Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  Another unexpected challenge during that first year came when the company started rehearsals for Balanchine’s holiday favorite, The Nutcracker. For my first “Nuts,” as everyone in the company called the famous ballet, I was cast in the corps of the Spanish dance section called “Hot Chocolate,” as a parent in the party scene, as a mouse in the fight scene—and as Mother Ginger. Mother Ginger may be a highlight for the children in the audience and for the other children who are dancing, but I have to say, the role is not a highlight for the boy who has to don the makeup and red wig and bonnet that make you look like a white Aunt Jemima on steroids, and then climb into a huge dress and walk onstage on stilts in drag. By the way—there is a big tambourine attached to the dress and you must carry a giant mirror and powder puff too. If you are not already humiliated enough, you soon will be as all of your colleagues begin either to snicker or give you that sad puppy-dog, wrinkled-eyebrow face. I remember thinking, “Boy, is this what I worked so hard for, to be a twelve-foot-tall drag queen?” But then I began to get into the role. By my fifth or sixth performance I had everyone in the wings cracking up so much I thought I might get myself fired.

  Fortunately, I was given an opportunity to prove myself in a more serious role that winter season when Darci Kistler and I danced the leads in the company premiere of Magic Flute, the ballet Peter had choreographed on me and Katrina Killian for the school the previous year. I had been a last-minute (as in, day of the performance) choice to dance this same ballet with Darci for the annual gala performance only a few weeks earlier, after both Ib Andersen and Helgi Tomasson were injured—but shortly after I was chosen, Balanchine realized that at a major fund-raiser the audience members expected to see major stars. In a decision that was a big disappointment to me and a shock to Peter Martins, Balanchine changed his mind and informed Peter that he would have to dance his own ballet that night. “But I don’t know it!” Peter had objected. “Well, dear, learn it,” Balanchine had answered. “Do something, dear—make something up.” That afternoon, instead of rehearsing to dance Magic Flute myself that evening, I helped Peter learn his own ballet. “You will get your ballet—don’t worry,” Peter had reassured me, and I was thrilled when he made good on his word and cast Darci and me for the company premiere of Magic Flute.

  Afterward, Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times had nice things to say about the ballet and about me: “Mr. Soto, making his company debut as Luke on Saturday opposite a daredevil Darci Kistler, turned in a dream of a performance—all clear, easy classical line, beautifully finished multiple turns and an attack that had all the mingled buoyancy and gravity of youth. Still a teenager, Mr. Soto has impressive technical gifts. What is most remarkable, however, is that he never seems to push or strain for it, and dances with an unfailing sense of character. At times his manner was touchingly reminiscent of Mr. Martins.”

  Ms. Dunning was certainly right about one thing at least—I was enthralled with Peter, as a dancer, as a teacher, as a choreographer, and as a mentor in life in general. I was learning so much so quickly under his watchful eye, and it was thrilling to have a front-row seat as he explored and developed his own talents as a choreographer. Peter was a beautiful dancer, classically trained in Denmark in both ballet and pantomime, and his comments on even the simplest details—such as how one cupped one’s hands over one’s heart to express love—were revelatory to me. Peter also had (and has) an incredible musicality—meaning, he is blessed with a visceral and natural understanding of music, even in the most complex of scores—that helped me find and trust a certain native musicality in myself. I remember a story Peter once told me about an exchange he had with Balanchine when Balanchine was pressing him to choreograph a complicated passage of Stravinsky. Peter was unsure of himself and felt he lacked the musical sophistication that Balanchine, as an accomplished pianist and reader of music, could bring to the choreography for such a score. When he expressed his doubts to Balanchine, Mr. B replied, “Dear, you see—I can’t trust my ears. I only trust my eyes—I have to look at the score. You are lucky—you just listen.” At sixteen I did not have the training or the sophistication of a Peter Martins, and I would never have his classic tall, lean ballet physique. But I did share some measure of his natural musicality, and it gave the two of us a special shorthand form of communication when we worked together.

  I was excited to feel this special relationship developing between Peter and me—he understood what I could do and he knew how to get me to do it. I understood what he wanted and sometimes even seemed to help him advance his vision further than he had expected. But despite this growing rapport, I was stunned when later that spring Peter called me into his office to tell me he had decided to choreograph a new ballet, Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, on Heather Watts and Ib Andersen and me. Ib Andersen was an established principal dancer and Heather was a star ballerina, both of them already dancing everything when I came to the company, and both of them my idols for some time. Heather’s powerful and edgy presence onstage followed her into her private life—she had an aura that a dance critic once compared to “a dry martini,” and a reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker. The rumor was that when she was at SAB the school had been on the verge of throwing her out because they couldn’t handle her (she was always chewing gum or rebelling in some way) until Balanchine intervened and offered to take charge of her himself. He brought her into the company class, where he could keep an eye on her, and then he brought her into the company.

  Heather and Peter had been romantically entwined for some time, in a high-voltage relationship that seemed always to be in its stormy season, and in 1978 Peter premiered his first ballet for the company, Calcium Light Night, with Heather and Daniel Duell as the leads. Peter’s choreography in this ballet was startling—fresh and sharp edged and different, yet still within the Balanchine aesthetic—and Heather was stunning: a skinny, beautiful ballerina with long, long legs and gorgeous feet doing things that nobody had seen before. Calcium became a huge success, and the first time I saw it I was amazed. I had allowed myself a private and far-fetched fantasy that someday I might dance this ballet with Heather. As a result I was more than a little excited when Peter chose me to work on his new ballet with Heather—but I was also terrified. I had worked with Peter as a choreographer in the school, but this ballet was being made for Balanchine’s company, with plans for a premiere at a special Stravinsky Festival that June. Three thousand people would see the premiere. I had just turned seventeen.

  Working with Peter and Heather on that ballet was one of my earliest and most intense lessons in the creative process of choreography—and, as such, unforgettable. Whenever we worked together I kept pretty quiet, but Heather and Peter seemed to have a language all their own—a hybrid of words and gestures and facial expressions that they delivered in quick shorthand bursts. Heather would stop in the middle of rehearsing a section of a duet with me, look at Peter, and say something like, “It feels itchy,” or, “Hasn’t this been done before?” Peter would nod, make a series of graceful motions with his hands and upper body, and say, “Try it backward. Slide.” Heather would nod, turn to me, and dance the same beats in an entirely different, much better, way. Technically the music and the choreography in this new ballet of Peter’s were very difficult, with many intricate notes and steps, and I remember thinking to myself—this is so incredibly hard, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I will never forget one particularly awful moment in the rehearsal studio when I was holding Heather by both arms in an off-balance arabesque penchée and as she flipped to the front and fell into a split—as choreographed—I failed to catch her to break her fall. I couldn’t believe it. I had just dropped this very famous ballerina right on … a very tender place. There was a horrible silence.

  “What just happened?” Heather asked, the fury obvious in her voice.

  “I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I think maybe I’m a little groggy.” There was another silence.

  “Don’t you ever, ever, ever dr
op a ballerina again,” she scolded me. I was completely humiliated, but I took Heather’s words to heart that day—and I did my very best to never, ever drop a ballerina again. Peter told me much later that Heather had been shocked when he first told her that for his new ballet he wanted to partner her with me—the youngest member of the corps de ballet—and she had resisted. “You’ve got to be kidding!” was her response. To which Peter in turn responded with a Balanchine story, about a famous prima ballerina who had refused to dance with a young dancer from the corps. Balanchine had turned to her and said, “My dear, one day he is going to be a major star and you will be begging to dance with him.” Heather, always a gifted sparring partner, had replied, “Don’t try to sell me that bullshit.”

  But almost immediately, as nervous and intimidated as I was in these early sessions with Peter and Heather, I could sense a special compatibility among the three of us. And in some ways my youth and inexperience helped to keep me from fully comprehending the daunting nature of what I was attempting. I just tried to do as I was told—and I paid careful attention to the music, trying to keep track of everything and get through the steps. We worked for weeks in a studio with the two brilliant pianists Gordon Boelzner and Jerry Zimmerman, translating the musicians’ counts into our dance beats, and painstakingly memorizing the intricate movements and structure of the ballet. Peter’s choreography in this ballet was much more complex and demanding than anything I had danced before and we developed nicknames to use as signposts for different passages—“Pac-Man” referred to a moment when all the corps dancers begin to peel offstage, following one another like a line of hungry Pac-Man monsters. I knew these intricate steps were not something my body could quickly absorb, and that I would have to count everything very carefully on each run-through, but whenever I could I also tried my very best to give something extra, to try to make the performance bravura—it had to be something special. I was performing with the famous Heather Watts and the equally famous Ib Andersen, but I was a lowly member of the corps. If the audience didn’t applaud at the premiere, I fretted privately, it would obviously be my fault.

  On the day Concerto for Two Solo Pianos premiered at the Stravinsky Festival I was a nervous wreck, but I did my best and I thought we had got through it well. After the performance, Peter came to me backstage, obviously not happy. “Why did you mark?” he asked me. “To mark” is the choreographer’s term for when a dancer fails to dance a ballet full out, and therefore “marks” the ballet. I was horrified. “I didn’t mark,” I countered. I had danced as full out as I trusted myself to at the time—trying so hard to please Peter, to not drop Heather, and to come up to Ib Andersen’s high level as an artist—but it hadn’t been enough. “You cannot mark this ballet—you have to go super full out,” Peter said angrily. I went upstairs and dressed and left the theater, feeling terrible.

  Fortunately Peter’s ballet was a success with the critics, and was praised for its “cerebral complexity.” I made a point of getting sharper and pushing past my lack of confidence, going “super full out,” as Peter had said, in the next performances. Peter complimented my efforts and I didn’t have to kill myself after all. A few nights later I cleared another potentially humiliating challenge when I replaced an injured Victor Castelli and successfully partnered Judith Fugate in the fourth movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C. Evidently Balanchine, who was very sick and in the hospital at the time, had chosen me, saying he wanted “the dark one with the black hair.”

  My incredible good luck in roles continued in the winter season of 1983 as I partnered Heather in Magic Flute (after Ib Andersen was injured) and in another season of Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, and danced a solo in the premiere of Jacques d’Amboise’s ballet Celebration. It felt like an almost surreal upward trajectory, and I was anxious, sure that it had to end—and sure enough it did. Peter was bringing a new ballet he had choreographed for the school, Delibes Divertissement, to the company, with Heather and me dancing the lead parts. It was a pretty ballet set to excerpts from Léo Delibes’s Sylvia, and in February we danced the premiere. I felt pretty good about our performance—we had learned our parts well, and we had danced expressively. But then I saw the papers. “A NIGHT TO FORGET” was the headline the New York Post ran over a picture of Heather and me standing center stage with huge, triumphant grins on our faces. In his review Clive Barnes slammed the ballet. Another stinging dismissal came from Jack Anderson in the New York Times: “The choreography’s delicacy did not seem suited to Miss Watts’ forthright style and Mr. Soto did not yet look at home in the most demanding passages… Mr. Martins has done little more than take some music and cover it with nicely patterned choreographic linoleum.” I had just had my first brutal lesson in the devastating effect dance critics can have when they decide to give the thumbs-down. In retrospect, I think the critics’ savagery at this particular moment may have marked the beginning of their negative attitude toward the possibility that Peter might take over the company someday. Balanchine was very sick, and everyone knew it.

  It was a dark spring in general that year. I was down on myself because of these negative reviews, and the communal morale of NYCB was down because of Balanchine’s degenerating health. On April 30, our company—and indeed the whole dance world—was saddened when Balanchine died. Ulrik and I were in our Eighteenth Street apartment when we got the call with the sad news early Saturday morning. I had to head to the theater to rehearse Balanchine’s Kammermusik No. 2 for a matinee performance—I was actually replacing Ulrik, who had been injured—and by performance time that afternoon the theater was mobbed with people who had come to honor Balanchine by watching his company dance. I was off that evening, but I came back to the theater to watch Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell dance the second movement of Balanchine’s Symphony in C. Before the movement began I was so nervous—Peter and Suzanne and Balanchine had such a history together, built on so much respect and shared vision. Would Peter and Suzanne be able to dance? As the adagio, which I would dance many times myself in later years, began, Peter led Suzanne onto the stage. My heart was pounding as one of the most beautiful visions I have ever witnessed unfolded onstage. Peter was absolutely brilliant as a partner, and Suzanne was magical, floating through the ballet with the most ethereal grace. Everyone in the audience was mesmerized, and when the performance finally came to an end, there were two beats of the deepest possible silence, followed by an explosion of applause and emotion in the packed theater.

  On May 4, at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign, on East Ninety-third Street, I stood in the pouring rain with the masses of mourners who had lined up to file past Balanchine’s open coffin. I remember thinking how strange it was that such a unique and powerful force could really come to an end. Would Mr. B choreograph the angels in heaven? The question made me think of the final composition he had choreographed for the Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, the Pathétique. It was an amazing scene in which all the ballerinas stood in the background wearing enormous ten-foot wings while all the men in the company filed onto the stage in monks’ robes and then spread out to make what eventually revealed itself to be the formation of a cross. The men in the cross formation were all positioned at gradually descending levels, standing at the back of the stage and lying on their stomachs in the front, so the cross seemed to be tipped toward the audience in a semiupright position, and once everyone was in place the men began doing push-ups and other coordinated movements to make the cross appear to “breathe.” A breathing cross! Who but Balanchine would ever imagine such a scene, let alone create it? I remember it was such a breathtaking vision, such an amazing moment, and at the time I was shocked that the audience seemed to roll right past it, as if it was just too wild and beautiful and moving a thing to acknowledge.

  I was standing in line that day near choreographer and co–ballet master John Taras, and when I reached Balanchine’s open coffin, John kept saying to me, “Kiss him, Jock. Kiss him.” Kiss him? Kiss a dead man? No. I had
the deepest respect for Balanchine, but I wasn’t about to kiss him. I had no desire to kiss his deadness, and, frankly, I could not believe he would want me to. As I filed past, crossing myself the way my mother had taught me, I said a silent prayer for him and a thank-you and good-bye to the man who had helped deliver to me my dream. But kiss him as he lay there? No. My kiss to Balanchine would be to remember him always, to remember what he had taught me, and to try always to be an honest and open performer—to “just dance.”

  The City Ballet has as fierce a show-must-go-on ethic as I have ever seen, and after Balanchine’s death all of us in the company picked up and threw ourselves into the process of continuing and trying to expand his legacy. That spring, choreographer and co–ballet master Jerome Robbins premiered his new ballet Glass Pieces. I was dancing as a member of the corps ensemble, and during rehearsals Robbins chose me to be the first runner in a string of male joggers who rush onstage to the dramatic pounding of drums. I have always suspected that it may have been my Native American looks rather than any particular talent that caught Jerry’s eye and prompted him to choose me as the lead runner. But I was happy to be noticed by him at all.

  It was exciting to be getting so many roles as such a young member of the company, but I was about to learn about one of the downsides—specifically, the hazards of juggling two demanding roles with two demanding choreographers at the same time. Peter had chosen me to partner Maria Calegari in Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements—a role debut for me—at about the same time that Helgi Tomasson had cast me as one of five soloist boys in a new ballet he was choreographing, called Ballet d’Isoline. The rehearsals for each of these ballets were intense, and often back-to-back, and when Helgi kept us late one day to do some last-minute revisions on his ballet he caught me eyeing the clock nervously and muttering something under my breath. He was furious. When I explained that I was overdue to rehearse Symphony in Three Movements for my role debut that night, he became even more furious. “Get out of this room, and out of my ballet,” he screamed. He just kicked me right out of his ballet, on the spot!