Richardson, here in Sylvia, says, “Accepting who I am as a dancer helped me be comfortable, even in company class.” PC Rosalie O’Connor, Courtesy ABT
The luminous Rachel Richardson has it all: long legs, articulate feet and a sparkling smile that makes her prodigious technique seem all the more natural. She was a standout in American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company, where she danced—with particular generosity and expansiveness—a memorable Medora in Le Corsaire, but during ABT’s Metropolitan Opera season last spring, she held the stage as both the Fairy Miettes qui tombent, or Breadcrumb, and the Gold Fairy in Alexei Ratmansky’s The Sleeping Beauty. Though she’s only been a member of the corps de ballet since 2015, one thing is clear: Richardson is in remarkable possession of ballerina aplomb.
Company: American Ballet Theatre
Age: 20
Hometown: Eugene, Oregon
Training: Oregon Ballet Academy, Eugene Ballet Academy and The Rock School for Dance Education
Accolades: Youth America Grand Prix silver medal, senior division
How the ballet bug bit her: When she started dancing at age 8, Richardson was deep into soccer and avoided all things girly. “My older sister danced,” she says. “Her teacher saw my feet and thought that I should try a class. I didn’t want to do it originally because I sort of thought it was nothing, like really easy. After my first class I totally loved it. I was always up for a challenge.”
Insider tip: “I went to The Rock for one year and then my parents asked me to come back to Eugene for my sister’s senior year.” That coincided with an illuminating year of training at Eugene Ballet Academy. “It’s tempting to think, If I can’t take from this one teacher or at this one school, then my life is ruined!” Richardson says. “But it’s important to see the bigger picture and that there’s a lot to gain from different people.”
On dancing in the corps: Richardson says it comes down to being gracious. “I’m learning about the unselfish aspect of dancing, which I’m realizing more and more is what being an artist is really about. If you’re too much in your head, it takes away from your ability to give.”
Breakthrough moment: “The Sleeping Beauty. Ratmansky has so much he wants. It’s the best way to work toward anything because you have a sense of how far you want to try to go, even if you can’t get there in that rehearsal—or in the next five. He works you hard, but I like coming out of a rehearsal super-sweaty.”
What Kate Lydon says: “I like the precision of her technique,” says Lydon, who directs ABT’s Studio Company. “Not many people have that ability. But I also like the honesty of her characterizations, plus her vulnerability and her steel will. She’s tiny, but she’s mighty.”
It never ends: Attaining perfection is impossible, but Richardson relishes the challenge. “I definitely always am working on improving my jump. Footwork. Strength in my feet. Dancing with my whole body as opposed to just dancing with limbs. But that’s why I started dancing and why I still love it. Literally every single thing can always be better.”
As a reigning ballerina of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ashley Murphy put in her time. A dancer of razor-sharp technique and plush musicality, she first joined the company before its 2004 disbanding—when Arthur Mitchell was in charge—and continued during its rebirth under Virginia Johnson. Murphy served as a bridge between the old and the new.
But the new, she discovered, could be a grind: Beyond financial constraints, she found herself dancing on less-than-ideal stages—an awkward rake here, an unsprung floor there—during tours that moved quickly from one city to the next. Even so, Murphy wasn't searching for another job. It found her.
Now a member of The Washington Ballet, Murphy, 31, is expanding her horizons. When artistic director Septime Webre was looking for a new dancer, her name was recommended. He had seen her dance with DTH, and was a fan. “She's got a certain fierceness in her barre work and a softness in her upper body," he says. “I just love that combination of steely legwork and strong turns and technique and a really determined approach. She also has a beautiful look."
When Murphy couldn't attend the audition, Webre watched her take class at Steps on Broadway. She had brought along her boyfriend, Samuel Wilson, also a member of DTH, for moral support. Webre offered each a contract. “We didn't want to leave DTH on a bad note," Murphy says. “It was like our family. But it was just time, for me in particular, to try something new."
As the most experienced member of DTH, she'd reached a plateau. “I wasn't really growing anymore—they didn't need to pay attention to me as much because they knew I would work on things on my own. I felt like I'd become everybody's mom. That's not the role I really want to have yet. I'm not that old." She laughs. “I need to be in a setting where I'm more equal with other people."
Being in a union company doesn't hurt. But Murphy insists that her decision had less to do with money than new opportunities. “I want to do a full-length ballet one day and that's not going to happen in the near future at DTH," she explains. “I just felt like we were still transitioning. I want to be somewhere where I can just dance and not worry about all the other stuff."
Last year, DTH decreased its dancers from 18 to 14, a move that coincided with the dismissal or departure of seven dancers, including Murphy and Wilson. As a touring company, Johnson notes, a smaller roster “can mean the difference between getting an engagement and not."
Johnson calls it a temporary reduction, but realizes that it wasn't an ideal situation for Murphy, who she said deserved a chance to spread her wings. “This has been a really good year for DTH, but it's also a really challenging year," says Johnson. “At Ashley's time in her development as an artist, yes she does need to do different things. It was, of course, heartbreaking, but I think it's what she should do. I also knew that it was an opportunity for people here at DTH to not only have Ashley in front of them."
Still, Murphy was one of DTH's greatest assets. Offstage, the Louisiana-born dancer is something of a southern belle. As Johnson fondly recalls, “She was always 2,000 percent coordinated—hair, outfit, earrings. It's so gorgeous! She probably wakes up like that."
As unruffled as she appears, Murphy, who started with The Washington Ballet in August, says that her new job was rough at the beginning. “The caliber of dancer here is so high, I felt like I was a little bit behind," she admits. “You're trying to impress a new boss and look good in front of other dancers and feeling like you're being judged constantly because they're wondering why you got hired. And I think it all just comes from insecurity. It's gotten so much better."
With boyfriend Samuel Wilson (in gray tank) and Daniel Roberge.
For one, she and Wilson, who love living in Washington, DC—their apartment is a 10-minute bike ride from work—have found a strong circle of friends. Performing is what drives Murphy, and for her, life began to improve after the company presented its first program of the season. “A lot of people here perform in the studio, during rehearsal," she says. “They go 100 percent—smile and makeup and everything—and coming from DTH, I wasn't really used to that." She laughs. “I think when we got onstage, they were like, Wow, I've never seen you do that before." As she adjusts her technique to conform to Webre's taste, she is constantly working on her arms, which are a little too Balanchine, and her extension. “He loves a high leg," she adds with a laugh.
Her confidence, she now realizes, has long been an issue. While at DTH, she constantly found reasons not to audition for other companies. “There was something I felt I was lacking to even be considered in another company," she says. “When I got the offer from Septime, I was like, 'Are you sure?' When you stay somewhere for so long you feel like, This is where I belong."
But Webre is sure Murphy belongs at The Washington Ballet, where his aim, for years, has been to develop a more diverse company. In December, she danced the Snow Queen and Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, and this month, she'll perform as a demi-soloist in Balanchine's Theme and Variations, as well as in a role in Webre's Carmina Burana. But while Murphy's African-American status is an obvious asset, Webre—who is actually leaving his post with the company when his contract is up this June—is first and foremost enamored by her onstage persona, which contrasts with her normally quiet demeanor.
Diversity is a complicated word for Murphy. At DTH, she says, it was eye-opening to be in a relationship with Wilson, the only white male in the company where he didn't have a chance of being cast in works documenting the African-American experience. “It's almost the opposite of what we go through in companies that are primarily white," she says. “I think when people are trying to do this diversity thing now, we have to figure out a way to include everyone. It's not trying to make a black company or a white company. Didn't we fight about this years ago? That's segregation."
At the same time, integration in the ballet world can't just be limited to dancers. “There need to be more African-American teachers and accompanists and artistic directors and ballet masters in companies that aren't DTH," Murphy adds. “When those things start to happen, you will have more dancers. Everything will fall into place."
Johan Kobborg has transformed the National Ballet of Romania.
Kobborg rehearses with Alina Cojocaru at American Ballet Theatre’s studios for a gala in New York City. Photo by Taylor-Ferné Morris
Johan Kobborg was in Bucharest staging La Sylphide for the National Ballet of Romania in 2013 when, out of the blue, he received a job offer: to become its artistic director. He wasn’t looking. “After I left The Royal Ballet, I was thinking, for the first time in my life, to not be part of a big institution,” he recalls during a recent visit to New York. “Now I use the words: ‘live my life.’ ” That meant anything—dancing, staging, choreographing. He adds, “I wasn’t afraid of suddenly being without anything.”
But those four weeks in Romania had gone so well that he happily accepted. Kobborg, 43 and engaged to Alina Cojocaru—the luminous Romanian ballerina who left The Royal for English National Ballet and is a guest artist with Kobborg’s company—is two years into a four-year contract. So far, he’s transformed the company, not only improving working conditions but adding new repertoire by choreographers like Alexei Ratmansky, Sir Frederick Ashton, Jirí Kylián and Yuri Possokhov. In April, the troupe performs Manon; in June, it unveils William Forsythe’s In the middle, somewhat elevated, George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Jerome Robbins’ In the Night. Kobborg knew it wouldn’t be easy: “But,” he says with a smile, “I’ve enjoyed every single moment.”
Photo by Taylor-Ferné Morris
So what hasn’t been easy?
I was, in many ways, entering a place that was stuck in the past. There were not many outside influences or different ways of looking at things. They were used to the same class every day, by the same teacher. The productions were really looking like they were from the ’40s and ’50s. I didn’t feel there had been any kind of, Let’s try making something better.
What did you do?
I entered with a management group that did not believe that just because things used to be done like this, that this was how we should do it. So there was a different energy and approach: How do we sell ballets? How do we get people involved? How do we raise money? The people in charge don’t want it the old way.
Also, I don’t have to work with a board of directors. I don’t have to ask anybody else’s opinion. I’ve entered this room where I don’t need to polish what’s already made. I almost consider it a blank canvas. It’s an extreme freedom. The only limits I have are financial.
What are the challenges of limited resources?
A gala to raise awareness of the company this winter included both Romanian dancers and stars from around the world, such as Daniel Ulbricht, at left. Photo by Taylor-Ferné Morris
It is a huge issue. Just a few months after I took over, the building went into refurbishment. It’s still being refurbished. Things take time. [Laughs] For the first almost-half year, the entire company would be changing in one room with a piece of cloth separating girls and boys. There were no studios; there was one room that had no sprung floor. And really, honestly, you don’t make much money in Romania from being a dancer. People would be shocked. Shocked. I can’t offer dancers much; what I can offer them is good rep. I still think like a dancer, and I know what worked in my career: It was to get opportunities. This is not a place where you have to sit and hold a spear for years and years. I don’t believe in waiting until you’re certain someone’s ready. Then it’s too late.
Did you have sprung floors installed?
Yes. When I was staging La Sylphide, I was taking class daily, and I couldn’t dance on those floors. It wasn’t just not strong, there were big holes. Now we have Harlequin floors in all the studios. We have a masseuse now. What we don’t have is a physio department. Alina has donated what I would call the beginning of a gym. Some weights. At first, we didn’t even have an ice machine. We had nothing. But then again, sometimes if you have everything, then you don’t appreciate it.
Did you think about how you didn’t want to treat dancers?
Yeah. [Smiles] And this is where it’s tricky. Sometimes it’s not possible to make things happen the way you would really like them to no matter how hard you try. I think I knew more about how I would not want to do things. The ballet department consists of me and two people; it doesn’t matter if it’s handing out pointe shoes, locking doors at night or making weekly schedules. So communication is very important. My door’s always open. I’ve seen too many people who have been stuck in a place and slowly the passion in them dies. Day by day by day. I’m really trying to make that not happen the best I can. I’m not your usual director, I can tell you that.
How so?
Photo by Taylor-Ferné Morris
I don’t look like a typical director. I don’t necessarily speak with people as one. I believe respect is not some attitude you put on and then get. It comes from honesty, openness. I don’t like to play games. I don’t hold a grudge. It’s very important for me to hear what people think. Then, I’ll go, “Am I doing something wrong?” And this is happening in a place where there was no communication. It was run on fear and intimidation. So I’ve lost a few people who can’t function without power. When I’m in charge, I can’t have people being intimidated.
What are your future plans for the company?
I’m in talks with people coming and creating on us. We have to have classics and newer pieces and not go into one extreme. What I would really like is that, when or if one day I am no longer in Romania, the place doesn’t go back to what it was. I’m not saying my way is the right way. But I hope that I will manage to leave a structure behind. I also hope that whoever comes after me would realize that you should not let people say, “It is not possible because this is Romania.” It might not be the easy way, but anything is possible. What’s important is that you can make a difference. I’m certain that if I’m asked to stay longer in Romania, I would. I love the city.
Photo by Taylor-Ferné Morris
Why?
It’s a little bit like Cuba. You walk around and go, Wow, with a bit of paint—and sometimes more than paint, unfortunately—this city could be one of the most beautiful cities. The architecture is stunning.
Where do you live?
I’m renting a flat in central Bucharest. I’ve got a cockerel outside my window. I’m bang in the middle of quite a big city, and there’s a cockerel outside my window. It is fantastic.
Gia Kourlas writes on dance for The New York Times and other publications.
At Miami City Ballet, the new principal has found her sweet spot.
Photo by Nathan Sayers, styling by Andrew Shore Kaminski
What does it take to make Simone Messmer happy? It’s not just another new job; it’s the right new job.
Messmer, the latest principal with Miami City Ballet, seems to have found it. As she told her new boss, artistic director Lourdes Lopez, the other day, “I’ve never been in a company with such mentally healthy people in my life.”
Of course, that’s not the only reason the company is such a brilliant fit for this transcendent, but not exactly mild-mannered ballerina. Messmer, a former soloist with American Ballet Theatre and, briefly, with San Francisco Ballet—she only lasted a season—has found herself where she’s always wanted to be: in an environment full of rigor, in which studio exploration is as valued as a performance.
“Every single person in the company is in ballet class every day,” she says. “I’ll do a pas de deux, and they stay in the room just to watch. Everyone is on board. I’m working for someone who actually really believes in what I’m doing, so I’m going to run with that.”
Messmer, who wrote to Lopez in May, was offered a principal contract with Miami City Ballet shortly after. Though the budget was already wrapped up, Lopez obtained special permission from her board to add another dancer to the roster.
But while it all happened quickly—she started on June 1—getting to this point hasn’t been easy for Messmer. In San Francisco, she quickly realized that “it was not an environment that I was working well in. I wasn’t dancing well. But other people have really flourished there. It depends on something I’m not sure I have.”
Lopez is coaching Messmer in Balanchine's Swan Lake this season. Photo by Daniel Azoulay, courtesy Miami City Ballet.
She did get little pearls of wisdom from certain people, including Sofiane Sylve and Yuri Possokhov (dancing his Firebird was a highlight, as was tackling a new role in Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy). “But in general I was floating on the ether because I wasn’t a focus of the staff, therefore my rehearsals were almost nonexistent,” she says. “I think it was a combination of the wrong place for me and also the first time in a brand-new environment. I was at Ballet Theatre for over a decade. It was the only thing I knew.”
In leaving ABT, a company in which she felt she had little room to grow, her aim was obvious: more meaty dancing roles. When that didn’t seem to be happening in San Francisco, Messmer told artistic director Helgi Tomasson that the company wasn’t the right fit. According to Messmer, she asked him if he wanted her to remain for the Paris tour, and he told her that he was planning on having her dance Choleric in George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments. For Messmer, that would mean missing out on auditions, but the role was worth it.
Yet she never got to dance it. “I was never called to a rehearsal,” she says. After the Paris season, she left. “Very quickly.”
Shortly after, she returned to New York City, where she got in touch with her ballet teacher Wilhelm Burmann and resumed Gyrotonic training. “They got me back to a place where I was comfortable being seen again,” she says. “It was more of a mental thing.”
But it took time. In between San Francisco and Miami, Messmer experienced several difficult months when, in order to save money, she and her boyfriend, Mike Diaz—he’s the master carpenter at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—lived with his sister in New Jersey. “All of a sudden, I was unemployed,” she says. “Stagnant is not a place for an artist. I don’t think I’ve ever had a struggle like that. It’s a toll on your relationship, it’s a toll on your ego, it’s a toll on everything.”
Even though she was depressed, she didn’t fall back into old patterns. Ten years ago, Messmer took a leave of absence at ABT after going down what she calls “a self-destructive path.” She declines to talk specifics, but will say that she couldn’t live with herself if she’d done that again. “It would have made it worse, and it couldn’t have gotten worse, because I maybe would have quit.”
Burmann, who admires Messmer’s rare qualities—she is both a romantic dancer and one suited to contemporary works—and has worked with her since her ABT days, has had the opportunity to study her, then and now. “She is calmer,” he says. “She is more focused, and that makes a big difference.”
But it is hardly surprising that Lopez says she needed to first believe that Messmer was interested in Miami City Ballet for the right reasons. “I was very open with her. I said, ‘You’ve left Ballet Theatre and you’ve left San Francisco, and those are major companies that any young dancer would give an eye and a tooth to join. So what’s going on here? Because something’s going on.’ ”
Messmer recalls that she was nervous. “In all honesty, I don’t want to place blame—I was unhappy in San Francisco, but it’s not my place to speak about the company that I know so little about,” she says. “It was difficult to answer questions like ‘Why didn’t it work?’ It’s not a simple answer.”
Even though Lopez was already a fan of Messmer’s dancing, she watched her in Burmann’s class and spoke to friends who had worked with her. “They all said that she’s really talented, she’s a workaholic, she’s very focused and present, she delivers onstage, but she has a very strong personality and asks a lot of questions and wants to know the answers,” Lopez says. “There was a part of me that made me wonder: If we were talking about a male dancer, would you have the same reaction?”
Lopez explained to Messmer that her sense of her was that she needed to find a place where someone would take her into a room and say, “Let’s make you a better dancer.” She told her that could happen in Miami. “I said, ‘We leave our egos at the door and it’s really all about working—but I can’t do that on my own. You’re going to have to meet me halfway. What I’m talking about is no BS, no attitude, no diva, no overthinking a situation, no under-thinking it.’ ”
A Midsummer Night's Dream rehearsal with Kleber Rebello. Photo by Daniel Azoulay, courtesy MCB.
To Lopez’s delight, there has been none of that. Messmer likes to work. She’s professional and serious. “She’s been wonderful,” Lopez continues. “And it hasn’t been easy for her because the technique is different, it’s faster. The Balanchine style is very different and she has not fought it. Quite the opposite.”
Now Messmer is learning a slew of thrilling parts, including Odette, in Balanchine’s Swan Lake, in which Lopez is coaching her, along with Janie Taylor’s luminous role in Justin Peck’s Year of the Rabbit and Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements, Serenade and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (both Titania and the divertissement pas de deux). While it hasn’t been easy to master the speed and intricacy of the Balanchine approach, Messmer, who has been able to work with Suki Schorer and Susan Pilarre—Lopez brought both School of American Ballet teachers to Miami to work with the company in separate visits—says that she may be more of a Balanchine dancer than she realized.
“Playing with the music the way I naturally do is geared well for this,” she explains. “There’s a big difference in the dynamic of every step. A tendu is a tendu, but in Balanchine the out–in is not even. You can do out–hold; in and out; or you hold the in. It’s that playing that makes you such a dynamic dancer.”
Now Messmer, who moved to Miami with Diaz, lives three blocks from the beach. It helps to have a carpenter-boyfriend; he is planning on building a sprung floor in their extra bedroom. She’s also grateful to her mother for sending her to Spanish-immersion school from kindergarten through eighth grade. And the Delgado sisters—Jeanette and Patricia, two of Miami City Ballet’s most treasured principals—are, in her words, “like a ray of sunshine. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen in my life,” she adds. “I mean really.”
Messmer doesn’t think she’s ever danced as well as now—or been as confident. “I have a ton of things to work on, but I know clearly what I want to say,” she says. “It’s humbling to be in that position. And I’m super-grateful to Lourdes for taking this risk. There’s no words that can actually say thank you enough, so I just have to be that person in the company. I have to say my thank-yous through my dancing.”
Gia Kourlas writes about dance for The New York Times and other publications.
The no-nonsense choreographer opens up about her career, her dancers and why money gets in the way of female choreographers’ success.
Reed Tankersley and Ramona Kelley. Photo by Kyle Froman.
Twyla Tharp. Photo by Marc van Borstel.
Twyla Tharp may be celebrating her 50th anniversary this year, but she’s looking forward, not back. The groundbreaking choreographer who made her debut in 1965 with Tank Dive is responsible for the first crossover ballet—Deuce Coupe, which included both ballet and modern dance and was set to the Beach Boys—as well as classic works like In the Upper Room and Push Comes to Shove and films like Hair, White Nights and Amadeus. Her work on Broadway, most notably Movin’ Out, has extended not only her reach but the reach of dance. This fall, she kicks off a 10-week tour with two premieres—typically gutsy—and a powerhouse crew. Along with regulars John Selya, Rika Okamoto, Matthew Dibble and Ron Todorowski, the current group includes Nick Coppula and Eva Trapp, formerly of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; Daniel Baker, formerly of Miami City Ballet; and Amy Ruggiero and Ramona Kelley, who were part of Come Fly Away. Reed Tankersley, who performed Baker’s Dozen as a Juilliard student, is, as Tharp puts it, “the baby.” Rounding the stage out will be two Amazonian queens: Savannah Lowery, on leave from New York City Ballet, and Kaitlyn Gilliland, a former NYCB dancer. As the impressive record shows, Tharp pulls the best out of her dancers and here, they run the gamut. “I’ve never held a bias against a dancer because they were short, tall, black or white,” Tharp says. “It’s only got to do with how they dance.”
Has the kind of dancer you’re drawn to changed over the years?
Gorgeous. Eclectically and brilliantly trained. Very intelligent. Extreme sense of humor. A willingness to work, but also an ability to work. They’re not quite the same thing. By now, I don’t have to put up with people who are trouble. You have to want to work with other people, and you have to appreciate what it is to be in an ensemble and to value the give and take of a great team. I need to see it from the audience and I need to feel it on the stage when I’m working with people. Otherwise, the singularity, the egocentric, the vanity—I don’t need it.
What do you mean by eclectic training?
Everything. We have an open position, we have a parallel position, we can be grounded, we can be high. You need to have it all. You also have to have a willingness to allow for movement to be funky or to be elegant, and that’s a state of mind. You require different kinds of grace. Another thing that’s important to understand is that as you mature, you can’t expect the legs to do it all. You have to be able to hold your own so that the legs and the feet are not being asked to do totally, absolutely everything.
Amy Ruggiero (center) and Daniel Baker (right) rehearsing The One Hundreds. Photo by Kyle Froman.
Kaitlyn Gilliland. Photo by Kyle Froman.
Is that part of why dancers should do weight training?
Absolutely. Everybody, both the men and the women. If the guys don’t, they’re going to have a weak lower back; they’re going to splay their back. If the girls don’t, they’re going to have a collapsed sternum, and they’re going to have old ballerina chicken neck early. Echhh. If you do weights, you learn to ground your back, you’re pushing, you’re pulling and this is open and elevated. Hello.
When your dancers have a star moment, what don’t you want to see?
Ego. Not interested and neither are they. Once in a while, it’ll come out because we’re all human. What that does is reduces their own presence. It gives them a minimized force field. When the ego is at play, it looks to draw a very small circle right around itself and everything else should keep out. A big performer doesn’t have to put up the barricades.
Over the years, a couple of your dancers have appeared on shows like “So You Think You Can Dance.” How do you feel about those programs?
The thing is this: I’m all for every one of these people having every experience that makes sense for them to have, because, ultimately, if they profit from it, I profit from it. They bring it back and then we have something to reference and guess what? Like with an actor, it is better to be working than not working. I am not arrogant or insecure about this. I’m all in favor of seeing people work in as many different realms as possible, because I have.
Tankersley, Ruggiero and Eva Trapp. Photo by Kyle Froman.
What’s been your greatest risk as a choreographer?
Oh please. I have no idea. Anything that’s exciting is a gamble. Anything that’s a challenge is a gamble. This tour is a scientific experiment in terms of doing something that is extremely demanding and doing it well. That’s not exactly a gamble, because I don’t gamble with other people’s lives. When I’m challenging myself it’s one thing; when you’re responsible for other people, it’s something else. I think that making the decision that the 50th would not be a revisitation of the master works and somehow pull out rep that represented a career that we all knew, that’s minimally crazy.
Trapp. Photo by Kyle Froman.
What are your thoughts about being a female choreographer, especially in the ballet world?
First of all, it’s important to acknowledge that I never set out to be a very good female choreographer. I set out to be a very good choreographer, end of story. I never accept any awards that are the “Best Female” anything. In ballet, one of the big reasons that the men prevail is partially because of the overbearing attitude in ballet companies, which is heavily chauvinistic in terms of women and their place. We all know this. However, it is also because most women are not big jumpers and they can’t partner. And a lot of what’s involved in new choreography involves partnering, and they don’t know how to design from the other side. I taught myself how to do that. I can do both sides of partnering. I know how the grips work, I know how the leverage has to function. So part of it is not “Let’s just sit in the corner and cry ‘poor me’ ”—let’s figure out why and let’s go and get those chops. In the modern-dance world, it’s a different deal. The earlier practitioners, at least in this country, were women. Now that seems to have flipped, and it’s like, Hmmm? What happened here? Money.
How so?
There was no money in modern dance. It didn’t exist. Everybody was in there simply to do it. More and more grants started to happen and then it’s a field where it becomes competitive about earning an income. Whenever earning an income becomes an issue, men have an edge. Unless women have a driving need to support themselves, and, heaven help us, any children. Then they will compete, as I have done. Otherwise, they will stand back and expect—emotionally perhaps a bit and practically perhaps a bit—for some support, because they are, after all, women. Bullshit. I’m being straight. It’s the responsibility of the women. You can’t sit back and say we’ve been exploited and taken advantage of. It’s like, Get out there and fix it. If you want something, you have to do it yourself.
Is there an area of dance you prefer to choreograph in?
No! Give me anything. Anything, anytime.
Gia Kourlas writes about dance for The New York Times.
Matthew Dibble
Photo by Jayme Thornton.
While studying at the Royal Ballet School, Matthew Dibble dreamed of working with the world’s great choreographers. But by the time he joined The Royal, the company was in transition. “Ashton was gone. Kenneth was dead,” he says. “I wanted to dance under working choreographers. It never interested me to do the Giselles.”
After five years in the corps, Dibble and five of his colleagues left to start their own troupe, K Ballet, in Japan. But life abroad was trying, and after three years, he moved home.
Soon after, he got a call from Twyla Tharp, whom he’d worked with on Mr. Worldly Wise and Push Comes to Shove at The Royal. She invited him to audition for one of her projects, then later asked him to join her company in New York. Though Dibble connected with Tharp’s collaborative style—“Something clicked when we met,” he says—he was hesitant to pick up his life again. Her response, he recalls, was something along the lines of: “Are you joking? You’re being stupid. Get over here and dance.”
So he did. And since that engagement in 2001, Dibble has been a staple among Tharp’s leading dancers, on the Movin’ Out tour, in Come Fly Away and now as a member of the latest iteration of her company. What’s most attracted him to her work, beyond the athleticism and larger-than-life personalities she demands of her dancers, is her intuitive sense of the chemistry that makes for a great show. An exacting but sensitive leader, she brings together an energetically balanced but stylistically diverse group of talents. “She’s direct, there’s no messing about,” says Dibble. “And she doesn’t ask anything of her dancers she wouldn’t do herself.”
Could Dibble have ever predicted his path, from ballet to Broadway and beyond? “Ballet helped me do what I’ve been able to do,” he says. “But I never got into dance to be safe. With Twyla, the studio is an open working space.” —Kristin Schwab
Rika Okamoto
Photo by Jayme Thornton.
Her first encounter with Twyla Tharp is something Rika Okamoto remembers well. It was 1993, and Tharp was selecting dancers for a work she was choreographing on the Martha Graham Company. Okamoto had just joined the previous year and wasn’t even supposed to be in the audition, which was reserved for senior dancers. (Longtime Graham dancer and master teacher Yuriko Kikuchi “pushed me into the studio and shut the door,” says Okamoto.) “When I lived in Japan, I went to see White Nights in the theater twice,” she says, referring to the 1985 movie Tharp choreographed starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. “I was the youngest person in the company. I was sure I wasn’t going to be in the piece.” Okamoto ended up being cast as Persephone in Tharp’s Demeter and Persephone.
Okamoto danced with Graham until 1999. Burnt out, she left the company, and considered leaving dance entirely after dabbling in acting and starting a family. Then Tharp’s people called about a workshop for a little budding idea called Movin’ Out. Okamoto went on to perform during the entirety of the show’s Broadway run (2002–2005). “I might not have known it then, but I realize now that I wanted to be a muse, be original,” she says of the transition. “When I started working with Twyla, I felt I could be who I was. I didn’t have to copy anyone.”
Since then, Okamoto has been a constant Tharp collaborator. She originated the role of Slim in Come Fly Away, helps Tharp develop movement for outside commissions and works as her assistant, archivist and education leader. “Performing or not performing, it doesn’t really matter,” she says. “Twyla challenges you to the maximum. Sometimes the challenge is beyond you. I still go home and cry sometimes, and I’m 46!”
This tour, says Okamoto, may or may not mark her last go at dancing. But that doesn’t mean she necessarily considers herself a veteran of all things Tharp. “Everybody else in the company is a ballet dancer but me, which I used to be so insecure about. But you discover yourself through challenge, whatever that is. Twyla always asks me at the end of the day, ‘Rika, what did you learn?’ That makes me want to go back for more. Once you taste that sense of ‘I can do this,’ you get addicted.” —KS
Photo by Lucas Chilczuk.
Earthily sleek in that effortless Italian way, Alessandra Ferri sits on the roof deck of her Upper West Side penthouse wearing Ray-Bans and a long black dress as she rattles off a list of upcoming performances: more touring of Chéri, the Martha Clarke dance-theater vehicle based on the Colette novella; Trio Concert Dance, a full evening spotlighting Ferri, Herman Cornejo—her dance partner in Chéri—and the pianist Bruce Levingston; Wayne McGregor’s anticipated work for The Royal Ballet, based on Virginia Woolf; John Neumeier’s new Eleanora Duse for Hamburg Ballet.
Midway through, she bursts into laughter. “It’s like I never stopped,” she says, amused yet incredulous. “I guess my dancing energy wasn’t over. There were still things that I needed to do—for me.”
Ferri, 51, retired from American Ballet Theatre in 2007 with the expectation that she would hang up her pointe shoes for good. She became director of dance programming for Italy’s Spoleto Festival, and quit ballet class. But her body rebelled; physically, she found herself in pain. So, after about two years, she went back to the studio. “After a year of taking class, I was in pretty good shape,” she says. “Once I was in shape, my brain started working. I started to have ideas of things I wanted to do.”
Her reawakening as a dancer can hardly be described as a comeback: This is a brand-new career.
“If you’re open-minded, things keep changing, and you keep having different opportunities,” she explains. “If you’re willing to mutate with your personal evolution, who knows where it goes?”
Ferri’s astonishing gifts were first made apparent as a dancer for The Royal Ballet, in ballets like Mayerling and Romeo and Juliet: the beautifully arched feet, the supple back and extended lines of the legs and arms, and the breathtaking ability to be anybody at any time. Dancing melts into her acting and acting into her dancing until both are at their purest essence, stripped raw.
Above: With Herman Cornejo in a scene from Chéri. Photo by Christopher Duggan.
Today, her luminous dancing is infused with a newfound freedom. But she knows that nothing is a given. “I put a lot of work into my machine, into my body,” she says. “Of course, the years go by. You have to have the passion for the work itself, for the challenge of the everyday.”
She also has, in her teacher, Wilhelm Burmann, the tools with which to continue. “Ninety percent of the reason why I’m still in shape the way I am is Willy,” Ferri says. “He believes in hard work—getting your body going. Your body is a machine basically, and you’ve got to keep that tuned. And for me, this approach really works. It’s thanks to him my body can still function the way it does.”
Chéri was an especially intense experience; the cast performed 50 shows in six weeks. “It was crazy,” she says. “You don’t have anxiety about performances anymore because you have so many that it frees you totally. You go onstage with the same presence and truth that you would have sitting in your living room.”
Yet the production was an incentive to return to the stage—the idea of playing an older woman involved with a younger man was both age appropriate and emotionally rich fodder. And while it initiated a brilliant new partnership between Ferri and Cornejo, it has also sparked more opportunities for dancing. After watching a performance of the dance-drama, McGregor invited Ferri for coffee, where he pitched his idea for a project about Virginia Woolf. “He said, ‘I can’t think of anybody else but you,’ ” Ferri recounts. “I said, ‘It’s great you’re thinking of me, but do you know’ ”—she pauses mid-giggle—“ ‘what I do? I know your work, and I love it, and obviously I still have a very good in-shape body, but you are very extreme.’ ”
McGregor’s sleek choreography is a shift from much of Ferri’s character-driven repertoire. But when McGregor explained that he wanted her in the ballet to stretch himself as an artist, she signed on. “For me, it’s completely new terrain,” Ferri says. “I have no idea what to think about, what to expect. I’m completely abandoning myself into an adventure.”
For the ballet, Ferri will spend a good chunk of time in London, which complicates her already complicated schedule—especially given that she has two daughters, ages 13 and 17, with the photographer Fabrizio Ferri, her former partner. The breakup and the subsequent separation and evolution of her family has made an important shift in the way Ferri lives now. Her approach to motherhood has changed.
“Love and overprotection and dependency are not necessarily the same thing,” Ferri says. “You can be a real good guide for your kids and be vigilant that they don’t get into trouble, but also have a relationship that is so authentic that you can also say, ‘Look, I need to live my life, and I need to do things I love doing, because that’s who I am,’ and they learn to respect that.”
Above: Ferri with mezzo-soprano Fredrika Brillembourg in Luca Veggetti’s The Raven, for the Gotham Chamber Opera. Photo by Richard Termine, Courtesy The Raven.
And dance is something, she’s discovered, that she can’t trade in. “I love dance, and that’s what keeps me alive,” Ferri says. “I’d be killing myself to give that up completely for somebody else, even if it’s my kids—unless they need it. Of course. But since everybody’s good and happy...” She laughs. “They love it when I work,” she confides. “In fact, when I’m there too much, they’re like, ‘Don’t you have to take class today?’ ”
Trio Concert Dance, to be performed in Italy’s Teatro Regio di Parma in April, will feature three or four choreographers, including Russell Maliphant, with whom Ferri attended The Royal Ballet School, as well as Fang-Yi Sheu, the former Graham star. “It’s an evening of who we are now,” says Ferri. “For Herman and me, it’s new ground. We can have the pleasure of dancing without having to be Chéri and Lea.”
For Cornejo, performing with Ferri has expanded his capabilities as a dance actor and opened the possibilities for a career outside of ABT, where he is a principal. Among other projects, they will perform a new pas de deux by Demis Volpi this month at Indianapolis City Ballet, and dance Roland Petit’s Le Jeune Homme et la Mort in Florence next year.
“She’s taking my hand and taking me along with her in many performances,” Cornejo says. “Jeune Homme et la Mort is a masterpiece and something I never thought I would be able to do, and not only am I going to do it, I’m going to perform it with such an iconic person. She’s the one—like how a fairy godmother could be.” He laughs. “There are so many dancers in this world with beautiful technique, but to be like her, it has to come from the inside. Her soul, her love for what she wants to do, is so pure that it comes out in her dancing.”
Ferri explains that there is little difference between the dancer and the woman; as she evolves, so does her dancing. “It’s like my inner world becomes real when I dance,” she explains. “I share it with people. I am glad that I have this opportunity to dance later on in life. In the world of dance today—and the world in general—everything has to be so fast, so immediate, so young and then you’re gone. You really haven’t tasted the pleasure of each different phase of your life and of dancing. It can be something that is more refined, more subtle.”
She laughs off the suggestion that, as a ballerina, she’s breaking the mold. “I don’t think I was ever in the mold,” she says. “I always did things the way I wanted to do them.” And there are no signs of stopping. “I had enough of my career,” Ferri says. “Now that I’ve started again, I don’t think of it as my career, but my luck. I’m so lucky that I have this. It’s a gift.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance editor of Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.
As the street dancer Storyboard P sees it, his body is separate from his spirit. The extraordinary Brooklyn improviser specializes in a style of flex dancing he calls mutant, where forms smash together to create the look of animation. He studied ballet briefly at Harlem School of the Arts, but his main training came from the streets, where he honed his performance quality in dance battles. He’s since performed at Sadler’s Wells in London and the Apollo Theater in Harlem. More recently, he was featured in the video for Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby,” and is in a new Sony commercial that was released this spring.
Storyboard begins his day with tai chi so that his body can pick up vibrations in the environment. “I do it subconsciously,” the 24-year-old explains in a phone interview from Ohio, where he is visiting friends. “That’s how I create a lot of my material.” As a dancer, he exists on a rarefied plane. The tremors and oscillations that course through his lanky frame are microscopic; as one connects to the next, it creates, well, a story.
Where did you grow up in Brooklyn?
I grew up on Eastern Parkway, where every block had its own style and form, and you would go around and collect styles—like a video game almost. You would collect skill sets. Dancing was like someone fighting their own demons. You could see dancers having conflicts with themselves as they figured out who they were; it showed in their art, in how they moved and in what song they played. You saw them struggle and then break through and take control so that they were jumping in and out of aggression and then into serenity. It’s a balance, and that happens as you keep channeling.
What do you mean?
When the dancers first start getting into it, it’s like a form of possession. They’re revealing themselves, and they have so much on their chest. It’s deep. It’s psychological.
How do you get your ideas when you’re dancing and improvising?
When I play a song, I have to just record and run through a whole song. It’s like I pick up the vibrations, but I won’t necessarily be dancing to it. I’m not doing moves yet. I’m more seeing what it feels like and then capturing the vibration and premeditating on it, so when I do go, I can start compartmentalizing everything. I put a little step here and a little step there and then I just sit on the beat, and then I put a little step here and a little 
step there. It’s like I’m building layers. It’s like recording music on a big machine. You’ve got to do levels with your body.
Do you have a sense about how you’re going to move before you consider the action? Does the feeling come first?
Yeah. It comes in the middle of my forehead and in the back of my head. In my pineal gland. It’s like light patterns. It really looks like wind or like smoke that’s telling me how much momentum I should give a certain direction. It’s telling me where to end the motion and where to start from. It’s like my body—my spine, my kundalini—locks up, and I’m able to coil into whatever shape I want to coil into.
What else influences you?
What inspires me most with movement is pedestrian form. Pedestrian is a layer that’s hidden in my style. It’s in modern dance: regular things that you do throughout the day. Our form is urban pedestrian. It’s us showing our feelings and our emotions and animating them and making them move how we want to, because it’s supposed to be lifelike. There’s always a story involved. It’s like you’re really breathing, you’re really getting into it. With popping, you don’t have to tell a story. It’s just a technique. But with flex, our way is about talking with your body. It’s about saying something. And if you don’t say anything, what you’re doing doesn’t make sense.
You must be extremely sensitive to dance the way you do.
Yeah, I’ve very sensitive—if I touch an apple and it has wax on it, I start breaking out. It’s one of those things. That’s why I’m in Ohio right now. The environment is better for me. I’m going to buy some land out here. I always have these more whimsical ideas, but this is more spiritual. I’m repositioning myself.
Photos: Storyboard P in the music video for “Drop the Game,” by electronic musicians Flume & Chet Faker; courtesy director Lorin Askill.
Sara Mearns working with Karole Armitage on A Dancer’s Dream
It’s not always discussed, but dancers are as integral to the creative process as choreographers. That notion gives Sara Mearns, the fearless and ravishing principal at New York City Ballet, reason to pause: “I think I’ve had maybe two questions before about my point of view.” Yet with her plush, go-for-broke dancing and spontaneous phrasing, Mearns is a muse to many, from Alexei Ratmansky (Namouna, A Grand Divertissement) to Justin Peck, who highlighted her in The Bright Motion at the most recent Fall for Dance festival. During NYCB’s winter season, she graced Liam Scarlett’s premiere, Acheron. As Mearns explores new ways to enrich her dancing, she’s branching out: Last year, she starred in A Dancer’s Dream, featuring choreography by Karole Armitage, and she has more projects planned for the future. Recently, she spoke about choreography from a dancer’s perspective.
Do you do anything special before going into the studio with a choreographer for the first time?
You want to be as prepared as possible. You want to be as warmed-up as possible. And it’s funny: I always think about what shoes to wear. You don’t want to have too-new shoes, and you don’t want to have too-old shoes; you want the perfect shoes that you could do anything in. Of course, you think about your outfit. You put yourself together a little bit more than you normally would because you want to make a great first impression. And then as the process goes along, you don’t put makeup on. Your hair is a mess, and you have sweatpants on. [Laughs] That’s because you’re just trying to make it work.
Right: Partnering with Amar Ramasar
Would you talk about the process for Acheron?
It was a little weird for me because I had an injury when Liam came. My part was made on somebody else, and then I had to learn it. We had to rethink it and redo it for my partner, Adrian Danchig-Waring, and me.
Did you have much give and take with Liam?
I did. He was very open to changing things and making each couple feel comfortable. He’s very quiet in a way; he lets you figure it out and talk to your partner about it. He doesn’t get upset with you, which is kind of refreshing. Also, Liam was here and then he left and then he came back and left again, so Adrian and I had time to work on it ourselves, to rough it out, break it down. Why isn’t this working? Let’s figure this out. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. You feel stupid doing that in front of the choreographer because you want to make it look good for him.
How does it affect you when a choreographer is upset or impatient?
I kind of close down. I can’t compete with that. You don’t want to compete with that, and probably a lot of that is anxiety; they need to get that out. So I get upset, but I’m just like, I can’t do anything about it, tomorrow’s a new day, we’ll come in here and try it again. I’m doing my best for you. That’s all that you can really do, because it’s their job to make it work on you—if they can do that, if they’re intelligent enough to do that.
What do you bring to the studio that makes you a good muse?
I like to think that I have a really good personality. I dance big, and I’ll do everything full-out, the biggest, until they tell me, “Don’t do that,” or they have to tame it down. I’d rather that than them telling me, “Do more.” People mostly choreograph really big dancing and very emotional dancing on me, so I guess that’s an advantage because I can dive into things. One time, Liam was trying to get Sara Adams to not think about 
what she was doing and just be with her partner in the moment. He said, “Do it like Sara does. Sara Mearns—she just closes her eyes. She just stands there and lets it happen.” It’s easy for me to go to that dreamy, mysterious place in the studio. And I like to work on things. I like to do them over and over again and see if I can make them work. I like to laugh in rehearsal. That’s a huge thing—obviously, you’re going to have those dramatic moments and those really tense and stressful moments, but you have to be able to laugh in rehearsal, too. You know, we’re just people. We’re not robots. We’re not perfection.
Above: "I think of it as two visions molding together" —Sara Mearns
How do you mold yourself to someone else’s vision?
I think of it as two visions molding together. It can’t be just their vision. There have to be multiple visions coming together, multiple talents, multiple inspirations, imaginations.
Do you blame yourself when it’s not going well?
Oh, yeah. Because you feel like it’s your job to bring his creation to life. And your creation to life. You want to make the best of this because someone picked you to do something completely new. It’s a moment in time that you might not ever get again. And it’s self-worth. You want to feel important, to feel like no one else could do this. No one could ever look like this.
What was the reason behind your wanting to branch out and work with Karole Armitage and others?
I’m still doing that. In April, I’m dancing one of Mauro Bigonzetti’s works for the Youth America Grand Prix gala. It’s just different movement. No pointe shoes. No walls, no boundaries. Sometimes it’s tough here at New York City Ballet because we don’t get the very modern-modern choreographers. Sometimes we do, but most of the time I don’t get picked for that stuff. So I want to look elsewhere for that on my off time. Just to see how it feels and see how my body reacts to it. I want to see if I can do it.
Gia Kourlas is the dance editor for Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.
All photos by Chris Lee
When Martha Graham formed her company in 1926, it was the start of a dance revolution. But for those dedicated to keeping the Graham flame alive—namely Janet Eilber, artistic director of Martha Graham Dance Company—the foremost question is, How can a company formed 87 years ago be relevant today?
“You have to make decisions,” says Eilber at the Graham company’s West Village studios in Westbeth, formerly home to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Take Eilber’s current undertaking: to cut Graham’s 1958 two-act masterpiece Clytemnestra down to one hour.
Right: Katherine Crockett in Satyric Festival Song. Photo by Nathan Sayers.
“I don’t see that as really losing anything,” she says. “I see that as traveling through time. You do have to strip things away as you move forward and accept the fact that they’re no longer relevant. That’s the great thing about the Graham legacy: the core of it is so relevant.”
When Eilber took over as artistic director in 2005—joined by LaRue Allen, who remains the company’s executive director—she had immediate crises to deal with. The company, previously led by the two foremost Graham interpreters of the 1980s and ’90s—Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin—was in substantial debt. Dancers were full of doubt. It seemed like the company had a better chance of folding than rediscovering itself.
The turnaround has been an evolution. “We started with a $5 million debt and used this whole trajectory of starting with simple, inexpensive creative programs that gave us a foundation to build on,” Eilber explains. The organization has been in the black for eight years, and its budget more than doubled since 2006.
For Tadej Brdnik, who joined in 1996, the success comes down to artistic vision. “The biggest mistake after Martha’s death is that nobody actually sat down and said, Who are we? How can we make this legacy thrive past the years of Martha Graham?” he says. “It was kind of like sucking on a lollipop: Nobody noticed there was nothing left on it.”
Eilber danced with the Graham company from 1972 to 1980. Martha trusted her so much with her own roles that she invited her back as a guest artisteven while Eilber was in Los Angeles, where she was acting in films like Whose Life Is It Anyway? Eilber has lost none of her statuesque polish, yet while she may evoke the blond coolness of Grace Kelly, there is heat in her, too. Her eyes sparkle with passion whenever she shares a thought about how an aspect of Graham’s world could be disseminated. It’s almost as if she’s built a web and shooting from its center are silken pathways showing all the ways Graham’s work can live on.
Left: Blakeley White-McGuire in costume for Diversion of Angels. Photo by Nathan Sayers.
Eilber’s first mission was to shorten programs so that there would be one intermission instead of two. She initiated audience-access experiments in the form of online video competitions like the “Clytemnestra Remash Challenge” and “On the Couch,” which was part of that season’s “Inner Landscape” theme. Eilber, who is greatly inspired by museum curation, adores themes. They give her a sense of structure; from there, her imagination can run wild. Currently, the organization is enmeshed in “Myth and Transformation,” but she’s starting to cook up “Shape and Design,” which will address Graham’s place in American modernism.
Yet Eilber also stays in the present. Lamentation Variations is an ongoing series in which short works—created in reaction to Graham’s extraordinary 1930 solo—are commissioned for a range of choreographers. (The list includes Larry Keigwin, Aszure Barton, and Doug Varone.) “It’s easier in Lamentation Variations to open the door to any style, but for a larger work we need somebody who can stand up next to Martha Graham,” she says.
In February, Nacho Duato will begin his second piece for the company. His first was Rust, a devastating male quintet exploring ideas about torture. “Even before he finished the piece, he volunteered to come back and do another one as soon as possible,” says Brdnik, laughing. “I could feel him in the studio—he was really happy because he was tapping into a part of his imagination that maybe wasn’t being fulfilled with different kinds of dancers.” (Duato, who mainly works with classical dancers, is the artistic director of the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg.)
Above: Doug Varone's Lamentation Variation with, from left to right, Tadej Brdnik, Lloyd Knight, Abdiel Jacobsen, and Maurizio Nardi. By Costas, courtesy MGDC.
Eilber also hopes to bring contemporary classics into the mix, like Merce Cunningham’s Winterbranch and Jerome Robbins’ Watermill; she would love to have, as museums do, an acquisition fund. “A work by Pina Bausch for the Graham company?” she asks in wonderment. “Pina was so influenced by Martha. There are so many people out there who are grandchildren of Martha Graham. Matthew Bourne. It’s the emotional narrative: Remember the duet in his Swan Lake between the son and his mother? It’s like a Graham duet. As you can tell, I dream…”
But her ideas are doubly exciting when the current crop of Graham dancers have so much to offer. If Katherine Crockett is the company’s incandescent bombshell—she was Cate Blanchett’s dance double in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for a reason—Blakeley White-McGuire is its drama queen. Her performances become more ravaged and haunting—without the melodrama, if you can believe it—with each passing season.
“What has been gained is a vibrancy and an unleashing of the spirit of the artist that made all of this,” White-McGuire says. “I didn’t know Graham as a personality. What Janet has done, in a way, is made that OK. She has opened up the possibility of it going forward.”
And Xiaochuan Xie, a soloist from China, is proof that the company is still attracting talent. A dancer of startling luminosity (see “On the Rise,” Sept. 2011), she will be featured in The Rite of Spring during the company’s New York City Center season this March. Having joined the company in 2010, she’s still learning; White-McGuire is her idol.
“She has a special intensity, which I think I’m lacking,” Xie says. “I see myself as a weak person. That’s also why I came to Graham: I want to be strong. When I came here, it was a new experience for me to really think, What’s in me? I still ask myself that question every day.”
Xie describes Eilber in one word: “Brave.” It takes a few seconds for Xie’s peals of laughter to die down. “I couldn’t do those things. It’s an older company with all this reputation and probably a lot of stereotypes from the audience.”
She recounts how one spectator complimented her dancing in a Graham duet, but referred to the other more contemporary piece on the program in a derogatory way. “There are probably a lot of people who say things like that to her face,” Xie says. “It’s hard to get all those opinions, but at the same time, you still need to say, This is what I want to do and I’m doing it.”
For Crockett, the company now has a greater openness. “Things change and they should change, because we have new people in the company and the world is changing,” she says. “The beauty is to understand the impulse of the technique and to understand that technique is not the style, but how to shift the body from the pelvis, how to spiral from the back, how to find the impulse of the contraction shooting you through space. If you project that into everything you do, it will still live, it will still be pure.”
Right: Blakeley White-McGuire in costume for Cave of the Heart, set by Noguchi. By Nathan Sayers
In a way, Eilber is creating a highly technical repertory company with a secret weapon: a Graham base. “These works will resonate,” she says, “and can be disassembled and reassembled in many different configurations.”
Falling under the category of what she calls “creative curation,” Eilber is experimenting with ways to reframe the Graham repertoire. In 2011 she collaborated with Italian theater director Antonio Calenda for a production about Picasso in which dancers performed remixed sections from Graham works. Another Italian venture featured 10 members of the company in casts of Prometheus Bound and The Bacchae.
“That was a great experience in deciding which Graham phrases to manipulate,” Eilber says. “Prometheus Bound had the dancers flying down this huge staircase, and we used moves from the white lady from Diversion of Angels for the whole group. Later, they had a more angry section; we used the solo Deep Song, but turned it into a group dance. It was amazing. I want to do it again!”
Another of Eilber’s dreams is to collaborate with an opera director to give a production a Graham look using, say, characters from the Trojan War. “What if scenes from all of these dances could be seen and the audience could walk through them?” she asks. “A film artist could create projections while you saw the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and then soldiers would lead you into a town square, and you’d see Cassandra’s crazy scene. You’d turn the corner and see Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon.”
Eilber’s eyes, it should be noted, have that special sparkle again.
“These are the sorts of things that I figure if you don’t think about them they’ll never happen,” she says. But it also comes down to what she’s been handed: the Graham legacy.
“If you’re going to curate something, curate something that’s limitless.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance editor of Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.
Xiaochuan Xie in costume for The Rite of Spring. Photo by Nathan Sayers for DM.
Melnick in costume for her Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version. All photos by Matthew Karas.
Not everyone grows up wanting to become a ballerina. Jodi Melnick, whose bare feet are firmly planted in New York’s downtown dance world, is a case in point.
“I do think there’s an idea that if you’re a modern dancer it must be because you weren’t good enough to be a ballerina,” she says over coffee. “I did not set out to do modern dance because I didn’t have that body type or that technique. This was a conscious decision. It had more relevance to me.”
And, as it happens, Melnick is also one of the most beautiful dancers there ever was—full of delicacy, lucidity, sensuality, mystery, and ferocity, which gives her an indelible sense of drama. Of course, there is another side to her charm: a dainty porcelain face framed by a halo of auburn hair.
Melnick may be a downtown dancer, but it’s clear that she’s breaking into the national scene. After heralded performances at the American Dance Festival, the Vail International Dance Festival, and New York City Center’s wildly popular Fall for Dance Festival, Melnick’s fame is growing. It’s hardly a surprise: When Melnick is onstage, there is little to do but stare. Is this the same sort of power Isadora Duncan had?
“Sometimes I look at her and think, How can those little legs hold her up?” says Vicky Shick, a dancer/choreographer who has worked extensively with Melnick. “How can she be so strong? In her soul and in her personality, there is fragility and huge vulnerability, but she’s so tough as well. And I don’t know anyone who can track, simultaneously, so many different complex coordinations in one body.” Or, as choreographer Susan Rethorst puts it, “Jodi and Steve Martin are the most brilliant physical people that I can think of.”
For Melnick, also a choreographer and influential teacher, every movement matters—even those you can’t see. Her art isn’t about making shapes, but giving sense to the myriad of layers in the body beneath the muscles and bones. She most admires Trisha Brown, and it’s easy to see why: The slippery mercurial path that movement takes as it travels through the body is somehow ancient.
Teaching an advanced class at Barnard College, where she is a professor of dance, Melnick guides a group of young women in a stream of movement. “Open your minor pectorals,” she instructs. “Now slide your earlobes down, drop the arms, shoulder blades down, soften the knees, and float the fingers up, thinking of the weight of the organs. Just be aware of the inside body—the three-dimensional body. Bring your hands back to where your kidneys are—sacs of water heating the body. Steam.”
It is this exacting focus that draws your eye to details, like the way a shoulder rotates in and out; Melnick’s art is a scintillating exploration of the human form.
However easy she makes it look, Melnick, by her own account, works like a dog. “It’s no big mystery,” she says dryly. “I never go into rehearsal without being completely warmed up. I don’t get drunk or high. It’s work, and if I’m going to be dancing at my age, I have to take care of my body. I don’t want a day off.”
At 49, Melnick could pass for two decades younger. “Am I going to lie about my age?” she asks, laughing in disbelief. “I think that would just be so dumb.”
Born in Brooklyn but raised in Long Island, Melnick started out not in dance, but in competitive gymnastics, which took her from fourth grade through high school. “I loved the idea of being ferociously physical,” she says. “And I had this crazy sense of momentum. Like I understood momentum in my body, and I remember it colliding with a fearlessness and with form.”
Through gymnastics, she took her first dance classes, which were mainly jazz and tap. “During my senior year, I was like, Why am I a competitive gymnast?” she recalls. “What am I going to do? That’s when I started getting more into dance. I would come into the city and take jazz class. I wanted to be on Broadway and be in A Chorus Line and do Bob Fosse.” She pauses. “I still secretly do.”
While at Purchase College, Melnick trained in the modern techniques of Graham, Limón, and Cunningham, as well as improvisation and experimental forms. “I took one class with Sarah Stackhouse, and I was like, my life has changed,” Melnick recalls. “It was the way she moved through space, very precise, but very grand. It was the way she talked about the body and movement and life and spirit—how she related dance to the world.”
Mel Wong, who specialized in Cunningham technique, was another influence. “He was very political, and in class he would talk about issues of the time,” Melnick says. “It didn’t feel superfluous. It didn’t feel like when I would take a ballet class and it was just about an aesthetic.”
Morever, she found ballet class oppressive. “When you went across the floor doing tombé pas de bourrée glissade jeté in a gorgeous studio with gorgeous windows and live music, it’s an exhilarating feeling—but for me, it was not,” she continues. “It was physically unenjoyable. But then I would go to modern dance class, and it was running, putting your heels down, articulating the hip joint, the foot going into the ground, using your body weight, what the elbow did, how you moved through space, and there was something about that that moved me. I had a visceral connection to it.”
In a dress made of screen material that Melnick designed herself.
After graduation, Melnick performed with Nina Wiener’s company and embarked on a freelance route, working with choreographers like Donna Uchizono, with whom she reunited for a 2006 piece featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Hristoula Harakas. “The next huge, monumental experience came in meeting Sara Rudner crossing the street in the early ’90s,” Melnick says. “I stood pointing and saying, ‘Oh, my God, you’re Sara Rudner!’ ”
She found a mentor in Rudner, a spellbinding dancer who was a founding member of Twyla Tharp’s group in the 1960s (and a 2009 Dance Magazine Awardee). “All we did for years was work and work and not talk in the studio,” Melnick says. “There was a point where I actually felt my body go through her like osmosis.” She laughs. “If you’re going to pick anyone to do that with, she’s an amazing choice.”
Melnick came close, but never made it into Trisha Brown’s company. (“I was destroyed and devastated.”) Later, she had other opportunities to work with Brown, in both setting her operas abroad, and in a solo that Melnick performed last spring at New York Live Arts. “Ultimately, it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “I got the other relationship with Trisha, where I could be who I was with her. So I lucked out.”
Through Rudner, she became acquainted with Tharp and went on to dance with her in the early ’90s and again in 2009. Melnick had a distinct feeling about Tharp’s work. “It was so challenging for my body technically, but I understood something about opposition and the range of motion in your ankles, in your pelvis. I understood those coordinations, and the sophisticated structure she would pair with them.”
After Tharp, Melnick worked with Iréne Hultman, Rethorst, and Shick. Working with these three women “developed my more quirky, inventive approach to movement,” she says. “It developed my eye to see the subtle nuance, how dance was not fleeting, that when I saw Vicky do something, after she left, I still saw it.”
In 2005, her own choreography began to take center stage: Wanderlust, Kentucky at Dance Theater Workshop was followed, in 2009, with a mixed bill at The Kitchen, where she unveiled Suedehead and Fanfare, a collaboration with the visual artist Burt Barr. The latter was a purely physical exploration of Melnick’s body in space.
“I had just gone through this very tragic experience,” she says. “One piece was going to be laden with the last two years of what I’d gone through—the good, bad, ugly, tremendous—and I wanted this other piece to be only about me being in the space with this movement and Burt’s set. I had to have a task to keep my mind from straying because when my mind strayed it went to a very dark and horrible place.”
Melnick doesn’t like to talk about the devastating incident in which her fiancé died suddenly, but she will say that her relationship to dance and to art saved her. “It’s so important to me, and then when you get out of yourself, you realize that it’s bigger than you in a way,” she says. “The way the ocean is important because it’s so big. I felt the thing I was so devoted to and that had loved me and that I had loved back, and I was so grateful.”
Now, she’s in a good personal situation and lives on the Upper West Side with her boyfriend, a math teacher. “I don’t know how this happened: I have this great guy,” she says. “Brilliant, beautiful relationship. I’m done.”
Her most recent concert included One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures, the solo that was created in collaboration with Brown. “It was a dream come true, and I know that sounds really corny, but she lives up to every expectation I have,” Melnick says. “Her choices were radical and fierce and unpredictable and spirited and crazy technical and hard.
In a costume designed by Yeohlee Teng for One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures.
This winter, Melnick will begin a new investigation in the studio. That’s how she starts every piece: Alone, with maybe a bit of talk radio to keep her company.
“My next work is a little based on my feelings,” she says. “How is that in cahoots with this abstract physical medium I use my body? It’s less tangible than love and hate or despair. I have a certain feeling when I’m onstage: The atmosphere, the environment, the way I move from A to B with a certain kind of motor. It makes me feel something that I don’t ever feel anywhere else. I want to expand on that.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance editor of Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.
Paul Taylor’s Also Playing. Costume by Santo Loquasto, photo by Matthew Karas.
After nearly 10 years as a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Parisa Khobdeh is being rewarded in the way every dancer loves most: showered with plum roles by a modern master. Still, one part in particular, the stoic, fearless female lead in Promethean Fire, fills her with awe. She first encountered that majestic dance in 2002; its tumultuous duet, performed by Lisa Viola and Patrick Corbin, blew her away.
“I saw Lisa run from Patrick to the edge of the stage and then she turned and threw herself at him,” says Khobdeh after a rehearsal at the company’s Lower East Side studios. “As he caught her, her face grazed the ground. I took the same gasp the audience took.”
The moment was life-changing. “At that point, I knew: I don’t want to be a great dancer—I want to be a great Taylor dancer.”
To accomplish that requires range, and in Khobdeh’s dancing—from her eloquent lyricism to her sly sense of humor—there is a rainbow of emotion and physicality. “I look at Paul’s dances, and it’s not light and dark,” she says. “It’s how many shades of gray. In one dance like Esplanade, you have tremendous pathos, you have romance, you have darkness, you have absolute abandon and letting go, and I feel like being a Taylor dancer is executing all of those things. That’s what I try to achieve. There’s beauty in the madness and the sanity, in the pure gorgeousness and exhaustion, and in the disparity and the dignity.”
In many ways, Khobdeh is impossible to typecast. She’s a beauty, with finely arched eyebrows that lend her dancing a sensuous air in works like Brandenburgs and Arden Court; they also seem to let you in on the joke in humorous pieces like Offenbach Overtures or Troilus and Cressida (Reduced). Despite her delicacy, she is tougher than she looks: Khobdeh is a Texan whose parents left Tehran a few years before the 1979 Islamic revolution. She grew up in Plano, a suburb north of Dallas.
Khobdeh began dancing for practical reasons: Her parents worked full-time and they needed a place for her to go after school. “Also, I think my mother always admired dancing when she was younger, so this was an opportunity for me to be exposed to the arts,” Khobdeh says. “She couldn’t dance. She wanted to as a youngster and her father didn’t approve.”
At the Chamberlain School of Performing Arts, under Kathy Chamberlain, she received rigorous training. The main focus was ballet, and Khobdeh had the chance to perform with high-level guest artists, including Carlos Acosta. “But it wasn’t until I saw modern dance that it spoke to me as an expressive medium,” she says. “I immediately fell in love with it. It blew my hair back.”
She entered Southern Methodist University as a pre-med major, but halfway through realized that she wanted to pursue dance instead. It was at SMU that Khobdeh feels she developed, not just as a dancer but also as a person. She recalls asking herself questions like, Who am I? Where am I going? “That’s where I discovered what I wanted.” Khobdeh set her sights on joining the Taylor company. “And then,” she continues, “it was like I’d walk through walls for it.”
She auditioned twice. The first time she was cut immediately, but the second audition, about a year later, occurred after she had completed a Taylor intensive. “The line was out the door at 7:00 in the morning, and I was a little cold, so I went to the third floor to the yoga studio that I had been training at.”
It wasn’t open, but a cleaning woman was working; Khobdeh asked her if she could use one of the smaller studios to warm up and meditate. “As I was leaving, I looked at her—there was a window behind her—and she was just glowing like there was a halo around her,” Khobdeh recalls. “She said, ‘I have a very good feeling about you today.’ ”
At the audition, Khobdeh says that she felt superhuman. “They were pounding out choreography,” she says, snapping her fingers. “When you’ve got so many eyes all over your body, it’s incredible. The next thing I knew, the dancing was done and I couldn’t believe that I had made it that far. Paul came up to us, and he was so generous. He said, ‘You guys are all beautiful’—and he kind of wrapped his arm around me and gave me a little squeeze—‘but I’ve made my choice.’ ”
Taylor hasn’t had reason to second-guess his decision. This fall, Khobdeh performed as the lead in his newest work, To Make Crops Grow, after this piece went to press. Taylor says that the role “is one of the most demanding I’ve ever made for her.”
"Parisa connects with you in the moment. You can tell when you look in her eyes that there is nowhere else she would rather be.” —Michael Trusnovec, her frequent partner. Photos by Francisco Graciano, Courtesy PTDC.
Khobdeh, who wears heels in the dance, laughs. “He’s warned me that it doesn’t end very well for me,” she says. “I don’t have a very good relationship with my husband. I’m kind of fancy and I’m married to an older gentleman. We have one child together, and he doesn’t do it for me. Paul says I’m very flirtatious. I think it’s because I’m unhappy.”
Actually, offstage, Khobdeh, who is single, is as sunny as they come. Michael Trusnovec, her frequent partner, says, “She’s one of those people that whenever we go somewhere on the road and get into a taxi, not two minutes into the ride, she knows everything about the driver.” That curiosity, in part, is what keeps her challenged by Taylor’s prodigious imagination. There’s no way to know what’s around the corner, and that’s how she likes it.
“Maybe that’s why we’re so fiercely loyal and devoted to Paul,” she says. “In doing parts like Piazzolla Caldera, Promethean Fire and Company B, I feel like Paul has a lot of trust in me. That he feels I’m capable of doing them justice. Being in the studio and making something is a very special process. When we find out who’s going to be in the new dance, it feels like Christmas morning. It is the best part of my job. It’s such a beautiful thing, especially to see him move. I admire the man so much. And I love trying to read his mind.”
Khobdeh, 32, lives on New York’s Lower East Side and rides her bicycle everywhere. She also attends as many theater, dance, and music performances—from the Philharmonic to a three-person band in a Brooklyn basement—as she can afford. But Khobdeh doesn’t limit herself to simply sitting in the audience: She’s also part of a comedy-improv troupe called the Sea Monsters.
“The reason I got into it was because Paul was challenging me with more comedy roles,” Khobdeh says. “It’s like the yoga, the biking, and the weight training that I do. It’s cross-training for my mind. It helps me understand comedy, timing and, more specifically, Paul’s timing. And that’s really what I’m striving for.”
Clockwise from top left: Offenbach Overtures with Michelle Fleet. Photo by Paul B. Goode, Courtesy PTDC; In costume for Piazzolla Caldera. Photo by Matthew Karas; Esplanade, from backstage. Photo by Francisco Graciano, Courtesy PTDC.
So far, her comedy-improv life is something of a secret. “Sometimes it’s really nice to walk into a random third-floor theater somewhere on MacDougal Street and perform and nobody knows who you are,” she says. “Nobody knows what you do. You’re just another player and I love that. I love completely being anonymous and turning into something else.”
In her dancing, she manages to do that all the time, performing such disparate roles as the forlorn young woman in Company B (her solo to “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” is heartbreaking) and as the lusty, space-devouring sexpot in Piazzolla. This March at Lincoln Center, Khobdeh dances with Trusnovec in three Taylor classics: Esplanade; Eventide, a delicately rendered look at love told through the simplest of means—walking; and Promethean Fire.
Photo by Matthew Karas.
Trusnovec finds something in Khobdeh’s essence similar to that of the recently retired Taylor dancer Annmaria Mazzini, who danced each performance as if it might be her last. “Parisa is one of those dancers who connects with you in that moment,” he says. “You can tell when you look in her eyes that there is nowhere else she would rather be, that there is no one else even onstage when you’re dancing with her. I feel like the world disappears. It’s very pure and beautiful.”
Khobdeh relishes dancing with Trusnovec; in Promethean Fire, which hints at the events of 9/11, she calls him her rock. “I do that blind leap,” she says. “I jump into the void. And I know he’s going to catch me. I trust him with my life.”
Photo by Matthew Karas.
At one point in Promethean Fire, the dancers collapse on top of each other only to rise up again. It’s a triumphant look at the human spirit, which is why Khobdeh loves it so much. “Being human is going through obstacles and overcoming adversity,” she says. “We’re all faced with tragedy at some point or another, and if you are afraid of it, it might overtake you. So you look beyond the obstacle.”
Before last season’s Lincoln Center engagement, the company performed a run-through of Promethean Fire for Taylor. “After we bowed, he gestured to me and I went up to his chair,” she says. “I bent down to hear him because he was sitting. He looked at me and he kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘That’s it.’ It was so tender. My heart felt huge. It was a beautiful moment that I’ll cherish forever.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance editor of Time Out New York and writes about dance for The New York Times.
How Parisa keeps her body dance-ready
Heavy lifting ”Here, the women are not the only ones being lifted. There are moments when I’m having to lift someone else, so I strength-train. I spend three days in the gym lifting weights, and I also do Pilates and Gyrotonics. I take ballet and Taylor too. I get massages and I do Thera-Band exercises and I try to eat a very high protein diet to take care of my muscles.”
Outside the studio “I bike everywhere. I do yoga and I swim, and especially on our off time, I try to do all of those things. To get the Taylor back, the closest thing without doing Taylor is to be in the pool and use the resistance of the water.”
On tour “I usually do some Pilates in my room. If there’s a gym in the hotel, I try to utilize that just to get some blood flowing, especially if I’ve been on a long plane ride. I’ll warm up before tech. I’ll give myself a barre and I will do the Taylor back exercises and rehearse and then do it all over again before the show. And I try to stretch after, while everything’s still warm.”
