmed at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London only four times by the original cast of ballerinas, who were each worshipped as stars and had tremendous egos; apparently it was a miracle that they all danced in the same ballet at the same time. The ballet is laden with history and needs to be danced subtly with proper romantic port de bras and demure grace. It is romantically classical and not the kind of modern ballet that dancers from New York City Ballet are trained to dance.

  The other ballet Nikolaj and I were dancing was Giselle, another ballet I had no experience with, but at least here we were not doing the entire thing. Three other couples were splitting the pas de deux with us, so that each couple did a section in turn. Carla Fracci, one of the most famous ballerinas of her generation, and her partner danced the final section.

  The whole experience was amazing for me. We arrived a week in advance so that we could rehearse with the other dancers. The costume shop there made brand-new costumes just for us. I had to learn how to fix my hair in the old-style bun where the hair drapes in front of the ears before sweeping to the back. The other dancers tried to help me attain the proper romantic style and classical body shapes for the ballets, and Nikolaj was supportive with his big laugh and passion for dance. And then there was Verona itself, home of Romeo and Juliet, with its pink streetlights glowing in the misty nights.

  The performances were a thrill, and all went well until the last performance. Susan Jaffe, a beautiful principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, was one of the four ladies in Pas de Quatre along with Carla Fracci, a very young Lucia Lacarra, and me. Right before the performance, Susan hurt her calf. She wasn’t going to be able to dance full out, but she had gotten into costume and was ready to perform the piece in whatever limited way she could. We had no understudies.

  However, because of the insurance policies of the theater, the stage manager would not allow Susan to perform injured. Suddenly, Pas de Quatre had become a pas de trois. Because of Susan’s part in the ballet, there were several times when she would dance while the rest of us watched. Just before the curtain went up, she tried to teach Lucia one of those solo parts. And then, with but a brief warning, the curtain suddenly rose.

  The three of us popped into the famous opening pose. We were supposed to be peacefully grouped around the center girl, who balanced en pointe, like petals of a flower. But I was so flustered that instead of hitting the position with a more romantic style, my body instinctively went into what it knew best: Balanchine style. I was meant to be peering under my arm poetically, but instead I arched my body back, face lifted proudly to the balconies. As I stood there, I realized my mistake and slowly tipped my body over into a more appropriate line. Right away in the first section, we came upon our first moment when Susan was supposed to dance by herself.

  I settled gracefully to my knee, thinking that surely this was not going to be my problem. I was the least experienced in this ballet, so no one would expect me to take any initiative. They had already tried to teach Lucia some steps to another part, so perhaps she would take on the responsibility for all of Susan’s solos. Furthermore, Carla Fracci was the major star of the evening. If anyone should have extra featured dancing, it should be her, and I was not about to step up when it might offend the important ballerina.

  But then, after we had all knelt onstage for a few counts of music with no one dancing, Carla turned those famous giant brown eyes on me, made a grand gesture that in ballet mime means “Get up,” and said to me, in a very low commanding voice, “Move.”

  Well, I moved. I stood up immediately and started dancing around, racking my brain for the steps that I’d seen Susan do in previous performances. I knew there was a slow arabesque in there. The trick was to keep myself in the style of the piece and not go on autopilot and look as if a time machine had transplanted a Balanchine dancer into the 1800s. I’m not sure I succeeded, but my efforts seemed to satisfy Carla. During my little impromptu solo, I heard Nikolaj’s rumbling chuckle from the wings. He was loving this, especially because since he came from both the classical tradition of the Royal Danish Ballet and the Balanchine style of New York City Ballet, he knew exactly how wrong I was getting it and the reasons why.

  The piece progressed, and we made it through to the finale. I thought that the excitement was over, but then before my own entrance I realized there was yet another solo for Susan. A feeling of inevitability came over me even before those huge brown eyes swung in my direction again. I had no idea what Susan did at this point in the ballet; I was usually preparing for my own entrance and not paying that much attention to the other dancers’ steps.

  What did ballerinas do in these romantic ballets when the music was fast? I only knew what Balanchine or Robbins would do. Didn’t those romantic sylphs run around on the tips of their toes a lot? I took a deep breath and plunged onto the stage. I ran en pointe from one side of the stage and back again, trying to look like a flitting fairy. I must have run around en pointe for about four measures of music. I heard Nikolaj’s laugh boom out from the wings. I was trying to look serene and joyful, but I had the feeling that I really just looked harried. Finally Susan’s music was over and my own was starting; I could start doing steps that I’d actually rehearsed. With relief I continued the finale as my own self, and the curtain came down.

  After the applause was over and the curtain was down for the last time, Nikolaj burst from the wings, running on his tiptoes and laughing in imitation of me. He proceeded to reenact the whole ballet for all of us with great enthusiasm. Little did I know that Nikolaj would continue to relish retelling this story for the rest of the time he was in City Ballet. At least my frantic fish-out-of-water moments had brought him a great amount of lasting joy. And moments like these are what make live performances so exciting. You never know what might happen, bad or good.

  Chapter Eight

  The Other Side

  In July 2000 my life was in a completely different place from where it had been two years before. I was now a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, and I was about to be married. My mother was horrified when I informed her that I wanted to be married in New York City. She didn’t think she could ever pull off a New York wedding, and our budget was very limited. But I’d become the person I was in New York City. It was where James and I had met and walked and loved, and no other place felt like home to me. So my mom gamely accepted the challenge, and the two of us started the planning ten months in advance.

  James was named after his father, who was from Connecticut; his mother, Benita, was from Spain. His family was Catholic, and though we wanted to be married in a Protestant ceremony, it was important to James and his family that the Catholic Church recognize our marriage. We were able to find a Catholic priest from the church James had attended in the city who was willing to take part in our Protestant wedding, led by a pastor whom I’d known at All Angels’, the Reverend Jonathan King. The Catholic priest would be able to give the blessing of the Catholic Church to our marriage. Both priests wanted us to attend premarital counseling with them, and the Catholic Church required us to go to a group couples counseling seminar. Needless to say, we felt very well prepared by the time we got married.

  We were married in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the largest Protestant cathedral in the world. We chose the cathedral as a nod to James’s Catholic family tradition and also because Reverend King was on staff there. Since we wanted a smaller wedding, with just eighty guests, we decided to have the ceremony in the front choir section of the church, which made that huge space feel very intimate.

  Looking back on it now, there are probably things I would change about the events before and after our wedding. But of the ceremony itself, I would change nothing. Little things certainly went wrong during the day: we thought at one point we had run out of wine during the reception, and our car never came to pick James and me up from the reception. But I didn’t care about any of it. I was so happy, I felt that nothing could ruin my day o
nce it had finally arrived. I have the dearest memories of this time: my sister quickly marking my leg with a blue magic marker right before I was to walk down the aisle because I’d forgotten the “something blue”; my dad touching my arm as we walked down the aisle and murmuring, “Walk slower, honey”; the happy tears bright in my mother’s eyes; James’s face looking pale and serious and full of love as I walked toward him; the sniffles of my bridesmaids and beloved friends from the company, Elizabeth and Yvonne, as they sat behind us; watching my friends and family take communion, even those who were not churchgoers, out of a sense of honor and celebration; praying beside James for the first time as man and wife. At the reception, my sister, the matron of honor, played a Gershwin prelude on the piano for our first dance. I felt tremendous joy.

  I also felt huge relief because, to my surprise, I was actually wearing a wedding dress. Though a wedding isn’t really about The Dress, sometimes it feels like it is, and just days before, it had looked like I might be a bride wearing a sequined prom dress.

  I had chosen to wear the dress my mother wore at her own wedding, thirty-three years before. She had bought it off the rack for herself in the 1960s, and it was a beautiful long-sleeved, empire-waisted gown. My sister had worn it when she got married, and I knew I would feel special wearing the same dress my mother and sister had both gotten married in. The problem was, I also really wanted a strapless dress, and I casually thought that it would be easy to alter my mother’s dress.