Gradually, I began to find my balance. It was far from instantaneous. In fact, I think it took me roughly five years, truly, to understand my body, what worked and what didn’t. I continued to do Pilates to build strength in my core. And I learned that my diet was probably 60 to 70 percent of what was causing me to gain more weight than I wanted. I came to understand that it played a bigger role than either my workouts or my dancing. So I set about changing my eating habits.
I try to stay away from salt, white sugar, and flour. I don’t eat empty calories, like potato chips or my once-beloved doughnuts. I can’t limit my mealtimes to certain hours since my schedule can be so busy and erratic, but if I’m focusing on a particular role, I won’t drink alcohol. And about four years ago I stopped eating beef, pork, and chicken. When I made the switch to strictly seafood, I saw a huge difference physically.
I’ve learned to take care of my body, my instrument, to accept it while ensuring that it’s in the best shape for me to give my all in every performance.
As a dancer, performing is my life. When I can’t dance, I feel lost. So I’ve had to find that balance that allows me to excel but not push beyond what my body can handle. I know that, as tempting as it may be to keep going and going, putting too much pressure on my instrument could end my ability to dance at all.
There is also a painful memory that bolsters me, reminding me that I am much more than my body.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I got into an argument with my clever, older brother Chris, who would one day be an attorney.
“What do you know anyway?” he screamed at me. “Dancers are dumb. All they do is use their bodies, not their brains.”
His words stung. I remember feeling so hurt, I could barely respond. I knew that he wasn’t the only person who felt that way, that he was one of so many others who would never understand all that it took to be a dancer. How we had to meld so many parts—our brains, our emotions, our bodies—to put on a performance that hid all the strings, leaving only stardust for the audience to see.
Chris’s words have stuck with me to this day. I feel as if I’m always trying to prove, whether I’m performing onstage or doing interviews with people who don’t know much about dance, how intense, multidimensional, and unique this art form is. How much thought it takes, and how much love.
I had breasts, and muscles, but yes, I was still a ballerina. I noticed other dancers who also had more womanly busts, more muscular physiques. And ABT, seeing how hard I had worked, how well I was performing, eventually stopped asking me to lengthen. They came to see things my way, that my curves are part of who I am as a dancer, not something I need to lose to become one.
Chapter 9
THERE ARE TIMES WHEN it’s important to seize the spotlight on the ballet stage. Having a musicality in the way you move, allowing the audience to see only the magic and not all the nuts and bolts, is what makes you a star.
But at other times it’s important that you blend in. Ballet companies will base a significant part of their decision about whether they want you on the length of your legs, the swoop of your neck, and how those proportions echo those of your fellow dancers. Even I have to admit that there have been times when I sat in the audience and, seeing a dancer with a particularly tiny head, thought to myself that, from the seats down below, she looked odd and out of sync.
In the famous danse des petits cygnes, or dance of the little swans, in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, four dancers—or “birds”—form a human chain, their arms intertwined as each dancer clasps the next dancer’s hand in hers. They then proceed, in unison, to perform sixteen pas de chat, “step of the cat,” leaping sideways while soaring above the stage, legs bent, knees wide apart, and their feet lifted as high as they can go.
It is an acrobatic feat, each dancer displaying grace and dexterity while at the same time she is linked with three others, looking like reflections in a mirror rather than four separate, fallible human beings.
If the contrasts between the dancers are too pronounced, if your torso is much longer than the other cygnets, if you tower above them, some of the synchronicity is lost. The dance appears less perfect, and a bit of the performance’s magic slips away.
I understood all that. Luckily, I wasn’t significantly taller or shorter than the other members of the corps, and my proportions were deemed ideal for ballet, not only by George Balanchine (who had never met me, after all), but also by Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s director.
But there were some who believed there was no place in ballet for a brown swan.
The whispers and talk happened slowly. One Saturday at our studios at 890, on a five-minute break from rehearsal, an older man approached me. It was a day that ABT friends and donors could visit the studios to watch us rehearse. “You do realize you are the only black woman in the company, right?” he said bluntly. “And you very well could be the first to move beyond the corps in many decades.” It wasn’t unkindly meant, but it was certainly unexpected. I was never approached by anyone at ABT about my color. I was a little taken aback.
A couple weeks later, we moved to the Metropolitan Opera House for the spring season. We had just started rehearsals for a production of Swan Lake that would be filmed for an upcoming TV broadcast. I’d been working feverishly on my pas de chat, determined to be seamlessly in step with the other cygnets by opening night. I was in the cafeteria on my lunch break when a girlfriend of mine walked toward me. She looked uneasy.
“Misty, I just overheard some of the staff members talking,” she said. “Your name came up in reference to Swan Lake.”
I was confused. “What do you mean? What did they say?”
My friend said that someone commented that I didn’t fit in with my brown skin, especially in a ballet like Swan Lake.
My heart dropped. I didn’t understand. I grew worried, especially with the filming of Swan Lake fast approaching.
When casting was finally announced, I was not picked to dance in the second act. The “white act.”
In the world of dance, there is a genre called “white ballets.” Swan Lake is one, as is La Bayadère and Giselle. Their second acts are populated by otherwordly characters—animals or perhaps spirits of the dead—who usually wear white, and it is considered imperative that the corps, and often even the principals, look the same.
It was strange to me to be judged by my skin color rather than my talent or effort. I had seen bigotry in its most vile form living with Robert, hearing the slurs he hurled at my little sister, Lindsey, knowing the ugly things his family said about mine. But that had felt like a surreal, terrible aberration.
My hometown of San Pedro had been a destination for Russian, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, and my friends and neighbors had come from a multihued pool. I spent years wrapped in the cocoon of a Jewish family, and Cindy always made me feel that I was even more beautiful because of my sun-kissed skin and bushy curls.
Now, suddenly, my blackness was a problem.
Raven Wilkinson, a mentor of mine whom I revere, became the first black American to be a full-time member of a large ballet company when she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s. Often when she performed, she would literally have to paint her face white. Half a century later, I have often had to do something similar.
At first, I took it in stride as part of the performance, and I didn’t mind much. To appear ethereal and ghostlike in the white ballets, all of the dancers dusted their faces with white powder. But for many performances, playing a goat in Sylvia, or a sylph in Giselle, I was painting my skin a completely different color, taking the ivory base foundation used by one of the other girls and layering it on my face and arms to lighten my skin.
It became a joke among the other dancers.
“You’re the only black girl, Misty, but you’re always playing an animal that has to be white,” one of my corps mates would say with a giggle.
I would usually laugh along. Until after one too many performances, one too many makeup applications,
I began to think that it wasn’t so funny.
IN 2007, THE YEAR that I would be promoted to soloist, an article appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. The headline was “Where Are All the Black Swans?”
It spoke of black ballerinas’ thin ranks in American companies. Of how Tai Jimenez became the first member of Dance Theatre of Harlem to find a home with a mainstream classical ballet company, Boston Ballet. And of how ABT and the New York City Ballet had told her they didn’t want her.
The article also told Raven Wilkinson’s story of meeting discrimination with defiance and grace. There was a photograph of the gorgeous ballerina Aesha Ash, who had danced in New York City Ballet’s corps but moved on after being told that she had gone as far as she ever would. And there was Alicia Graf Mack, who was also turned away by ABT and New York City Ballet before joining Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
By then, I had been in ABT’s corps for six years. That article was the first thing I’d ever read that reflected the heartbreak and loneliness I felt inside. I’d never before read such a perfect articulation of what I was experiencing: that there were many people who seemed not to want to see black ballerinas, who thought that our very presence made ballet less authentic, less romantic, less true.
The story made me sad and angry. But it was also, somehow, affirming. I was not alone after all. Others had come before me, sometimes in far worse circumstances. Raven Wilkinson had to contend with the Ku Klux Klan as she attempted to dance in the South, eventually having to leave the company because of threats. Unable to find work in this country, she would move to Holland and dance with the Dutch National Ballet.
Her story—all of their stories—made me want to fight even harder to become a soloist, to become a principal, to attain my dream.
I WAS OFF ON Monday, the day after the article appeared, but I was back in the studio Tuesday morning.
Walking to my first rehearsal, a young woman in the company who was a friend of mine rushed toward me.
“Did you see that stupid article in the Times, ‘Where Are All the Black Swans?’ ” she asked me in a tone that was more accusatory than curious. “What are they talking about? What a dumb story.”
I couldn’t speak. I felt dismissed, and even more alone. Was she truly so clueless? If she, a friend, didn’t understand my struggles, who else would? The fact that she, like most of the company, liked me and yet could still say what she did so nonchalantly starkly showed how blind most ballet dancers are when it comes to matters of race.
I turned away quickly, my eyes welling up with tears. I felt my way down the hallway and found an empty studio. Closing the door, I began to cry like my heart was breaking. Because it was.
No one understood. Along with all the other insanely hard things that came with being a dancer, the pressure to look perfect despite being in crippling pain, the need to push your body to the brink of injury in the pursuit of excellence, the tsk-tsking of dance masters and critics and patrons, I also had to deal with the snubs, smirks, and insensitivity of people like that girl, with whom I shared a stage but who didn’t know a thing about the road I’d traveled. No one got it. No one cared.
There were no other black women at ABT for me to connect with. And my dear friend Leyla soon left the corps. So I often hung around the black boys who came through the company, one or two at a time, lighting for a short while before inevitably moving on.
Danny, Jerry, Dante, Jamar. They all came and went while I stayed.
And then there was Eric Underwood. He was the one with whom I forged the strongest bond.
Eric had grown up in Washington, D.C. in a lower-income but loving family, like mine. Also like me, he had been led to ballet by what only could be serendipity. Or was it destiny?
He was already fourteen years old when he went on an acting audition for a spot in a local arts school. He was trying to avoid going to his neighborhood school, which was violent and lacking academically. The acting tryout didn’t go so well, but when Eric walked out, he saw some girls getting ready for their dance audition, and he suddenly thought that was something he could do.
He made it, and that was it. Eventually, Eric would perform with Dance Theatre of Harlem and ABT, and he is now a soloist with the Royal Ballet in London.
We clung to each other. We’d grown up listening to the same music: New Edition, Toni Braxton, Mariah Carey. We had our own secret code, whispering to each other in the lingo we spoke with our siblings back home. We were like brother and sister, bonding over our shared affection for R & B and hip-hop. And we had our own “’hood” thing, on Friday nights, going to Red Lobster or BBQs, where we’d feast on shrimp, burgers, and ribs to our hearts’ content.
There was no translation needed with Eric, no need to explain. If we heard something that seemed a bit callous, a bit racist, we would exchange glances, and there was comfort in knowing someone else had heard the bad note, the off key. We were the only ones who understood the weird moments that arose because we were African Americans in a lily-white world.
One day, Eric had a meeting with Kevin McKenzie about his hair.
When Eric returned from Kevin’s office, he tapped me on the shoulder, and we quickly walked together outside.
“He wants me to grow my hair long.”
We both roared with laughter, giggling until our eyes watered and our stomachs hurt.
Eric had tried his best to explain to Kevin that if he grew his hair, it wouldn’t grow long. Rather it would grow “out.” We laughed because we knew if he’d done it, he would have had a huge afro. Was it more fitting to have a short hair cut in the eighteenth-century setting of the ballet, or to look like a member of the Jackson 5 dancing on Soul Train in the 1970s?
We were able to make fun of it all, though the harsher reality was that we were constantly misunderstood. It could be exhausting. As black people, we are supposed to tiptoe around situations, to shrug off insults that are at times naive, at times intentional. It’s like another dance to perform, making sure that the white people around us never feel guilty or uncomfortable.
Surrounded by dancers who were sometimes my friends and often my competition, I felt more alone than I ever had. But gradually, a group of women began to emerge in my life who became sounding boards and pillars I could lean on when it all felt like too much.
The woman I considered my first real mentor after I’d joined the corps was Victoria Rowell, a former ballet dancer turned actress who continues to be involved with ABT.
Rowell had endured her own challenges as a child, having spent time in foster care. She grew up to dance with ABT’s Studio Company before moving on to modeling and acting. She has appeared in numerous television shows and films, but she’s perhaps most recognized for her role as Drusilla Barber on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.
ABT had traveled to Hollywood for a handful of performances. One night, after I came off stage feeling stressed and exhausted, I found a note with my name stuck to the pin board.
“Please call me,” it read. It was signed Victoria Rowell. Below her name was her phone number. I knew of her, of course, and was awestruck that she had reached out to me.
Being in Hollywood, I was only an hour or so from Mommy’s apartment . . . but still a world away from my family. Though I know they would have tried, I believed it was impossible for my mother and siblings truly to understand the unique pressure I was under. My late-budding body had suddenly bloomed, and I was still in the midst of my struggle with my weight. I was pushing through grueling practices, all the while trying to quell the self-doubt crowding my thoughts. I was also a bit embarrassed. This is what I had wanted: to dance with ABT, to be a professional ballerina, to live in New York City. I’d almost run away from home to pursue it. Now that I had it within my grasp, how could I complain? And Mommy was so proud, more effusive than she had perhaps ever been. I didn’t want to let her down.
So I welcomed Victoria’s invitation. When I called, she asked me to come to visit,
and she sent a car to take me to her beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills. I believe her children were already sleeping, but Victoria and I sat up talking nearly all night.
I saw a beautiful, successful black woman, a ballet dancer who was now not only making her way but thriving in the cutthroat world of Hollywood. I remember thinking, There is actually someone out there whom I can relate to. She was the first person to take the grown-up Misty, with her grown-up experiences, her grown-up challenges, under her wing. We have had many conversations over the years, often on the phone, sometimes over a hearty lunch or dinner. She remains an angel in my life to this day.
Another mentor of mine is an African American woman who was a member of ABT’s board of trustees.
Susan Fales-Hill, a descendant of a Mayflower passenger, is akin to black royalty. The biracial daughter of Broadway chanteuse Josephine Premice and Timothy Fales, the scion of a New England family whose roots date back to Plymouth Rock, Fales-Hill is a prominent socialite with all the poise, polish, and pedigree that goes with it. She’s the type of woman who’s a must-invite to every charity gala, and she resided with her banker husband and daughter on the swanky Upper East Side. Yet Susan emanated a light that wasn’t inherited, but was entirely her own. She is a graduate of Harvard, a published author, and worked as a writer on The Cosby Show.
She is also perceptive. Susan could see that I was faltering, questioning my purpose in ABT. One day she took me aside for a chat.
“You know, many of the board members talk about you,” she said with a warm smile. “They feel you are one of the most promising dancers in the company. That you have a future that is unbelievably bright. I agree.”
Susan would eventually become my sponsor, one of those behind-the-scenes patrons who make sure dancers have all that they need, from emotional support and guidance to simply someone to chat with at company events. It is a wonderful, ongoing gift. But what I cherish most were her words of reassurance, her ability to recognize and feel my pain, and her desire to share with me kind words, from not just her but from others on the board, to lift me up. She made me feel as if I had a vital role to play within ABT. She gave me the strength I needed to keep pushing, to keep waiting for my turn in the spotlight.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 15
