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Gelsey Kirkland's "Dancing on my Grave"


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[...]--

Speaking of being murdered by chemicals, remind me one day to tell the story of partnering the ballerina who went on a millet-only (whole grain, natch) diet for a month...

OMG how did you know?! When I was dancing, many many years ago, the fad diet of the day was millet or seseame seeds and...soda water. We were also weighed every other week and had to be AT LEAST 5lbs UNDERWEIGHT. There was no medical supervision that I remember, even when a member of our comany became anorexic and ended up in Boston Children's Hospital for 6 months. Thank goodness all of that has changed for the better with proper supervision and medical staff at most companies. (And a few anorexic deaths and lawsuits to force them to do the right thing.)

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Re: the lifts in Giselle, I don't entirely blame Kirkland--the technique for those lifts is similar to that used for the lifts in Les Sylphides. The woman must not jump at all; the man must lift her as "dead weight" because otherwise she ends up looking heavy, and it spoils the illusion of weightlessness. However, it is quite hard on the man.

It's odd, but this is still something that must be explained to a lot of (experienced) ballerinas today. Only last year, I heard a ruefully funny account of just that conversation between two famous dancers doing Giselle at the Met. But I guess someone got it right, because when I saw the performance, she did appear totally weightless (and he later said his back was sore.)

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Thank goodness all of that has changed for the better with proper supervision and medical staff at most companies. (And a few anorexic deaths and lawsuits to force them to do the right thing.)

From my own daughter's (and some of her friends') experiences in today's companies, it has not changed for the better at all. The death of Heidi Guenther 11 years ago, for example, does not seem to have made a bit of difference to many artistic directors and their assistants today, who still demand impossible weight loss goals for some of their dancers, forcing the dancers to adopt starvation diets and other means in order to comply. For anecdotal evidence, many company dancers can tell you what it's like today. Even reading their blogs will give one insight. ABT dancers, for example, "get skinny" for Met season. Sounds cute, but it shows that the mindset of yesteryear and the basic requirement for ballet dancers to be bone-thin hasn't changed. I know several dancers in our major local company who report that they were all told by the AD to lose 5 pounds before last season began. I consider conditions even worse than in the past, measured against the fact that we know so much more about proper nutrition and emotional health today, and, because of the internet, there is so much information available to us. On our sister forum, Ballet Talk for Dancers, more than one thread's been started over the years for Dancing on My Grave as new young dancers discover the book. Many young ballerina hopefuls read it as a manual for weight loss and control. The moderators on BT for D always have to do damage control when discussions of the book arise.

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Thank goodness all of that has changed for the better with proper supervision and medical staff at most companies. (And a few anorexic deaths and lawsuits to force them to do the right thing.)

From my own daughter's (and some of her friends') experiences in today's companies, it has not changed for the better at all.

Thanks for those words, Marga. Still, my drug-related questions are still on the air. For those of you guys who are more knowledgeable on Company current policies. Is there any help offered to addict dancers...? Is the issue still as big as back on Kirkland's times...? Is it properly acknowledged nowadays...? or on the contrary...Is the "don't ask don't tell" policy still current...?

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Thank goodness all of that has changed for the better with proper supervision and medical staff at most companies. (And a few anorexic deaths and lawsuits to force them to do the right thing.)

From my own daughter's (and some of her friends') experiences in today's companies, it has not changed for the better at all.

Thanks for those words, Marga. Still, my drug-related questions are still on the air. For those of you guys who are more knowledgeable on Company current policies. Is there any help offered to addict dancers...? Is the issue still as big as back on Kirkland's times...? Is it properly acknowledged nowadays...? or on the contrary...Is the "don't ask don't tell" policy still current...?

It's my strong intuition that denial, tied to a "sink-or-swim" mentality, is still the reigning mode in the ballet world.

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ABT dancers, for example, "get skinny" for Met season.
What makes this scary is that as a group, ABT's dancers look healthier than most of the others I've seen lately. Maybe it's just that our definition of thin has shrunk over the years, but in comparison to their ABT counterparts, the women of the Kirov were almost grotesquely skinny. This is not a criticism of the dancers but of the ballet masters who set unreasonable standards.
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During the soviet goody-goody days, drug consumption was a forbidden topic, as it was considered part of the highly criticized aspects of the then so called "imperialist corruption" and "capitalism vices". I wonder if with their newly acquired freedom of expression and action the practice it's also being spread out within the Marinsky and/or the Bolshoi troupes.

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During the soviet goody-goody days, drug consumption was a forbidden topic, as it was considered part of the highly criticized aspects of the then so called "imperialist corruption" and "capitalism vices". I wonder if with their newly acquired freedom of expression and action the practice it's been also being spread out within the Marinsky and/or the Bolshoi troupes.

I imagine it already was. It's not very hard to find out about the Soviet black markets, and that always means drugs, although I don't know what the comparison with 'evil imperialism' would be in terms of consumption.

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Maybe it's just that our definition of thin has shrunk over the years, but in comparison to their ABT counterparts, the women of the Kirov were almost grotesquely skinny.

And they look like veritable Jayne Mansfields next to Eifman’s girls, who are really, really thin.

The rehearsal process was difficult - La Fosse describes Kirkland as being a dead weight when he had to do the Act II lifts but onstage they looked lovely with her body draped in a long line but not so lovely on his shoulders and back.

Peter Martins made a similar comment in his book about a very small dancer who gave no help with lifts (“Dancing with this pint-size ballerina was like dancing with a truck”) and I always wondered if he meant Kirkland.

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Robert La Fosse made it a point to describe the difference between partnering the much more independent ballerinas at NYCB and the ABT ballerinas, in his experience.

La Fosse describes an entire drug culture during his Studio 54 days, but his book is rarely mentioned in context with "Dancing on My Grave". He was never demonized the way Kirkland was.

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La Fosse describes an entire drug culture during his Studio 54 days, but his book is rarely mentioned in context with "Dancing on My Grave."

Thanks, Helene, for that observation. So much of what we know/learn about the dance field happens one dancer memoir at a time. It would be great if there were more overaching studies of the dance world, or more bios that use their figure as representative of an era or movement (i.e., the fine studies on Diaghilev by Buckle and by Garafola).

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There is an article/interview with PNB dancer and Princess Grace award winner Lucien Postlewaite in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (also in today's links) in which he relates,

I took summer classes at SAB (School of American Ballet, the teaching arm of New York City Ballet) every year and at 17, almost 18, I was offered an apprenticeship with the company. One night I went out celebrating with friends, drinking, and got caught when I returned to the dorms. I lost my apprenticeship and was sent home: the poster child for the school's new drugs and alcohol program.

Since Postlewaite is now 24 or 25, that would have been around 2001-ish. Having a policy at all is acknowledgment that drug use is neither isolated to a few people or to two decades before, although the School with dorms and minors takes on quasi-parental responsibility.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/classical/376896_clas29.html

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There is an article/interview with PNB dancer and Princess Grace award winner Lucien Postlewaite in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (also in today's links) in which he relates,
I took summer classes at SAB (School of American Ballet, the teaching arm of New York City Ballet) every year and at 17, almost 18, I was offered an apprenticeship with the company. One night I went out celebrating with friends, drinking, and got caught when I returned to the dorms. I lost my apprenticeship and was sent home: the poster child for the school's new drugs and alcohol program.

Since Postlewaite is now 24 or 25, that would have been around 2001-ish. Having a policy at all is acknowledgment that drug use is neither isolated to a few people or to two decades before, although the School with dorms and minors takes on quasi-parental responsibility.

Leave it to SAB/NYCB, though, to exercise power in such a draconian fashion (at the old Julliard SAB, so I've heard :P , students used to smoke pot in the stairwell!). If he was worth apprenticing, he was worth holding onto and--a dirty word in that world--COUNSELING.

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This raises a very interesting question. What ARE the in loco parentis responsibilities that programs like SAB (teenage students, many living away from their families) recognize and accept?

Dismissal, as in Postlethwaite's case, or turning a blind eye to pot-smoking in the stairwells, as described by Ray, seem to be opposite extremes -- each of them irresponsibile in its own way.

If I were sending a teenager to such a program, I'd want to know they were being monitored, but also that the program had some sort of due process and offered some sort of support and counselling depending on the nature of the behavior.

(Maybe this deserves a thread of its own, since the connection to Gelsey Kirkland -- while definitely there -- seems a little tenuous.)

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Leave it to SAB/NYCB, though, to exercise power in such a draconian fashion

That does indeed sound like a rather stiff punishment given the offense, but I suppose the school doesn't want to take any chances.

Having a policy at all is acknowledgment that drug use is neither isolated to a few people or to two decades before, although the School with dorms and minors takes on quasi-parental responsibility.

Any responsible (and cautious) school would have a policy in place no matter what the degree of use.

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Any responsible (and cautious) school would have a policy in place no matter what the degree of use.

Of course. But he mentions a "new" drug policy, which means either they had some impetus to change the one they had, or they didn't have one before (several decades post-Kirkland) and had reason to institute one.

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This is an old thread.

I recently reread Kirkland's book and despite all the controversy, I was struck how painfully honest it was. Although, I think Kirkland had at times wrong assumptions or misinterpreted the behavior of her colleagues, I don't think she was lying just for the sake of making herself a more tragic figure. The three big relationships which she herself drew inferences were her father, Balanchine and Baryshnikov. She is pretty upfront that she wanted Balanchine to be a father figure and it seems he even tried to be one. Although I don't think she took into account that he was hurting terribly over the Farrell scandal. Which probably made extending interest toward Kirkland and other ballerinas a very bittersweet prospect.

The fact that he turned Firebird into such a cold, inhuman presence was a result of the Farrell heartbreak. And poor teenage Kirkland had to deal with the blowback of this affair. I think even D'Amboise, in his book, mentioned something to the effect that it wasn't all in Kirkland's head.

I think one of her problems with Baryshnikov was that he was a very competitive dancer even with his female partners. Kirkland wanted a meeting of artistic minds and he just wasn't that kind of dancer. I think the, ultimately, the ballet world inhibited her. She should have tried a bit of acting. I think, although she despised it, that "The Turning Pointe" would have been a fantastic opportunity for her. She would have been so good on screen with that graceful, little form and that big brassy voice.

I'm glad she recovered and is in the process of passing on her insights to new dancers.

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Thanks for reviving the thread, kaskait. Rereading d'Amboise, he seems to think Balanchine sabotaged Firebird (what an utter tragedy) in part because he didn't want it to make Kirkland a star in her own right. Talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face!

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@kfw

Yes, definitely he was trying to make the ballet about his choreography not Kirkland's talent.

But again, I think Balanchine realized that his choreography had a lot to do with being obsessed by certain talented women. This obsession turned them into ballet superstars. It was this sudden insight, due to Farrell running away, that changed his relations to dancers that came after her. Kirkland was the bullseye in this emotional aftermath...I think Balanchine did take some of his anger out on her. If anyone after Farrell could have been a muse, it would have been Kirkland. Balanchine realized that and purposely nipped it in the bud. Kirkland being talent and emotionally exposed read his intentions all wrong. She thought he disliked her when really he was fighting the demons in himself.

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To be exact, Farrell resisted. She didn't run away, Balanchine canned her.

In fairness to Balanchine, Kirkland does seem to have taken for granted much of what he did give her, which was plenty. In her book there's a passage where she runs through the roles she danced at NYCB - great parts in great ballets that other dancers would have killed to get - quite dismissively. And Firebird wasn't the only Stravinsky ballet treated strangely by Balanchine around this time. My hunch is it had more to do with Balanchine and Stravinsky than Balanchine and Kirkland. Quoting, or re-quoting, Melissa Hayden: "Kirkland got too much too soon without the right kind of emotional support." And I agree, it's quite likely she didn't get that support in part because Balanchine was still recovering from the crisis with Farrell.

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I found it interesting that when it came to Stravinsky, Kirkland said she hated his music even Firebird, one of his most accessible scores. She hated the costume, music and choreography for Firebird. It seems to me she wanted something that NYCB or Balanchine didn't had to offer. I don't think it had to do with emotional support. What ballet company in the world was going to provide that?

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It seems to me she wanted something that NYCB or Balanchine didn't had to offer. I don't think it had to do with emotional support. What ballet company in the world was going to provide that?

I'm reminded of Susan Pilarre, I think it was, in the recent PBS broadcast of the 2014 SAB workshop, saying "I'd love to mother them," but that they had to find their own way.

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@dirac

We have to be fair to both ballerinas in regards to Balanchine. When everything went down, Farrell was a teenager and just 24 when she left NYCB. It wasn't fair that Balanchine pushed himself on such a young girl. I know there have been accounts from other dancers that Farrell played Balanchine but, I mean really, she was just a child. She had a right to be in love with a man closer to her own age. It wasn't right that Balanchine took out his anger on her husband. This was the reason why he "fired" her. She complained about this treatment and mentioned that she would leave and he said fine or something to that effect.

Then he proceeded to work out his anger and heartbreak on various other ballerinas including another teenager, namely Kirkland.

I think Kirkland's main problem with Firebird was that Balanchine and Stravinsky wanted to really be true to the concept as it was originally planned. Hence the slavish reproductions of Chagall's designs. It was all about the concept with the dancers being just decorative pieces to add scale. I could see why Kirkland would be unhappy considering the type of dancer she aspired to be. I love Stravinsky's score to Firebird, but I have to admit...it isn't something that lends itself to dance all that well.

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That is a very interesting theory about Kirkland/Balanchine relationship. I'd never thought of it like that. I also recently read an interview Baryshnikov did (I believe it was when he was doing a play in Italy... Maybe) that he himself admitted he was a very week partner for both Gelsey and Makarova and he played it off as their fault. It was really interesting hearing some of what she had accused him of being admitted to in the press, even so many years later. I agree so much is all based on perspective, but perhaps some of her accounts are more accurate than one might care to believe. If anyone has a link or knows of the interview by Baryshnikov, please post it. It would be interesting to reread it with the entirety of this thread being refreshed in my mind.

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