U.S. Ballet Soars

By Paul Gray

First position first. Place heels together and splay the feet until they point in opposite directions. Fine, but keep those legs touching, no bowing at the knees! In passing, note the ripples of protest that exfoliate up from the ankles through knees to outer thighs, the pebbly grind of hip sockets trying to accommodate swiveling joints. Good. Tendons, sinews, muscles and bones should now unite in sending an urgent message to the brain. Ouch! Wait a nanosecond for the translation. Here it comes: "Cut it out, will you? People were not built to stand this way. " Disregard this perfectly valid information. Now, dance.

Countless thousands of little girl ducklings each year paddle into this wrenching regimen, known politely as ballet class. Many are shoved by doting mommies and daddies with an atavistic sense of how young ladies are supposed to move. A single-minded few are driven by the demonic notion that they could, some day, be swans. Most are mistaken. Once in a great while though, the real thing comes along, and word rapidly spreads through one of the world's oldest permanent floating meritocracies. Leningrad hears it, and so do Stuttgart, Covent Garden and New York: a star is born who might, just might, be capable of being made. So recognized, this singular creature is then cosseted and punished, cradled from outside interruptions and given every imaginable opportunity to fall smack on her overextended haunches. Meanwhile, the cognoscenti settle back for a long wait. A verdict should be in in about ten years.

For Gelsey Kirkland, 25, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, that trial has ended successfully. An obvious prospect at eight and a gleam in the eye of George Balanchine at 15, Gelsey (pronounced with a hard g, as in great) has emerged from ballet's long chrysalis stage as the most exciting young ballerina in the Western world.

She is now moving into the class of the finest ballerinas: New York City Ballet's Suzanne Farrell and Patricia McBride, A.B.T.'s Natalia Makarova and Cynthia Gregory; and Gelsey is six years younger than the youngest of these. Her stage presence fuses contraries--strength and limpidity, control and abandon, energy and ease. "It's difficult to talk about Gelsey," says Choreographer Antony Tudor, "because she is so right." Many try nonetheless. Rudolf Nureyev commends her: "She has that beautiful fluidity in her movements and an incredible strength for such a small girl." Mikhail Baryshnikov notes that "she advances from performance to performance. Her taste and artistic outlook are constantly developing, and none of us can predict how far she will go." Dancer Edward Villella singles out the essence of a performance: "Those steel-like legs that are doing the most fantastic technical feats, while the upper body is soft and lovely as though nothing was going on underneath."

Gelsey has been drawing superlatives from balletomanes ever since she was a tiny dancer. No one who saw her nearly nine years ago in Jerome Robbins' piano ballet Dances at a Gathering doubted the arrival of a technical virtuoso. Gelsey sped through every challenge of the choreography, the visual equivalent of the rippling Chopin score. Though some in those days found her work rather cold, reservations never centered on her talent. The question was not whether she could make it to the top but whether she would self-destruct first. For her fame within dance's inner circle rests not just on her skill but on her ability to take a hard road and make it much, much harder. "I was a compulsive worker," she says, "even at eight."

The kid was also a tartar and grew up in kind, gobbling up ballet lessons, putting her tiny foot down whenever anyone dared to nudge her from her chosen path. Her purpose was clear. Says Dancer Robert Weiss, an old friend: "She wanted to have the extension of the greatest dancer, the jump of the best jumper, the turns of the best turner, the dramatic possibilities of the best dramatic ballerina and the comic possibilities of a comedienne. She wanted to be perfect."

How close she has come was visible last month at her Kennedy Center debut in Baryshnikov's version of Don Quixote. Very close. As Kitri, the spitfire Spanish girl who defies her innkeeper father and marries Basil, the barber of her choice, Gelsey has the kind of high-stepping, scenery-chewing part that can hurl an artist into stardom. Don Q offers some of the great bravura set pieces in the classical repertory, and Baryshnikov has seen to it that the routines spill into each other and positively spatter on the stage, threatening to engulf the aisles and even (somebody call the cops!) the streets outside.

Kirkland mugs like a trouper, perfectly attuned to the broad style of "classical vaudeville" that Baryshnikov chose for his tribute to this sturdy war horse of Russian ballet. When she is in the presence of Gamache, the unwanted suitor pressed upon her by her father, her eyes roll in exaggerated disdain. She transforms her snapping fan into an epee to prod this fopling across the stage and out of her sight. Her face flares in coquettish outrage at brash Basil's proffered kisses; she singes and melts at the same time. When she is onstage with the demented man of La Mancha, the tart senorita turns spindrift. She not only sees his visions but sees around them. Her poignant movements tell everyone watching what she knows: she is the earthly incarnation of the Don's beloved Dulcinea and how sad that life and visions cannot meet. Gelsey is, in short, one of the most electric actresses now working on any stage.

The pure dancer in Gelsey could be seen last week when A.B.T. opened its New York season with a new production of Balanchine's Theme and Variations, a ballet as precise as Don Q is broad. David Howard, one of Gelsey's two current instructors, describes the challenge: "Theme requires diamond sharpness, tremendous speed, a glittering technique. The Balanchine style is small, sharp, quick footwork." Gelsey's performance was in the way of a reprise. When she first conquered the ballet's fiendish demands at 17, she gave notice that she could do anything. Nothing she does now suggests otherwise.

Observed from afar, the Kirkland magnetism looks as easy and inevitable as a natural force. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and look at that woman up there on that stage. This illusion, indeed, this bald-faced lie, is the tribute art pays to perspiration, not to mention a flinty intelligence that knows exactly what the body is up to every second of a performance. Says Gelsey: "As unnatural as dancing is, you have to find a natural way of doing the unnatural."

In the matter of physique, nature did not deal Gelsey an ideal hand, but she trumped every disadvantage. Her facial features seem to have been intended for a slightly larger head. So? What big blue eyes she has and what an alluring Gioconda half-smile, all the better to be seen clearly from the third balcony. And those long arms and legs: Should they not be attached to a bigger body? In motion, Gelsey's torso seems to lose what little substance it has. Mass is translated into a continuum of grace.

With her waiflike face and small person (she does quite graze 5 ft. 4 in.; she weighs around 93 lbs.), Gelsey is an enchanting soubrette, delightful as Swanilda in Coppelia or, more recently, as Clara in Baryshnikov's A.B.T. production of The Nutcracker. Gelsey enters in a swirl of other young people and first steps out of the crowd as a shy spectator of party festivities. At bedtime her tiny frame is swallowed up in a pink nightdress. Later, amid the wondrous dream parade of snowflakes and exotic entertainers, the girl-woman Clara stands out as the most ethereal and ephemeral creature of all.

Gelsey has been dancing various roles in The Nutcracker for nearly 17 years, but her performance in the Baryshnikov version had special significance. It was her first triumph after a period of physical and emotional travail. While rehearsing the part, immersed in the light-heartedness of make-believe girlhood, Gelsey began doing something that her grim lockstep toward perfection had never allowed before: enjoying herself.

Why did this happen? Gelsey explains: "I guess it was because--forgive me, Mother--I would like to have remembered my childhood like that, but it wasn't anything like my childhood. It was such fun to go through a childhood like the one in The Nutcracker. Christmas was a big deal for us, but I never saw things this way. I never had the kind of dreams that Clara does. I was so busy working at making my dreams come true that they were never really dreams. They were aspirations."

Nobody stood over little Gelsey with a knife and forced her to have aspirations. All accounts agree, including hers: she did it to herself. John Clifford, director of the Los Angeles Ballet company, knew the young Gelsey and was not entirely charmed. "Gelsey was born mad at the world," he says. "She was born ready to kill." Former Dancer Meg Gordon, one of Gelsey's few close friends, remembers the same thing in softer focus: "Even when we were little, her mother used to joke about it, saying, 'You must have come out of your mother's womb marching.' "

Gelsey marched on Dec. 29, 1952, in a Bethlehem, Pa., hospital. Her father Jack was a playwright who had scored handsomely as adapter of Tobacco Road for Broadway; her mother Nancy, a onetime actress, had retired from the stage to become Jack's fifth wife. A sister, Johnna, was nearly four when Gelsey was born; she has a brother, Marshall, 16 months younger.

Home was a rambling place in Bucks County, Pa., shared by three of Jack's children from earlier marriages and four grandchildren. Carloads of theater friends and Kirkland's fellow writers arrived regularly from New York for extended house parties. Amid all the drinking and countryside romping, Gelsey stood out as the poker-faced toddler. "Her seriousness was always a source of kidding," says Brother-in-Law Don Bevan. "But she would never encourage it. She would never give the adults satisfaction. You could never get her to sit on your lap and be cuddly."

When she was three, the Kirklands moved to an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. There, Jack decided that both girls should be prepared for a life in the theater. He took a special interest in Johnna, whose easygoing gregariousness matched his own. "I was my father's child," says Johnna, "and Gelsey was my mother's child." The younger daughter's obsessiveness taxed a mother's patience. First it was ice skating. Tummy sticking out and a frown on her large face, Gelsey learned to whirl around the Wollman rink in Central Park. "She had no fun doing it," recalls Nancy, the long-suffering spectator.

Next came horseback riding, at summer camp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Johnna had begun taking dance lessons at the prestigious School of American Ballet. An idle observer at first, Gelsey was soon trying steps in front of a mirror. Weiss remembers her as "the little sister who always hung around and got in the way." Before too long, Gelsey decided that Johnna's way belonged to her.

She recalls her tryout for the School of American Ballet with amusement she did not feel at the time: "I believe that I had a black leotard on, red tights and saddle shoes. I had a huge stomach, teeny little legs and this tremendous head. The teacher came up to me and lifted my leg to see how limber it was. I was desperately holding on to the barre, and the foot I was standing on went right out from under me. I was so tight, so really unsuited for dancing." Admitted to the school despite her pratfall, she renounced skates and horses forever.

She became totally absorbed in a craft as demanding and stubborn as she was. Regular schooling was a chore she impatiently endured; she eventually dropped out in the eleventh grade. At home, Jack's royalties were dwindling. Nancy took a job and found work for Gelsey as a child model. She detested it "because it was so upsetting to miss a class." A dance scholarship came to the rescue and put her in classes 12 1/2 hours a week. Twice a day she and her classmate Meg Gordon donned rubber sweat pants and took turns stretching each other's legs, an ordeal that often left Gelsey weeping. Her muscles were taut and had to be tugged mercilessly if she was to achieve extension, the astonishing limb span demanded of great dancers.

The most promising students in the School of American Ballet were tapped to join the corps of Balanchine's New York City Ballet, and the hope of catching Mr. B's eye spurred every young dancer on. "You cared more than anything in the world how you were impressing him," says Gelsey. When she was 15, Gelsey danced in a school production of Bournonville's Flower Festival. Dancer Villella was among the many who were impressed: "Already she was capable of making her own comment on the choreography, which usually takes many years to do." She joined Balanchine's company.

Johnna was already there. Jack Kirkland's death two months after Gelsey's 16th birthday momentarily brought the sisters together but did not dampen a long-simmering rivalry between the two. Gelsey's determination to be a better dancer than anyone else definitely included Johnna. Soon the sisters did not speak. Balanchine apparently did not help matters. Johnna remembers him asking Gelsey, "Why can't you do an adagio like your sister? Go home with your sister and have her teach you how to do an adagio." Johnna was told to learn jumping from Gelsey. The result was predictable. Says Johnna: "We really, at one point in our lives, really hated each other." John Clifford recalls seeing both sisters watching from the wings and weeping as the other performed well.

Gelsey was to give Johnna plenty of opportunities to grieve. When she was 17, Balanchine devised a version of Firebird for Gelsey. The work took advantage of her speed and youth. "I didn't want a woman," Balanchine explained. "I wanted a bird, one of God's natural creatures." But Gelsey had created a story to prepare herself for her role. "I don't think Balanchine wanted me to do that," she says, correctly. Balanchine's bird was intended as just that, a pure figure of form and movement. The production was a rare Balanchine stumble. Critics blamed him, not his pupil.

A bit later, Mr. B set Gelsey the stringent task of dancing Theme and Variations. He made his earlier version even more intricate and Gelsey rose to the challenge. But the strain on her overtaxed system was considerable. She developed tendinitis and began thinking the unthinkable: "I love dancing more than anything in the world, but I cannot dance with this pain."

As she had always done before, Gelsey took steps. This time, though, her single-mindedness promised a confrontation with the demiurge of 20th century dance. Balanchine's classes are known for their remorseless speed. Gelsey not only sought the help of outside teachers, she dropped Balanchine's class entirely. What she wanted to learn from others was an approach that was both less punishing and more effective.

"It created a lot of friction within the company," Gelsey recalls. "I had to do it on my own without anybody's approval and with everybody's disapproval." Far from punishing her, Balanchine continued to give Gelsey the run of City Ballet's unparalleled repertory. She danced lead roles in his Symphony in C, "Rubies" in Jewels, Harlequinade and Concerto Barocco and in Robbins' Dances at a Gathering, Goldberg Variations and Scherzo Fantastique. She became a stellar member of one of the world's great companies.

But not a star. The City Ballet means Balanchine; company dancers, however superb, are the embodiments of his imagination. Says one Balanchine-trained performer: "It's like a painter who needs red, blue and yellow. Gelsey was red. She was the material for his choreography." After six years under Balanchine, Gelsey felt that she could do more. Says she: "I knew that I could not extend myself in the New York City Ballet." The question was, how to make the break.

Then came Baryshnikov. Gelsey had met him briefly on a 1972 tour with the City Ballet in Russia, and he had seen her perform there. During the summer of 1974, she went to Toronto to see Baryshnikov dance. At a supper afterward they hit it off. Sizing her up, the 5 ft. 6 1/2 in. Baryshnikov remarked, "Hhmm, good partner, right size." A few days later Gelsey was back in New York, working at the barre, when she got a phone call from a member of Baryshnikov's entourage. Misha had just decided not to return to the Soviet Union and wanted Gelsey to dance with him. Was she interested? "Well, I just flipped out," says Gelsey. "I just flipped. I remember just screaming at the top of my voice: 'What do you mean, would I dance with him? Of course, I will.' "

Gelsey's own defection from Balanchine soon followed. She joined Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theater, a company that showcases luminous dancers rather than a single choreographic vision. Purists were appalled and left with a tantalizing question: Would Balanchine have made a masterpiece for Gelsey had she stayed? But Baryshnikov's offer was a plum that few ballerinas could have resisted. Keeping up with him was hard enough. And the glare of publicity that followed his grand jete to the West offered his partner the brightest, whitest arena in which to succeed or fail.

Gelsey threw herself at the challenge with typical fervor. Joining A.B.T. meant rapidly mastering the classical repertory of story ballets that Balanchine's company did not perform. It meant learning to act as well as dance, an opportunity that she both craved and feared: "I never really felt capable of doing the roles that people seemed to think I could do." Being out from under Balanchine's shadow also meant that she had no place to hide.

Onstage, Misha and Gelsey were magic from the start. A trial-run pas de deux from Don Quixote dazzled audiences in Winnipeg and later in Washington. Offstage, a love affair flared up between them, along with much professional bickering. Against a common background of rigorous classical training, Baryshnikov relied on instinct, Gelsey on analysis. Rehearsals became long and exasperating. They argued about the meaning of different positions. He: "It's arabesque, it's position." She: "No, it can be different in every ballet." There was also some competitive brain-picking. Gelsey sought the secrets of the Kirov's impeccable style; Misha, whose idol is Balanchine, wanted tips on the master's techniques.

Despite all the tensions, Gelsey danced a succession of new roles in La Sylphide, La Fille Mal Gardee, Les Sylphides. Her first Giselle in May 1975 was a major triumph. Gelsey's peasant girl seemed halfway toward spirithood even before she falls in love with and is betrayed by Baryshnikov's charming, careless nobleman. Pure spirit in the second act, she had gossamer lightness, nearly unbearable youthful poignance. The part confirmed her arrival as a romantic ballerina.

Amid all the praise, Gelsey was becoming increasingly miserable and insecure. Her affair with Misha fizzled out when he moved on to others. Says a friend: "It was all a romantic little dream, but it did not turn out that way. It was hard on her, but not as hard as the problem of dancing with someone who gets so much acclaim."

Gelsey was losing sight of her goal. "I realized that the very thing that gave me my life's inspiration was also the thing that was most difficult for me to do. Eventually, dancing was the thing that I loved and the thing that I resented." Never easy to work with, she now became impossible. She was late to rehearsals and then threw tantrums if other dancers tried to break before she had drilled herself to exhaustion.

On a West Coast tour with A.B.T. in early 1976, Gelsey nearly guttered out. With her weight dipping into the 80s, she could not sustain a performance. The producers of the film The Turning Point had wanted her to play a young ballerina. The first screen test had gone well, but Gelsey's deterioration came swiftly. Says the film's executive producer, Nora Kaye: "She was skull-like. It was impossible to use her." Gelsey's role, and an Oscar nomination, eventually went to A.B.T. Soloist Leslie Browne.

For the first time in months, Gelsey did something sensible. She returned to New York, where therapists provided massages and muscle stretches; physicians worked on a severe potassium deficiency. She studied again with David Howard and with Dance Teacher Stanley Williams, who had helped her through her previous ordeal under Balanchine.

As she grew healthier and stronger, she found it easier to untangle the psychological snarls that had tripped her. Analysis helped; born old, Gelsey decided that it was time to grow up. "I had to want to get well," she says. "I had to have the desire to dance again and work." Gradually it came. She picked up with A.B.T., at first not dancing at full strength. Those who knew what she had been through crossed their fingers, held their breath and marveled. Says Williams: "That she survived all that is remarkable." Soon the "steel-like legs" were as pert as when Villella first saw them. Gelsey was pleased by her recovery but not surprised: "I'm really a survivor at heart."

On tour in Europe last summer, Gelsey and A.B.T. Soloist Richard Schafer, 25, discovered each other. Tall, blond and as unflappable as Gelsey is volatile, Schafer showed her a world beyond ballet. He packed her along on sightseeing jaunts and taught her to be interested in good food and wine. "Richard has helped me more than anybody," says Gelsey. "He makes me laugh about certain things about myself. Just to see how he feels about me makes me feel good." In that frame of mind, Gelsey was primed last autumn to discover the joys of childhood in Baryshnikov's Nutcracker.

"Gelsey no longer feels frantic about a day off," says Schafer, and then hedges: "Or three-quarters of a day off." Her daily routine would still stun an ox. She haunts classes and rehearsals, whether she is performing that evening or not. In preparation for Don Q, she took long sessions in the use of a fan and castanets. If Gelsey were asked to play the lead in Hamlet, she might very well decide to learn Danish.

Then there are her shoes. All dancers are meticulous about their slippers, so Gelsey is fanatic. A toe shoe is a rigid object. To get one of her 50 pairs in shape, she brushes Fabulon floor wax into the shoe to make it even harder. Since hard shoes make noise, she next pounds the stiffness out with a tinsmith's hammer. Then she sews on ribbons and bits of elastic. Done? Almost. Just before a performance she pulls the shoes on over socks, brushes them with fast-drying alcohol and removes the socks. Putting the shoes back on, she says, "That's that, the shoes are comfortable, noiseless and hard."

Gelsey hurtles through her days offstage and out of class with the little-girl giggliness she lacked as a little girl. Her large, airy apartment on Broadway is a treasured refuge, just 15 blocks up from Lincoln Center. The corner drugstore and grocery deliver necessities and cash her checks. A confessed financial innocent, Gelsey has entrusted the care and feeding of her $50,000 plus A.B.T. salary to a relative. Her only real extravagance is an addiction to New York cabs; if her destination is more than four blocks away, Gelsey starts waving an arm. On the street she is indistinguishable from the thousands of women who have achieved thrift-shop eclecticism, a mildly deracinated New York look: jeans or slacks, boots or clogs, bulky sweater, dangling scarf, knit cap.

The question of what Gelsey does when not involved with dance formerly evoked an immediate response: When is that? Now she finds time for friends. She and Johnna, a principal dancer with the Los Angeles Ballet, are on easy if not intimate terms. Schafer lives nearby, and the two regularly dine together. Since both must watch their weight, they order separate appetizers and share a single main course. The new Gelsey has learned to like being naughty, at least once in a while. What does she do when she wants to feel wicked? "I just come home, eat a few good cookies and turn on the telly." After a binge of soap operas, she is bored enough: "I want to work again."

And there she was again last week, in class, working. The night before, she had drawn her customary bravos at A.B.T.'s Lincoln Center opening program and then, with Schafer and some friends, lingered at a West Side restaurant until 2 a.m. Now, with four hours of sleep behind her, Gelsey is a ragamuffin hiding from attention, swathed in a tentlike brown tunic and baggy sweat pants. The rehearsal piano pounds away, and Howard's piercing voice ("Now up, now up, now up ") guides some 90 students through a long series of stretches and drills. Morning sunlight pours through the tall windows; the air is humid with exertion. Gelsey moves among the stretching, straining bodies, her eyes dense with concentration. "The floor could collapse," says Howard, "and she would not notice." She works in counterpoint to the other dancers, seeming to sense a rhythm in his commands meant especially for her. Howard knows what she is up to: "She is trying to take dance into the next century." Gelsey looks at herself in the mirrored wall and cocks a leg high, high behind her. Now, dance.

-- Paul Gray

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