seen someone so thin. The dancer doesn’t have anorexia. Not most anyway. Most have control. That’s different. If they eat a bagel, never with butter or cream cheese, they toast it because they believe toasting gets rid of the starch.
The body of a dancer . . .
The body of a dancer has shin splints up the front of the leg. She has a bunion from her years as a ballet dancer before she became a modern dancer. She has no toenails. Now as a modern dancer, she has floor burns up and down her spine. She has skin splits on the bottoms of her feet, and she wraps the splits with Elastacon, an expensive medical tape sometimes used on horses. The pharmacy on Eighth Avenue and 53rd carries Elastacon for modern dancers and for all the Broadway gypsy dancers.
To this day, I can tell you the injuries of all my friends. I can tell you their physical problems more than I can tell you their family history. I can tell you that my friend Stef has trouble with her neck and sometimes with a knee. I can tell you that my friend Heather injured her calf muscle and that she was terrified because she’d never had an injury before. She didn’t know what the rest of us were talking about when we said a strained muscle hurt so badly. I can tell you my friend Mara had trouble with her lower back. I can tell you about another friend who had a herniated disk and spent six immovable months on her back. The doctors told her she would never dance again, and she told me she couldn’t imagine her life without dance. I can tell you almost everyone at Graham had trouble with their lower backs. I can tell you my friend Sandra occasionally has a glitch in her hip. I can tell you about a young woman named Kathleen who was slated for the New York City Ballet Company whose teacher ripped out the muscles in her right hip area because he forced the leg to her ear to show her she wasn’t working hard enough. That teacher was Perry Brunson. He was an amazing teacher. Placement, alignment, discipline. We lost him all those years ago. That was at the beginning of AIDS. We didn’t say AIDS back then.
Pain . . .
Don’t tell anyone about the aches and pains. The body of a dancer is a perfect instrument. It is honed. Even when it shows the effort with modern dance, done barefoot, as opposed to defying gravity in ballet, done in pointe shoes, the body is still a tool, an instrument, an expression of the soul. And if the soul isn’t interesting... forget it.
The body, Martha Graham says, never lies.
My body lied all the time. The tiny spot on the front right of my hip, on the top of my iliac crest, was on fire by the end of my dancing life. I couldn’t let anyone touch it; the pain sent my face grimacing, involuntarily. I didn’t tell anyone I used to spend days in bed or on the floor, trying to get my lower back to release various spasms. In rehearsal, I often wore a flexible neoprene back brace. There was Velcro on one side, and I wrapped it tightly around my lower back. The neoprene held my sacrum together. I covered it with a floppy sweatshirt.
Drugs . . .
My boyfriend Chris followed me from Montana to New York City, and he would bring me aspirin while I lay in bed or on the floor. Then we tried ibuprofen. We settled on naproxen, using the product Aleve.
I remember Chris begging me to lift weights, to try some toning exercises for my muscles, to rethink the way I was training my body. He also told me to lose weight—I was 5’5” and 112 pounds—and he pissed me off so much, I didn’t do anything else he suggested. I should have. Maybe I would still be dancing.
Maybe not.
They say there are three kinds of dancers: 1. Those who dance when young and never dance again; 2. Those who dance professionally and move on; and 3. Those who dance professionally and then move on into careers in dance, teaching, and/or choreography.
My own personal opinion is that there is a fourth kind of dancer: for her, dance never leaves the heart; dance is the purest expression of life; it is movement without voice, movement that is a gift of the body.
The mind . . .
The modern dancer’s mind is just as twisted as the ballet dancer’s mind. She thinks she is too tall, too short, too fat, too thin (oops, never too thin), too blonde, too brunette, too pale, too dark, too, too, too something to be a dancer. She is wrong for the part. She is not wrong for the part. Her body is wrong for the part. But her body is her. There is absolutely no difference. Her body is the instrument, and she is the instrument.
When I moved to New York City in the summer of 1993, I wanted to get trained. Then, I thought, I’ll see what I want to do with a trained body. I was twenty-five-years old. Old for a dancer. Even a modern dancer. After eight years training in ballet as a kid, I’d left ballet at the age of sixteen. I declared I wanted a broader focus to my life, but it was also true that I had started to realize I would not become a principal or even a soloist, and I didn’t want to be part of the corps. Maybe in a different era, Margot Fonteyn’s era, I could have made principal. Danced Swan Lake. Maybe not. For a while after ballet, a broader focus took over. I finished high school, then traveled, held different jobs, and briefly went to university without completing a degree. I had the opportunity to come back and dance again. Myra Woodruff gave me the chance.
New York City. I was willing to bleed for my art. But I wasn’t willing to die for it. I made a distinction in my mind because I’d seen death at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. I’d seen a woman who was skin and bones, a woman who was a warning to my dancing life. I’d seen her, and I remembered her. I never knew her name, but I saw each rib. I saw her collar bones. I saw the protrusion of each vertebra. She had no pubic hair.
I’d seen the hollows of her eyes. She had looked me directly in the eye in the dressing room. I was ten years old. She must have been sixteen or eighteen or maybe even twenty. She’d looked at me, and I had stared back, and I had heard her words in my head, “I am dying.” I remembered.
My mother had seen this girl, too, and delayed my enrollment at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School for an entire year because of it. My mother figured that if there was a skeleton walking around Pacific Northwest Ballet, it was not the sort of dance school she wanted her daughter to attend. Instead, I enrolled at the Cornish School of the Arts and trained with Noël Mason, who had danced with the Joffrey Ballet. When Ms. Mason moved from Cornish to Pacific Northwest Ballet School a year later, I followed. For the next three years after that, I was “Clara” in The Nutcracker—Michael Smuin’s version, not the Kent Stowell and Maurice Sendak version.
Francia Russell, the director of the school, said to me, “You’re perfect for ‘Clara,’ because you are much more of an actress than a dancer.”
It was a condescending compliment. I couldn’t handle her honesty, but I did appreciate it. That’s why, at sixteen, when Francia Russell told me the most I could hope for as a ballet dancer was as a corps member in some Midwestern third-tier company, I decided to quit. My excuse was that I would act. But really, something inside died. An ex-dancer knows what I mean. When I left ballet, I left my identity. None of my dance classmates phoned. I had succumbed to failure. I did not have the biology. My extension was not high enough. I had breasts. I would never be a ballet dancer. I was nothing.
At the age of twenty-five, I had a lot to prove as a modern dancer. But I had placement and turn-out and good arches and musicality and presence. Ballet had given me all that. I was ready—in modern—to learn. I worked harder than all my classmates. I had lost years. I couldn’t waste a second.
In the summer of 1993, I felt I’d been given a second chance. I was home. In my body. In the body of a dancer. Or what would soon be the body of a dancer. There was much to do: shape the thighs; get the turnout working again; get the extension going; develop strength; balance. And jump. And land without hopping. God, I loved to jump. To leap. To fly to the sky and never ever land. To take to the heavens. The blue expanse holds me there.