Category: dance

This week’s Friday Fiction is a threefer of nonfiction books that follow young kids doing cool things: “A Very Young Dancer,” “A Very Young Skater,” and “A Very Young Gymnast”, all by Jill Krementz. (Krementz had a whole series of “Very Young X” books, of which these were likely the most popular.)

What is it about ballet, ice skating, and gymnastics that is catnip to (certain) little girls? I don’t know, but they enchanted me as a child. When I moved to the US at age 7, one of very few entertainments I had available to me was the public library. I was barely able to read English at the time, so I wandered the aisles aimlessly and somehow stumbled into those books. With their beautiful photographs and minimal text–the books are all “narrated” by their 10-year-old subjects–they were perfect for me. All three follow affluent young white girls growing up in New York City in the late 70s, training for each of those passions.

“A Very Young Dancer” follows Stephanie (last name not given, but easily searchable), a girl training in ballet at the famous School of American Ballet–the one that Balanchine founded and that feeds into the New York City Ballet. She lands the role of Marie/Clara–the star!–in SAB’s Nutcracker. It follows her through the performance and then sees her settle back into the rhythm of regular hard work at SAB, post-Nutcracker.

“A Very Young Skater” follows Katherine Healy, a girl training in figure skating. It ends with Healy doing a figure skating exhibition event.

And “A Very Young Gymnast” follows Torrance York, a girl training and competing in gymnastics. She qualified for the Junior Olympics while the book was in publication.

As a person with an obsessive personality, I realize now that what I loved about these books, in addition to how beautiful these athletes’ movements were, was the obvious amount of dedication and love that these kids were putting into their work. I loved the thought of my job being to do something beautiful over and over until it became even more beautiful.

(“A Very Young Dancer” was also my introduction to ballet, of course. I didn’t get to take lessons until I was in my 30s, but what can I say, the book worked.)

As an adult, I went back and wondered what became of these kids. Google told me.

York probably had the most conventional path in life. After the events of the book, she was invited to train at an Olympic gym. Although that was once her dream, she turned it down on the grounds that she felt satisfied with what she had already accomplished and did not want it to consume her life. Today she is a photographer and has, as far as I can tell, no links to gymnastics.

Athletically speaking, Healy was by far the most successful of the three. She wanted to be a ballet dancer herself. She also entered SAB and danced the Nutcracker lead in 1978 and 1979. (I have not been able to stop wondering: did she and Stephanie ever meet? Stephanie’s book came out in 1976, so I suspect they just missed each other.) I have seen Healy called a child prodigy in both skating and ballet. I don’t know about skating, but I’d agree about ballet–check out these videos of her dancing at age 10 and at age 13. I’ve seen pre-professional students who don’t have her quality of movement. Her command of movement and port de bras makes me want to weep.

Healy won a handful of international ballet competitions and when she was merely 15, joined the English National Ballet as a principal dancer. That’s the kind of thing I’d say was too unrealistic for a story. Today she teaches ballet and I think also skating. I’m honestly a little surprised that she isn’t more famous. Just imagine if she’d been born in the Instagram era.

What about the actual very young dancer? Although her book inspired a generation of girls to take up ballet, Stephanie’s dance career was over just after it began. Despite having danced the lead in Nutcracker, she was, to be blunt, kicked out of SAB just a few years later. It’s not really clear why, and anyone who knew has long since passed. That said, what evidence remains does suggest that she was not progressing as quickly or as well as her teachers would have liked. As one might imagine, it was a shock going from a literal poster child for ballet to being booted from a famous ballet school. Stephanie now lives in Wyoming, in a life as far removed from ballet as possible. (And if you didn’t believe me when I said that this book was popular, well, I hope the fact that a New York Times article focuses on her after-story is convincing. That, and the mention that superstar Wendy Whelan got inspired to dance from the book.)

I went back to the books to see if there was any hint of these outcomes–any seeds of the future–in the children’s own words about themselves. It’s easy to read too much into these things, but one thing I noticed what that York and Healy come across as more serious and, well, professional in their books. Unlike Stephanie, they discuss technique in their narration, which implies a deeper level of understanding and ownership of their work.

That’s probably far too much tea-leaf-reading to apply to the words of 10-year-old kids, but it does align with what I know to be true. If you want to succeed at the highest levels, you pretty much have to be your own coach. Of course it helps to have piles of wealth and privilege and the world’s best teachers behind you (as all three girls did), but even then, they can’t do it for you.

A bigger issue is probably that, at least according to her interview decades later, Stephanie didn’t actually enjoy ballet enough to progress in it as a career. She said that classes were laborious and unpleasant. I’ve heard the same … from professional dancers. You’re going to have shit days. There is no job in the world with no shit days.

None of this is to judge Stephanie in a bad light. Shit days are much harder to deal with when you are 10 than when you are 30, unless you are one of those preternaturally mature children (I have the feeling that York and Healy both were). I am only sad that she didn’t get to discover for herself that ballet was probably not her calling, and that the choice was ripped away from her so abruptly and quasi-publicly. As a child, it must have been enormously difficult to process.

I suppose all that is to say: for all that I idolized these girls, and for all that society loves to fawn over stories of successful children, there are benefits to being a grown-up. Like maturity. Perspective. Context. Fantasies aside, I would never have been able to handle being a professional ballet dancer at 15 or training for the Olympics at 12.

I once heard a successful older woman who runs her own business say that that professional success comes for you when you are truly ready for it. While that flatten a lot of aspects, for me, I find that it has been overwhelmingly true. So I hope that we can all have, and take, the time that we need to get on our own paths, Very Young or not.

Today’s Friday Favorite is “Dancing on my Grave,” a memoir by Gelsey Kirkland, one of Balanchine’s baby ballerinas who joined the New York City Ballet at 15. She was also something of a notorious (but reformed) bad girl figure in the ballet world. If you know anything about her it’s probably that she 1) danced with Baryshnikov on TV in “The Nutcracker” (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube) and 2) did a lot of coke on top of starving herself.

If you know anything more, it’s probably that she was a unique, brilliant, expressive dancer. I’m painfully crushed that we didn’t have today’s cameras in the 60s-80s, because I wish I could see her in HD, but even looking at the blurry videos that do exist, you can get an idea of her brilliance. She cultivated an airy, innocent yet knowing, childlike and delicate quality to her movement. And she expressed with every cell in her body.

Kirkland is probably my favorite dancer of all time. Her movement aesthetics are the same as mine, and I really connect with how she discusses ballet. I have often said that what I love about ballet is the shaping of space with your body. In an interview with Dance Magazine, Kirkland expressed it far better:

Many dancers think of performance as the audience… and themselves, that is, two-dimensional. They need to build a three-dimensional world and draw the audience into it. When you radiate épaulement, let’s say in croisé, you are opening up a whole arc of light with your body. You have to open this circle constantly, so that when you move through space you create a state of wonder and the audience discovers this with you.

But the absence of light is darkness. The book is an extremely unvarnished retrospective, penned while she was—as the end of the book describes—getting off coke and Valium. In addition to the drug abuse, she dealt with eating disorders. It really does fall into the “tortured genius” category which really makes me wonder how much better she might have been if she hadn’t hated herself for most of her life. But she also claims, and I see no reason to disbelieve her, that all that hatred meant she focused and obsessed on making her dance better because it was the one area of life where she could control. Obsession leads to practice, and practice approaches perfection. So perhaps if she had been born into a healthier family, Kirkland’s career would have ended young when she decided that Balanchine was an asshole and walked out of the School of American Ballet. No doubt it would have been healthier for her. The paying public admires achievements, but doesn’t like to think about the cost, unless it’s also shown as a performance—a grotesque one, especially.

That aside. The book is a fascinating look for me, as a person who enjoys dancing ballet, into the unbelievable amount of work Kirkland put into her dancing. We’re talking all-night practices. She was a complete perfectionist. The book doesn’t really linger on her studio time, but there are others who were there with a camera. Kurt Froman got his hands on some footage of Kirkland (among other things) practicing the famous Kitri jump for 50 minutes, over and over.

She paid for it financially, too. She found her own coaches, not just in ballet but in kinesiology and mime and other types of dance. She was learning nonstop for her entire career … although I suppose the cocaine didn’t help.

On that note, I can easily see why cocaine was so attractive to her. My understanding (never having tried it) is that coke, aside from the euphoria, makes you feel really confident in yourself. If I hated myself as much as Kirkland describes hating herself, I too would be instantly hooked on being free of that feeling. Speaking as one who drinks alcohol to occasionally stop the noise of a mind that sometimes just won’t shut up, I understand self-medication completely, without necessarily promoting the act. I should also mention that (as described both in and out of this book) plenty of other dancers at the time were doing various drugs for various reasons. The dancer whom Kirkland said introduced her to cocaine died a year after her book came out, probably of an overdose.

For those of you worried about a sad ending, I have good news. Kirkland did get away from drugs and returned to the stage. She discovered teaching while at the Royal Ballet, and today helms the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet. She gives beautiful, frank interviews and is all about coaching the next generation of dancers. She’s an artist still, and she’s even happy. May we all come to that point, but hopefully with far less trouble.

P.S. Kirkland wrote a second memoir, The Shape of Love, which is also on my to-read list.