Last Saturday was the 151st Kentucky Derby where I live in Louisville, KY. I don’t know that much about breeding, raising, and training racehorses or how they are treated or what their lives are like. So that won’t be the focus of this blog post. Instead, I want to make a loose analogy between top, competitive performance in horse racing and top, competitive performance in dance. I’m talking about the kinds of dance where athleticism and technical skill is a major factor of virtuosity.
Here are the elements on which I will focus today:
- Advantageous natural, bodily inheritance;
- Repetitive, sustained and increasingly difficult training; and
- Direction by an expert (or team of experts) in achieving the tasks required by the form.
On natural inheritance. George Balanchine has been quoted by the dancers he worked with closely as saying this or something like this, “Dancers are like horses. Everything has to be there from the beginning.” Whether or not he did actually say this, the concept is consistent with the way that very young dancers were selected for the pre-professional training programs at School of American Ballet in the late 1970s when I auditioned. Dancers who auditioned at age 6, for example, were evaluated in terms of physical instrument. Do they have longer legs and shorter torsos? Do they have straight legs (not bowed, not overly hyperextended) that can withstand the later rigors of training? Do they have feet that arch enough when pointed for the aesthetic “look” of ballet? Do they have enough flexibility for both the 180-degree turnout that will be required and in their backs for a deep arabesque?
In my audition, the former New York City Ballet ballerina (wearing a black stretchy turtleneck, a black, slim skirt, and a sort of heeled jazz shoe) had me face her with my back to the parallel barres. “Give me leg,” she said, in a deep Russian accent. I raised my foot off the floor to the front and she lifted it high to the front, measuring how much resistance my body gave to her measure of my flexibility. She whispered something to an assistant, who jotted notes down on a clipboard. She did the same to the side and to the back.
The training at SAB was progressive and increasingly difficult. Although I was accepted to the school initially, it became clear with the addition of pointe shoes that I was not developing the physical strength needed to progress to the upper levels. Because of this, they cut me from further training, much like (I assume) one would stop training a horse for races who failed to progress in sufficient strength and speed to win.
How could they see, at age 12, at just the beginning of puberty, that I would never be strong enough for the rigors of the New York City Ballet repertoire? This is where expertise came in. They knew from long years of experience training young dancers into New York City Ballet members. Each year, 1 or 2 of the ranks were selected to be Apprentices in the Company.
The competitive nature of the selection process allowed SAB to train 10 times or more the number of contenders they would need and then select the best from among them. Expressivity in performance was not a non-factor but in general it seemed that any individual style or artistry was cultivated not in the SAB training program but in Company performance later and training by George Balanchine himself. A non-negotiable prerequisite for artistic training was technical proficiency. And then, later, Balanchine would help the dancers he wanted to elevate to soloists and principals develop a signature style. (Merrill Ashley’s book, Dancing for Balanchine is instructive here on what it was like to work with Balanchine, as is Susanne Farrell’s book, Holding On to the Air, and Edward Villella’s book, Prodigal Son.)
One major difference between horses and dancers is that horses have no say at all whether or not they want to be trained as racers. As a dancer, once you get into a pre-professional training school, however, all the adults, teachers, and everyone else around you assume that you are there to be trained into a professional dancer. The entire culture revolves around carrots for success and sticks for failure. At SAB the carrot was parts in The Nutcracker as children and praise from the very stern dance teachers. The stick was social rejection (and sometimes ridicule) by other dancers – not being “good enough” for parts or praise. And every class had a mirror by which you judged yourself in comparison with the other dancers in the class, by at least the dancers to the left and right of you at the barre. Self-censure and blame were par for the course.
Another difference between horses and dancers is that if you get so injured that rehabilitation is not possible, they don’t shoot you. You do, however, get put out to pasture. You are excommunicated from the only life you have been raised to think matters. And if you, yourself, are a part of the culture that banishes you an alienation takes place between the dancer you once were and the non-dancer (weak, failure, normal person) you are now. This is the root of my attempt to heal this rift. I’m trying to heal by reclaiming the dancer who is still within me.
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