Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  Once again I am humbled by the breadth and energy behind my mother’s many accomplishments, and reminded of the truth in the opening sentence of the book she never got to write: “One never really gets to know one’s parents.” As I examine my own life I am beginning to feel that I took everything for granted when I was growing up. I spoiled myself and had the strangest notions of grandeur and poverty. To me, the reservation and the life people led there always seemed poor and sad. Only now am I beginning to realize how rich it actually is—rich with culture, rich with natural beauty, rich with tradition. The house I shared with Heather and Damian in Connecticut may have looked fancy and rich, but did I ever really feel nourished there the way my mother was nourished by her land and her heritage? It is hard to say. I do know I would give anything to sit down and have just one more Christmas dinner with both my white-marshmallow mother and my salsa-singing father (at whom I hope I will never again scream).

  Christmas Cheer for Orphans and Strays

  FOR DECADES OF my life, the annual run of Balanchine’s beloved Nutcracker ballet put the kibosh on any out-of-town holiday travel—we dancers got Christmas Day off, period—so every Thanksgiving and Christmas I was inevitably an orphan-guest at the holiday dinners of some kindhearted family in New York. John Gruen and Jane Wilson wrapped me into their family holiday meals on many occasions when I was young, as did Peter and Heather and several other company members who were grown up enough to actually have homes.

  These days the NYCB is dark on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—such a luxury! But there are still plenty of dancers and colleagues of Luis’s from his busy restaurant and sommelier worlds who can’t make it home or who have nowhere to go, so every year we put together a dinner for a random assortment of orphans and strays. This is always one of my favorite parties of the year, because we never know who will fill the chairs. What will be on the table is more predictable: a groaning board of standard holiday side dishes and a big old spiral-cut smoked ham. When it comes to gifts they always say it’s the thought that counts, so if you are hosting a crowd of unknown size for Christmas, why not think of something easy and give yourself the gift of time?

  I always try to keep every other aspect of this meal simple too. For hors d’oeuvres I go to the Chelsea Market and put together a big platter of cheeses, salami, and crudités. For flowers I buy bunches of red roses at the corner deli the night before and keep them in a bucket of warm water—a trick Heather taught me. Just before the guests arrive I cut the stems short (about four inches) and arrange the roses in stemless wineglasses or jelly jars down the center of the table. A couple of big candles and some holly sprigs here and there, some classic holiday music in the background, and a tray of glasses filled with rosé champagne to greet guests as they arrive—with friends like these who needs family?

  World’s Easiest Christmas Ham

  ______

  SERVES 10 GENEROUSLY, WITH LEFTOVERS

  This really has to be the easiest dish in the world. I like to get a Cook’s spiral-sliced hickory-smoked honey ham, but there are many variations of the same. Usually the glaze comes glued to the side of the packaged ham, and instructions (which may vary) are printed on the inside—so remember not to throw the wrapper away too soon.

  1 10-pound spiral-sliced hickory-smoked honey ham, with glaze packet

  Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Put the ham flat-side down in a large roasting pan, pour the juices from the package the ham came in over the meat, and cover it with aluminum foil. Put the ham in the oven. Let it cook for 2 hours without touching it. At this point, if there is a lot of juice at the bottom of the pan, I pour half of it out, and then baste the ham with the remaining juice. Spread half of the glaze from the glaze packet over the ham, put the aluminum foil back on, and cook for another 50 minutes. Finally, spread the remaining glaze over the ham and cook for another 10 minutes without the aluminum-foil cover. Remove from the oven and let the ham rest, covered with foil, until ready to serve.

  This ham makes a perfect entrée for a Christmas crowd, but it’s just as good in spring, with some gorgeous asparagus in balsamic vinaigrette. Or serve it for a Sunday brunch with garlic bread, so guests can put their ham between two luscious garlicky crusts and chomp away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ______

  Endings Beget Beginnings

  Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.

  —MARTHA GRAHAM

  After that sad January evening in 1995 when I danced my final Bugaku and Valse Triste with Heather, I was completely lost. It still seemed impossible that she was gone, and I felt totally alone and exposed. Heather and I had been dancing together for so long, and we knew each other so well, both on- and offstage—I wasn’t sure there would be much of me left up there onstage without her. I was thirty and I was beginning to feel my years—we boys do all the lifting, and over time our joints pay the price. I had been suffering from more aches and more injuries with each passing year, and in the winter of 1995, as I confronted the prospect of my first season without Heather, I honestly wondered if it might be time for me to retire as well. I thought about this quite seriously, the big question being, of course, what else could I do?

  Heather and Damian and I still shared the house in Connecticut, and we would hole up there together whenever we could, doing our best to maintain the work-hard, play-hard lifestyle we had led before. Heather and I launched a new partnership when we began to work together on a cookbook that would present some of our favorite meals. This gave us a comforting transitional partnering mode, but in truth the basic frame beneath our rolling adventure had changed—two of us were still performing in Lincoln Center every night, while one of us was moving on to explore new territory. The cadence of our days, the rhythm of our professional responsibilities, had been altered—and as time passed everything else began to change, too.

  One inevitable change resulting from Heather’s retirement was that I began to partner other ballerinas more frequently, and as a result, my stage rapport with various company members began to open up and expand. Of course everyone in the company dances with one another in all kinds of combinations, and over the years I had had the privilege of partnering many astoundingly talented ballerinas. But my partnership with Heather, in the final years before she retired, had become such an intense and defining aspect of my professional life that it had overshadowed most other experiences. In some situations my closeness to Heather even complicated matters. Relations between Heather and Darci, for instance, had always been a little distant—not just because Peter had been involved with each of them, but also because of fundamental differences in their personalities and styles. After Heather’s retirement, Peter began casting me with Darci more often, and I was pleased when a deeper friendship began to develop between us.

  Another ballerina I began to dance with more and more by this time was the supremely talented and intensely dedicated Wendy Whelan. Wendy had joined the company in 1986 and had been promoted to principal in 1991. In February, the month after Heather retired, Wendy and I danced the premiere of Dick Tanner’s Operetta Affezionata, and we were extremely comfortable together onstage. Over time Wendy began to take over some of the roles Heather had always danced with me, and slowly I could feel a special rapport, almost like a new language, beginning to develop between us as we performed. By the end of that year—a year that had started with me seriously considering retirement—I looked back and realized that I had premiered four new ballets: Tanner’s Operetta Affezionta, Kevin O’Day’s Huoah, Jerry Robbins’s revival of West Side Story Suite, and Peter Martins’s Adams Violin Concerto. In the fall I traveled with the company to Paris to dance for two weeks at the International Festival de Danse de Paris. Maybe I wasn’t completely washed up after all—in fact, I realized, I felt invigorated and very enthusiastic about the future.

  One of the reasons for my enthusiasm and optimism may have been a new relationship—one that would affect both my personal and professional lives—th
at was just beginning at about this time. To trace this relationship back to its roots, I have to go back to an evening in 1993 when I was dancing Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun. A couple of times while I was performing this ballet I had the strange feeling of being watched intensely by someone in the wings—anyone who has been onstage knows this feeling. When I looked over I saw a young dancer named Christopher Wheeldon, a former member of the Royal Ballet in London who had recently joined the NYCB, staring intently at me. For my role in Faun I wore tights and no shirt, and I remember wondering briefly if it was possible that this boy had a crush on me. No, I decided.

  My next encounter with Chris came quite a while later when the company was in residence in Saratoga. I was in transit between rehearsals for my own ballets, passing through the main rehearsal hall, where ballet master Victor Castelli was rehearsing Dances at a Gathering. Chris was dancing the Giggle Boy part of Dances, a passage where he had to lift Wendy Whelan. He was having some trouble lifting Wendy all the way, and as I passed, Victor stopped the rehearsal and called out to me.

  “Jock!” he said. “Can you help Chris with this lift? He’s having trouble. What should he do?”

  It was a hideously hot and humid day, and I was sweating like a pig and already late for my next rehearsal. I looked at them, and the first words to fall out of my mouth were “Well, he should do some push-ups.” Then I walked out of the rehearsal studio without another word. That was our first exchange—what a bitch I was.

  My next significant encounter with Chris was not until 1995, in New York, when Lourdes Lopez and I were warming up for a ballet—I think it was Midsummer Night’s Dream—that Chris was dancing in too. Between our passages onstage Lourdes and I wound up talking about Chris, and I admitted that I thought he was very talented and “kind of cute.” The truth is, by this time I knew a little more about Chris, and I was intrigued. I was attracted to his boyishness, of course, but I could also feel how eager and driven he was. He was a beautiful dancer, with beautiful legs and feet, but he also had great ambition and potential as a choreographer. I had seen some of the work he had choreographed for the SAB, and it was very, very good. In many ways he reminded me of Damian, who had already choreographed some pieces for both the school and the company; they were both go-getters with big talents and big visions. They both had that special aura that radiates from people who you know are going to become exactly what they want to become.

  I was attracted to all of these qualities in Chris, but given my recent history of bad romantic choices, I was not really in the market for a boyfriend. In fact, I was somewhat aghast that night when Lourdes called Chris over and asked him what he was doing after the performance. I just stared at her—what was she doing? Chris said he had no plans, and when Lourdes pressed him to join the two of us for dinner, he agreed. It was, essentially, my first date with Chris—engineered not by either Chris or me, but by the dynamic Lourdes Lopez.

  Sometimes it shocks me to think about what a kid Chris was when we got together. He was twenty-two and I was thirty. I had always been the one who dated older men, but in this case I guess the passage of time kind of turned the tables on me. Not long after we got together Chris moved into my apartment, and we ended up living together for the next six years. Those years proved to be a hugely important period of my life—perhaps most significantly in terms of the professional collaboration that evolved between the two of us. I knew that Chris had been brought up in the Royal Ballet and was a true classicist—he was a Kenneth MacMillan fan. But I also knew he believed Balanchine was a genius, and that he harbored a hunger for Balanchine’s invention and freshness. I was attracted to Chris’s obvious talent and understood his desire to create ballets that combined a feeling of innovation and classicism. It seems quite likely that Chris’s attraction to me was also at least in part professionally motivated—I was an experienced and established dancer who by then had been choreographed on many times by many artists. We sensed that we could help each other learn and grow, and while I take no credit for Chris’s choreography, I do feel that we were both right. We did work well together. In the ballets for which Wendy Whelan joined Chris and me as a third partner in this collaborative process, the experience expanded into something truly sublime.

  Although Chris and I may have sensed the potential in our professional collaboration from the beginning, this was not something we were able to explore immediately. For one thing, in November 1995, shortly after Chris and I got together, I suffered one of the worst injuries of my career. I was dancing Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante, a very intense and fiendishly fast ballet, and during my final leap in the second entrance with Wendy I felt a stab of pain and heard a sickening pop—I had torn a calf muscle. As I exited to the wings, limping, I knew there was no way I could dance the next entry. I screamed to Damian, who was warming up for his own ballet later that evening, and explained the situation, and then limped back onstage for an ensemble passage that I knew I could fake my way through. When Wendy began the solo that leads into the next pas de deux, I exited with the rest of the corps. Damian, wearing his warm-up tights under a tunic he had grabbed from somewhere backstage, heroically leaped in and took over my part. His rescue was so smooth and seamless.

  That torn calf muscle was my first really serious injury—dancing is a very risky business, and I was comparatively lucky not to have had a major injury earlier—and it gave me a foretaste of the frustrations to come. My roles were severely curtailed for the next year as I worked on getting my calf back to strength, and it was not until 1997 that I had fully recovered. But there were some upsides from that year of reduced dancing, one of which was that because I had more time on my hands, at Peter’s suggestion, in 1996 I began teaching some classes at SAB for the first time. It is strange to think back and remember how nervous and uncomfortable I was with these duties in the beginning—no doubt because I was insecure and unsure of my abilities as a teacher. Now I love teaching, so much that I cannot imagine not having it as part of my life. Another upside of dancing less was that I could devote more time to the new project Heather and I were working on together. After toying with the idea for some time, we were working seriously on a cookbook based on the informal dinners and gatherings we cohosted for friends. In 1997 we managed to complete our book, and published it with Riverhead Press under the title Our Meals.

  It was not until I fully recovered from my injury, in the spring of 1997, that Chris and I began our collaboration in earnest, when Peter asked him to choreograph his first ballet for the company on me and Monique Meunier. It was called Slavonic Dances, and in addition to Monique and me, it featured a big corps. I was impressed by how crafty and inventive Chris was about using a big corps, and I think he was grateful for the ways I was able to help him with some of the partnering passages. Slavonic Dances was one of six new ballets created for the annual Diamond Project that spring, and it would be one of three ballets chosen to premiere that summer at Saratoga. I remember Chris and I were both insanely busy at that time—he was dancing as a soloist with the company and also choreographing, and I was dancing four premieres in the month of June alone: Chris’s Slavonic Dances, Peter Martins’s Them Twos, Miriam Mahdaviani’s Urban Dances, and Robert La Fosse’s Concerto in Five Movements. In fact, it was probably a good thing Chris and I enjoyed our professional collaboration so much, because we had very little time to explore much of anything else. We did go to South America together that fall when one group of company dancers went on tour in the Pacific Rim while a second group—including Chris and me—toured Brazil. My main memory of that trip is that everyone in our group ate a little too much Brazilian food and drank a few too many caipirinhas, and as a result we all waddled home a little fatter than when we had left.

  The following January marked the beginning of the company’s fiftieth anniversary, and the launch of a series of special celebrations and performances at home and around the country. As always, Peter Martins was brainstorming a number of new ballets that year, with a wid
e range of feeling to them, and I was lucky enough to work with him on two pieces—River of Light and Stabat Mater—that were wildly different. The former was a stark and futuristic ballet set to a Charles Wuorinen score, and showcased the special talent Peter has for finding and expressing incredible beauty and grace embedded in a passage of music that can be difficult to count and even unappealing to the ear initially. Three couples danced in virtual rivers of light created by lighting designer Mark Stanley, and when Darci and I performed our final pas de deux we danced inside a ring of light that seemed to be floating in the water. Stabat Mater, by contrast, had a feeling of great antiquity and classicism, and featured three couples who come to life amid what appear to be Greek ruins. Peter created Stabat as a somber and moving tribute to the amazing ballet teacher Stanley Williams, who after thirty-seven years with the SAB, had died the previous fall. Stanley was renowned worldwide, and he taught so many of us so brilliantly. I remember I was driving uptown to take Stanley’s class when my cell phone rang. It was Heather. She said, “Jock, are you going to class?” I said, “Yes, I’m going to class.” Then she said, “Well, prepare yourself. Stanley died this morning.” I was stunned, but I just kept going. I drove to the school, I parked, I walked upstairs, I changed, and I headed into the studio. Everyone else in the class had done the same thing—we were all so upset, but we didn’t know what else to do. Somebody said, “Peter’s going to teach.” Then Peter Martins walked in and said, “Stanley would have wanted this.” Then Peter started teaching.