A life in training to be a professional ballet dancer requires numerous auditions. As I child I auditioned for the School of American Ballet, a square with a black number on a white background safety pinned to the front of my leotard. The judges studied our bodies individually, one by one, and tested our flexibility before giving us some simple barre and center exercises to do. This was my most innocent audition – I was completely unaware of the other dancers and just danced for the fun of it and for the love of movement that I had learned up until then. Madame Dudinskaya, the one teaching the mini-class, had very white skin and a cloud of black hair around her head. When I was done with the first center combination she came over to me, put one arm around my shoulders, and walked me back to the starting position at the back of the room. There was something sweet and motherly about that gesture and I wondered why she had singled me out in that way. It was radically different than how we had been treated by Madame Tumkovsky, who was more of a drill sergeant in appearance and manner. She was all bluster, no motherliness, as she approached us to lift our legs and then drop them abruptly, whispering her assessments to Miss Finn, the administrator who took the notes for the audition.
When I auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts (“PA”), which later became the F.H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts, they required that we bring our own music (on a cassette tape) to perform a pre-choreographed piece. Francis Patrelle, from Ballet Academy East, choreographed my audition piece. When he gave me the music he had selected, a Brahms piece in D minor, I was surprised by its slowness. The beginning of the piece was just to move one arm slowly up and to the side for the first 30 seconds or so of the piece. I was disappointed by this beginning. I wanted to burst out of a cannon showing what I could do – some double pirouettes and some jumps with beats in them. Worse, the judges stopped my audition right after that arm raise. When I found out later that I had not only been admitted to the school, but with a near-perfect score, Mr. Patrelle said, “You see?” He had known that my strength was musicality.
When I auditioned for the Pennsylvania Ballet Summer Program, they required two Polaroid photos to be submitted as part of your audition – one on pointe in first position and one in arabesque. At the time, I was mystified, but I now think that if you can see a dancer in both of those positions you can tell a lot about her body and her former training. That class was taught by a teacher who had taught a guest classes at Ballet Arts, Bojan (“Bo”) Spassoff. I was pretty sure that his having known my dancing outside of the audition would give me an edge and I was right. I was accepted to the program at a higher level than some of my contemporaries.
One of my last professional-level auditions was for the Eglevsky Ballet Nutcracker. There we just took a class with director Michael Vernon, which included barre and center work. I knew some of the dancers who were auditioning with me for that and I took care to position myself next to the weakest ones. My lines were straighter, my legs were higher, my movements were more precise. I was accepted to the adult corps de ballet for the Nutcracker run of performances.
By the time of my final audition in ballet, the one that precipitated my final injury and the downhill spiral into which it sent me before I quit altogether, ballet was no longer an opportunity to try some new steps and feel the music and the love of dance. It was about beating others out. It’s ironic, perhaps, that as I got better at beating others, winning one of a few coveted spots, that I also beat myself. I beat myself into a battered person both physically (via injuries and an eating disorder) and emotionally (as I tried to spur myself on to greater achievement by cultivating anger at myself when I didn’t progress fast enough and didn’t go far enough). I think, perhaps, that I was as much a part of killing off a possible dance career as I was a victim of unfortunate genetics.
In my life now I no longer get in my own way. I’m not sure if this is because I have learned and grown or whether it’s because I’m no longer really going anywhere. Perhaps the two are the same thing. And I’m not sure whether or not to be sad about that.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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