When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave a tri-part answer: “A choreographer, a journalist, and a beautician.” The three disparate vocations slimmed down to two when styling hair did not translate into a skill for cutting it. When revolutionary politics drew me into its orbit during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, it persuaded me that one cannot serve two masters, I strategized along dialectical lines to combine the remaining two ambitions of the three. In adulthood, my friend Mary Ellen Hunt approached me after a ballet class. She invited me to write for the prize-winning San Francisco Bay Area dot.com, “Voice of Dance,” Thanks to that opportunity, I more or less somersaulted into journalistic writing, eventually wending my way into territory where terpsichorean successes coincided with great moments in history, such as the ascension of the Cuban National Ballet during the early period of the Cuban Revolution.
It had taken time to encumber my life with the straitened realities of the dance world that, when I entered it at age six, seemed no more imposing than colorful buoys bobbing up in the waters of a fantastic voyage. “Don’t send her to ballet school,” my father cautioned my mother, as he left for work early one morning. “They’ll strip away all her interpretive talent.” [Upon reflection, maybe he truly was, as he complained, a “prophet without honor in his own country.”]
I followed my friend Debbie to Mme Nina Anderson’s Academy of Ballet, located in a serviceable if tiny studio over a billiards parlor on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, just a few steps south of Williamsbridge Oval. After several months, it became clear that Mme Nina, an ex-Ziegfield girl, had professional-track plans in mind for me. At seven, I learned to ignore the pain my pink satin Capezio pointe shoes inflicted, protective “bunnies” notwithstanding. I was ballet’s love-slave. No Fairy Godmother appeared in a cloud of dry ice, wand pointed to the cosmic warning that ballet dancers die twice: first, when they retire or their contracts are not renewed, and a second time, when they give up the ghost.
James P. Cannon, a famous revolutionary figure in the US labor movement liked to clear up confusion over the stages in political skirmishes. He said that in each one there is a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the effective participant becomes skilled at recognizing the difference between each stage and what to do next to assure the best outcome. I was a slow learner. It took me the better part of a lifetime to grasp how the ballet world grows more political as its acolytes advance through the stages delineated for all time in and by the court of Louis XIV.
Tiler Peck, principal dancer with New York City Ballet, didn’t need to hear Aaron Copland’s Simple Gifts lyrics: “come down where we ought to be.” She just knew. And at seven years old, in tones balletically dulcet, she convinced her supportive family to help her to dance on Broadway and train at the School of American Ballet. This inspired move on her part led to her star status in New York City Ballet, in spite of company founder, George Balanchine’s contention that the company boasted no stars: “Dance is the star,” he is quoted as having said.
In the documentary film, “Tyler Peck: Suspending Time,” which had its international debut as the opening event of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Peck was on hand for a post-showing interview conducted by San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director, Tamara Rojo. The documentary introduces the audience to a Peck, who turns out to be preternaturally uninhibited. Her penchant for self-disclosure shocks, if for no other reason than it violates Ballet’s First Commandment, which one could argue violates the First Amendment, but not the Fourth: Don’t disclose anything about your private life, career plans, what you had for breakfast, whom you love or don’t, whether or what you think about any subject, let alone why. There are sharks in those fantastic voyage waters, and they’re starving, not so much from anorexia, as for first bite at your company rank, the role you are up for, and the promotion to the next highest rank for which there is only one available contract. So, no-brainer, discretion is the better part of of a velour-trimmed tutu.
Rojo’s first question to Peck was, “What made you so open in sharing intimate personal details on camera?” These had included the break-up of an early marriage, Peck’s devoted father’s fatal illness, and injuries doctors predicted would prove catastrophic. Peck admitted that in retrospect, the unanticipated disclosure felt uncomfortable in the beginning, but as the shooting progressed, an abundance of feelings rose to the surface, and she “just went with it”. She seems to embrace the athlete’s mantra that the best defense is a good offense: telling your story in your words is preferable to keeping it a secret that the tabloids unearth and exploit.
The camera’s lens noses into her quotidian routine: breakfast, class, dog play, a non-vegan supper, fun moments on or off stage, and in COVID hibernation with her dance partner. It flows organically from the relatable story of how hard work is the key to success, and can transmogrify into a growing respect for an equally hard-working partner. Under optimum heat and pressure, that combination of hard work and respect can meld love with marriage.
Aren’t there moments in the film where you wish that for her own protection she’d beat a retreat from what feels like a performative naiveté? “Look at me. I distinguish myself from the other ballerinas by arriving as an open book.” No, she convinces you that what you see is what you get. If there’s any “need to know” exclusion issue, it’s that you need to know that “Suspending Time” is a statement that Tiler Peck’s fearless candor is the very quality that nourishes her artistry. She is vulnerable, unafraid, and so confident in her mastery that she will dive into musical comedy and other genres, with no hesitations that ballet is too restrictive to free up a broader range of artistic expression. A few days after the film debuted in San Francisco, Peck took to Instagram to apologize to followers for having to cancel a performance in Europe: Doctor’s orders.
“Farewell, Opera” picks up the trail about a decade from where Tiler Peck’s peaking career begins to register international recognition. She has written a book, and enters the “merch” stage of monetizing her brand.
In footage shot at Paris Opera’s studios, offices, and its storied performance venue, the Palais Garnier, we gain a close-up view of the typically European progression for dancers who, when they reach age 42, are obliged to retire. Every US dancer knows the advantage of dancing in Europe: a guaranteed job up to age 42, defended by a relatively strong union that protects attendant benefits—a six-week vacation, national health plan, and access to a plethora of consultative services meant to help the dancer maintain his or her corporeal “instrument,” the ballet body. We meet dancers who, as they approach that final year, negotiate a near-paralyzing depression that comes with the realization that ballet has been such a substantial part of who they are from a time when they were too young to remember a life before ballet. They have by needs forfeited the education and work-world connectivity to new and different vocations. Most end up as studio teachers, ballet masters, and in rare cases, choreographers.
Tonight’s host at the Delancey Theater is Pierre-François Villanoba, whose career began at Paris Opera and ended at San Francisco Ballet, when a rash of artistic disagreements resulted in firings, resignations, and a pervasive embittering of company morale. Villanoba decided to pursue a second career as a psychotherapist. It has enabled him to help dancers recover from the PTSD specific to dying twice.
In the film, we meet Alice Renavand, Stephane Bullion, and Aurelia Bellet, dancers of varying ranks when they retired. The camera shadows them during their final season through the daily routines of class, rehearsals, coaching, fittings, and musings. It zeroes in on the six month pre-retirement meeting that each departing dancer must submit to with a company administrator. The administrator must, on the one hand, check off all the boxes pertinent to acting responsibly when putting the dancers out to pasture, and on the other, insure the company against litigation or unresolvled disputes over casting, injuries, sexual harassment, or issues that counterpose seniority rights to artistic merit.
This is where it all ends for the now-adults who sacrificed their childhoods, higher education, friendships, long-distance romantic relationships, and “outside” interests that would have competed for time with the rigorous and demanding schedule set by the Paris Opera school and company. As children, they learned early to hide disappointment at not getting this or that role, criticism for dust-ups that a more favored partner caused, promotions, or casting priorities that didn’t favor them, being refused a weekend off to attend a close relative or friend’s wedding, graduation, or funeral, as well as the company’s Public Relations Department’s decision how or how not to feature the dancer in publicity.
The list of perceived injustices for which there is no acknowledged appeal process in place, apart from rules specified in the union contract, can become more and more exacting and frustrating as one’s career passes through its beginning, middle, and endpoint stages. The aging dancer while appreciating career achievements, now narrows his or her focus on age-related defects that begin to appear as handwriting on the wall.
Careers in other countries where there is no cut-off age, and the end of a career comes instantaneously with an injury, or at the sole discretion of a hostile artistic director, or because the dancer has tempered frustrations via an addiction, there arrives the double indictment of self-inflicted deprivation: an impetuous decision to quit and turn one’s back on what you love. Some dancers in that category engineer a “suicide by company,” where the coup de grace comes from the company to free you and it from the tensions, humiliations, and deprivations that now resonate more forcefully than do critical and collegial appreciation and the roar of the crowd.
No matter how the end comes, present in the dancers’ affective restraint is the holding back of acerbic comments, tears, and any visible sign of frustration, the better to appear prepared and composed. Best to walk the plank with one’s dignity in tact. They take final bows as confetti floats down from above while a frenzied audience unleashes unceremonious bouquet pelting and tearful fellow dancers, family members, and stage technicians stand at attention or proffer deeply-felt or performative hugs in an orgy of symptomatic and wholly unballetic mayhem.
Stephane decides on a cool, polite, almost cavalier exit; he is a cancer survivor. Upon the closing of the curtain, Alice collapses into the arms of a dancer friend, unable to suppress her grief; Aurelia cries for days on end, foraging through her emotions like a flip-book, to locate some semblance of integral equilibrium after decades of finding physical balances to meet the specifications of her directors, expectations of the audience, and scrutiny of the shrivel of critics, and most demanding of all, the critic within.
One recognizes that these themes have been caricatured and exploited to the hilt in such films as Arnovsky’s “Black Swan,” approached compassionately in “The Turning Point,” and retouched with a focus on the curios and quirky ways of dancers in the film “Center Stage,” enacted by a cast of ballet and Broadway dance artists.
The everyday skills of discipline, patience, and interrogation of a problem with a partner, or coaxing the healing of an injury, teach dancers how to evaluate what to do next. Some, who experienced the trauma of dying the first time, such as Claire Sheridan, have inaugurated low-cost, life-credit higher learning opportunities featuring accessible class schedules, such as the LEAP program that cooperates with such institutions as St. Mary’s College in Moraga California and Fordham University in New York. While still dancing, dancers with a proven professional record can earn degrees to prepare for their post-performance careers. Administrators at the participating programs report that dancers are among the best, most disciplined, and hardworking of students. That commitment sometimes can mirror the self-reproach that lives in every dancer. One such student presented three papers for an assignment that required only one, and asked her professor to choose the best of the three to grade.
James P. Cannon is also remembered for having observed that, “If you live right, you get a few breaks.” It’s a belief that many dancers instinctively follow to help them remain optimistic during that final exit, stage left or left behind.
During the post-showing discussion, when participant Aurélia Bellet expressed regret over not having been permitted a closing révérence upon her retirement, a fellow panelist, in a burst of spontaneity, suggested that she take that bow right then and there, in front of the film’s audience, which she did, to a standing and genuinely heartfelt ovation.
Toba Singer
