I thought to myself, With what money? But I held my tongue.
After a while, I started coming home less frequently. A week would pass, then two. Cindy, to give me—as well as her dance studio—exposure, had us performing constantly, often at very high-profile gigs. Once, I danced a solo, en pointe, at a luncheon for the L.A. Dodgers. I had a baseball cap, a white leotard emblazoned with the Dodgers logo, and even a bat as a prop.
Another time, I—along with some of my classmates—performed at the Special Olympics. And every year we danced at Taste of San Pedro, a popular event where local restaurants set up booths on the street and offered samples of their menus to passersby.
Our primary performance home was the auditorium at San Pedro High School. But wherever we danced, our shows were usually on Saturdays or Sundays. And when I wasn’t performing, I was rehearsing or taking dance classes. There was no time to go home.
That’s when Mommy really started to get angry. She felt as if she was losing me completely.
My mother began calling the Bradleys more often, not to speak to me but to talk to Cindy, who would take the calls in her bedroom, beyond where I could hear. When she came back ten or twenty minutes later to wherever the rest of the family was gathered, her mouth would be stretched tight. She never shared what Mommy had said—but I could guess.
I can imagine how my mother must have felt. She probably worried that people wouldn’t understand that her daughter had to move out to pursue her dancing dreams and would assume instead that she was simply a bad mother.
Our relationship was so much more complicated than that. Mommy probably envied Cindy—a woman with more resources, a supportive husband, and a comfortable home—and thought she was trying to steal her daughter away.
I don’t think that was Cindy’s intention. But it was true that my living with her and Patrick changed me. Before I moved in with the Bradleys, I was a thirteen-year-old girl who still played with Barbies. I hid from life in games of make-believe, in dance routines choreographed in my mother’s bedroom. But when I moved out of the motel, I left my dolls behind. I was growing up.
To this day, I have no negative feelings about Cindy and Patrick. They were positive forces in my life who pushed me to become a whole person. When I had to leave them, two years after I’d moved in, it would be the most traumatic of all my departures, more wrenching than leaving Harold, more frightening than fleeing Robert. It was the hardest thing I’d ever experienced in my life.
I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know why I was being taken from these people who loved me so much, who had immersed me in the world of ballet, who had exposed me to art, to etiquette, to a taste of what life could and should be.
I would move from that new life to my old one, back into a motel. And I would resent my mother so much for returning me there.
DURING MY FIRST YEAR at Cindy’s school, she staged The Nutcracker at San Pedro High School. I danced the part of Clara, the little girl whose vivid dream of sugar plum fairies and enchanted dolls has mesmerized theatergoers for generations. Filling rows in the auditorium were Mommy and all my brothers and sisters, along with lots of our friends. It was a wonderful evening.
But when I was fourteen, a retelling of that classic story would help launch me, bringing me attention and a measure of celebrity that I had never experienced.
It was The Chocolate Nutcracker.
Cindy was always trying to connect me with the black dance community. Once, she found a local African American charity event that I was able to participate in. I danced a solo, en pointe, while a jazz saxophonist played. The great actress Angela Bassett, glowing and doe-eyed, was part of the program, and I’d gotten to meet her during the dress rehearsal. I could barely look at her, I was so excited.
I think Cindy saw The Chocolate Nutcracker as another chance for me to meld all my worlds, showing the classical ballet repertoire that I was mastering but also allowing me to dip into African dance and meet prominent African Americans.
The Chocolate Nutcracker was produced by the actress and choreographer Debbie Allen and added twists to the classic story of Clara and the toy soldiers come to life. Instead of Clara being taken to the land of sweets by her nutcracker-turned-prince, she’d travel the globe. And the nutcracker and his soldiers fought slithering snakes instead of militaristic mice.
My performances throughout Los Angeles were getting attention, and by then I had been the subject of several news articles talking about this late-blooming black ballerina who turned out to be a prodigy. I believe Debbie Allen had seen them and reached out to Cindy to see if I’d be interested in playing Clare, The Chocolate Nutcracker’s version of Clara.
Debbie was warm but no-nonsense. At first, she had me work privately with her choreographers to make sure I was capable of all it took to be the lead in the ballet. After I’d won the part, they actually wound up having to alter the dance sequences to make them more challenging for me. I have video footage of my rehearsing for hours and hours.
Since Clare would be traveling to other countries in the ballet’s world, like Egypt, part of my preparation included taking classes with Debbie to learn various ethnic dance forms. Cindy drove me to Debbie’s studio in Los Angeles, and it was a world apart from what I was used to. There were all these beautiful black boys and girls engaged in African and Brazilian dance. There were live drummers, pounding out a beat, and me, in the middle of it all, in my pointe shoes.
We performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and I got to share the stage and dialogue with Debbie, who played Clare’s aunt. I was fine doing African dance one minute, and dancing en pointe the next. But holding a mic and talking to Debbie Allen? That was scary.
But becoming Clare was wonderful. I again felt that sass coming out of me, the way it had in the Point Fermin Elementary talent show, or the way it did at that first performance Cindy set up at a park in San Pedro. The way it did every time I was on a stage, before a crowd.
I remember the audience giving me a standing ovation. And Mommy, there, sitting close to the front row, gave me the most love of all. She was hooting and hollering on her feet, clapping like it was the greatest performance she’d ever seen. It’s not exactly what you would hear at the Metropolitan Opera House where ABT performs, but it was loving and genuine. It just made me want to do it all again.
Later, Debbie Allen would tell the Los Angeles Times Magazine that I was “a child who dances in her soul . . . I can’t imagine her doing anything else.”
After that performance, I was on fire.
More articles about my talent followed, in the Daily Breeze, San Pedro’s local paper, as well as other news outlets. People were calling Cindy’s dance studio wanting to know when and where this phenomenal little girl they’d heard so much about would be performing next.
My school identity morphed as well. I’d always been Doug and Erica and Chris’s little sister who happened to be captain of the drill team. Now I was the ballerina.
As shy as I was, all the attention could be a little overwhelming, and I felt uncomfortable at first. But the glare was somehow easier to absorb because it was connected to ballet, my new love. It was like I was carrying the audience with me for a little while after I’d left the stage.
I had been dancing for well over a year and decided to give up the drill team. I wanted to focus every hour that I could, every bit of my energy and creativity on ballet.
After The Chocolate Nutcracker, Cindy decided it was time for me to perform my dream role for the first time. The San Pedro Dance Center would stage Don Quixote, and I would be Kitri.
With so many performances under my belt, Cindy also said it was time for me to enter competitions, to go up against other experienced ballerinas and win broader recognition for my talent.
My first competition would be one of the most difficult and prestigious, the Music Center’s Spotlight Awards. The competition, which has been staged annually for more than two decades, gives out tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships t
o teenagers who excel in the arts. There were prizes in various categories, including ballet, modern dance, jazz, and classical music performance. And the judges were at the pinnacle of those genres. Those who won have gone on to perform with the Metropolitan Opera and Alvin Ailey, among other premier cultural institutions.
Since I was preparing to play Kitri in the dance center’s production of Don Quixote, we thought it made sense for me to perform a variation from that same ballet at the Spotlight Awards.
But it was a daunting selection, a complicated, arduous dance sequence that most dancers would not have dared to attempt with barely two years of training. And they certainly wouldn’t have debuted it on the Los Angeles Music Center’s grand stage, in front of some of the giants of the ballet world.
I would also be preparing in the glare of the television spotlight on KCET, a local TV station. The program was called Beating the Odds and it was doing a segment on some of the teens competing in the Spotlight Awards. They knew of me from all the articles that had been written, and when the show’s producers learned I was one of the entrants, they picked me as one of the handful of teens they would follow.
I was one of two dancers whom they trailed. The crew was there when I auditioned and at some of my rehearsals, and crew members even spent some time at home with me at the Bradleys.
To prepare for the Spotlight Awards, I practiced six days a week for a month. The variation I would perform was Kitri’s third act solo, and I would have to execute the famous thirty-two fouettés at the end of the variation.
I should say now that when I danced, I was never nervous, not during rehearsal, not during a performance. It was as if I went into a trance.
Ballet studio walls are lined with mirrors, and you are supposed to use them to correct yourself, to adjust your body or extend your legs to reflect your teacher’s direction about how to improve. But to this day, while there are times when I pay attention to what I see in the mirrors, to master new steps, more often it’s as if they’re not even there. My visual memory, my physical intuition, takes over.
I think I’ve always danced beyond the mirror, transcending the tedium and bounding right to the joy.
That’s what you need to stand out on the stage. Many dancers have a body that’s capable, that has the facility to perform, but they get onstage and they don’t have “it,” that blissful spark that makes it impossible for the audience members to get the performance out of their heads. For me, even in the classroom, it was always showtime.
When I was seventeen, I went to New York to participate in ABT’s summer program. Lupe Serrano, a woman whom I still love, was one of my first teachers. She had been a prima ballerina in her day and was now a ballet mistress.
After I executed various combinations, she walked over to me, disapproval creasing her brow.
“Why are you giving so much at the barre?” she asked me with exasperation. “This isn’t a performance!”
“Oh,” I said, surprised and more than a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”
In ballet, every step has a million moving parts. Your head must be in the right position, your body in alignment, your feet turned just so. It requires precision to get it all right. But for me, ballet has always been more than a technical matrix. It’s fun.
Cindy had an incredible ability to really showcase the music in her movement. She was both an actress and a dancer. I emulated it because it was all I knew. Her arms, her épaulement, her elegant and feminine style, definitely rubbed off on me. That became my approach when I danced. Though this was not the way most schools taught you to approach ballet—prioritizing a basic understanding of your placement, lines, and strength—my training at the San Pedro Dance Center was based on movement, music, and performance. Very few develop these qualities, even after a lifetime of training. I had it from day one. In preparation for Kitri, I studied Gelsey and Paloma endlessly. I paid close attention to the way their heads moved, the way their elbows were always in a forward position ahead of their wrists when their hands were on their hips. Kitri was strong and in control. I understood it all!
Cindy said to me during one of my rehearsals for the grand pas de deux in the third act, with Charles Maple, “How do you know when to lift your chin? I never told you.” She was stumped. I didn’t really have an answer. The accent in the music came and with it so did the lift of my chin to match. I never questioned or quite understood how: I just knew. It was my instinct, and the marvelous thing was that it was usually right.
Not a performance? Of course it was. Always.
BUT WHEN I WAS fifteen, in the final days before the Spotlight Awards, I began to stumble. I was having trouble completing my full series of turns. The morning of the competition, I felt something I’d never experienced before a performance: nerves.
It was a feeling that was so new in connection with dance that at first I didn’t even know what it was. I suppose the difference this time was that I’d never felt so pressured before when it came to ballet. There were thousands of dollars on the line, and an entire city watching me.
Cindy had begun to worry during my final practices. Then, the morning of the performance, during the dress rehearsal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, she seemed almost frantic.
I couldn’t get through the fouettés. It’s a classic bravura move that is one of the prima ballerina’s staples. You’re supposed to keep going and going and going, through thirty-two exhausting turns, and I couldn’t complete them. I was probably just exhausted, but seeing the way Cindy reacted—the tension and fear on her face—panicked me.
“You have to get this,” she said nervously. “This is your big chance. Gerald Arpino will be there.”
Gerald Arpino was the artistic director and cofounder of the Joffrey Ballet, one of the world’s top dance companies. He would be one of the judges.
We only had fifteen minutes to practice, and then we had to get off the stage and give the next competitor a chance to rehearse. I was freaked out, and Cindy saw it.
Then Cindy had an idea.
She hurriedly took me down into the underground garage where her car was parked. She opened all the car doors to create a makeshift screen, then stuck a cassette of the music I would dance to in the car’s player. She calmed me, reassuring me that even though I had a decade less training than my competitor, I had something she didn’t: a sparkle, a will from within that wasn’t about the number of fouettés I did, or how high I kicked my leg, but the passion and potential the judges would see in me.
Right there, she rechoreographed my variation.
Instead of thirty-two turns, I would do sixteen. And then I would go into a piqué ménage, a circular traveling step, to finish out the music.
It was a backup plan, which I embraced gratefully. Cindy cranked up Kitri’s music, and we got to work. Instead of in my pointe shoes, I learned and rehearsed the new routine in my sneakers.
That taught me something. When I’m on the stage, I always want to appear clean, and strong, never out of control. That is what it means to be a professional. And that day, at the Spotlight Awards, I learned you should always have a backup plan, so you can always deliver a performance that is sharp and refined. Even if your body fails, your performance never will.
There are dancers who believe that you won’t try as hard if you know there’s a safety net. But I don’t agree.
My life in the ballet studio is devoted to the goal of perfecting the impossibly precise and rarefied steps of a centuries-old technique. You teach your body to depend on its muscle memory with repetition of the steps in rehearsal so that when you are onstage and are presented with the unpredictable elements of the theater you can still thrive.
Onstage, the lights change your balance and focus and warm the air enough to soften stiff pointe shoes. A costume adds weight and restrictions to a dancer’s movement. The live orchestra and often temperamental conductor challenge you to now think on your toes if there is a sudden change in tempo. And then there’s your own excit
ement, the rush that comes with a live performance. Often, instincts tempt you to react in opposition to the choreography your body knows so well.
And with all these outside and internal pressures, dancers are still expected to meet the standards of classical “perfection.” I’ve had to create my own standard. As a professional (and a perfectionist), my goal is to be consistent in giving an exciting, emotionally charged, and technically sound performance. The rehearsal studio is the time where I take risky chances and fall on my face so I can learn where to rein it in. I would never take those risks on the stage in front of a hungry audience. They deserve better.
Some dancers feel different, taking gambles onstage in pursuit of that chance that a risk will pay off and create a once-in-a-lifetime performance. I guess that’s why live theater is so exciting.
But that day, at the Spotlight Awards, I learned to be prepared and focus on what’s important.
It was finally showtime. I took the stage, dressed in a red tutu edged with golden lace that Cindy had made just for the competition.
Mommy, Lindsey, Cindy, and Bubby were all there. The theater was dark despite the white spotlights. I felt cool and determined, even as I congratulated the performer who finished just before my entrance.
I went to my backup routine and performed it flawlessly. Up and down on my toes, twirling across the stage, brandishing a ruby-red fan that I flung aside before I began my turns. I became Kitri, fire in my eyes, flirting fiercely as though I were batting my eyes at every last audience member. As I finished my performance, I threw my arm into the air with my head thrown back, a smile nearly splitting my face, and one hand cocked saucily on my hip. I had danced—happy, free.
Then it was over. I was relieved and joyful.
“I got through all my fouettés!” I said to the program producers standing backstage. “I’m really happy.”
From there it’s all a blur. I won the top prize—five thousand dollars—for ballet. I have the trophy in my apartment to this very day.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 8
