The Last Dance

Darci Kistler with Damian Woetzel in Swan Lake in 1999

The New York Times
June 22, 2010
Last Dance
By GIA KOURLAS

“DARCI KISTLER has a way of walking onto a stage and casting a spell. For years you could be sure that someone in the audience — in barely a whisper — would remind you that the woman with the honey blond hair, broad shoulders and killer legs was the last ballerina trained and hired by George Balanchine.

More recently, as her performances have become less frequent, those whispers have given way to something a little more soulful: a collective holding of breath.

On Sunday afternoon Ms. Kistler, who is 46, intends to finish her 30-year career at New York City Ballet in a farewell program at Lincoln Center, the end of an era. Not only is she Balanchine’s last ballerina; she is also one of the New York ballet world’s last stars.

Her power lies in an irresistible combination of tomboy daring paired with an inherent romantic softness. As Rudolf Nureyev said after first seeing her when she was 17: “There’s that devil inside. She already knows how to move to make everybody watch.”
Robert La Fosse, one of her most important partners at City Ballet, said that watching Ms. Kistler dance early on was like being in the presence of a gift. “The light that she shines is a kind of starlight,” he said.

That star power today arises from the free-spirited nature of her dancing as well as the way her name is so strongly linked to Balanchine’s. Her departure is more than a retirement: as long as she danced, he lived on, not just in ballets but also in a body.

But Ms. Kistler, seated comfortably on a sofa at the School of American Ballet, the academy affiliated with City Ballet, didn’t like being reminded of her celebrity. Her playfulness faded; her blue eyes wearied. The kiss of death, she said later, is being known as someone.

“I never am aware of it,” she said. “I don’t feel that.” After a pause she tossed her hair, considerably darker now, and found her smile. “No.”

Ms. Kistler’s smiles are frequent and often followed by shrieks of laughter. In the studio — she is on the school faculty — she is a tough motivator in the guise of a mischievous sprite. After marking a pirouette combination, she turned to face a group of 12- and 13-year-olds: “Want to try another fun one, girls? Let’s give it a whirl.” And they whirled.

Ms. Kistler began studying at the school in 1976. She joined City Ballet in 1980 and was promoted to principal two years later.

Though he never created a ballet for her, she worked intensely with Balanchine, who died in 1983. Ms. Kistler said she believed she was his last visitor in the hospital. “Who knows what death is,” she added, “but it was rough to see that. He turned away, and I grabbed his hand, and he looked back, and I just spoke to him. It was very traumatic.”

Eight years later Ms. Kistler eloped with Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief. “We knew what we were doing, and we wanted to do it,” Mr. Martins said in a phone interview, “and nobody was going to come between us.”

In 1996 they had a daughter, Talicia Tove Martins — a slender beauty known as Cia — and they are slightly animal crazy. Their household includes two cats (Ms. Kistler couldn’t leave the shelter with just one) and four dogs.

After she retires Ms. Kistler plans to continue teaching. But she has other ideas too. “I always say to Peter, ‘I’m going to pet-grooming school,’ ” Ms. Kistler said. “Darci Scissorhands!” She whooped, testing out titles for her potential new business. “I was going to call it Petipaw,” she continued, pausing. (The name is a play on the 19th-century choreographer Petipa.) “I really am serious.”

Growing up in Riverside, Calif., Ms. Kistler had four older brothers. The siblings, each a year apart, were some version of the lost boys and a girl; when they got into trouble, they went down together. One incident involved bows and arrows, BB guns and a baby sitter. “I guess we ran her off,” Ms. Kistler said, “so she called our parents.”

For Ms. Kistler ballet, which she started studying at 5, was an escape, with its quietness and femininity. “It was something that I could have on my own,” she said. “I think, really, it was a refuge. Going and taking class was the best part of my day. It still is, actually.”

In California Ms. Kistler trained at Mary Lynn’s Ballet Arts and with Irina Kosmovska, who also taught at the School of American Ballet and instilled in her a reverence for Balanchine. She also became entranced with an article in her mother’s Vogue magazine in which she learned how Balanchine chose a different perfume for each of his favorite dancers. Regretfully, she said he never picked a scent for her.

“I know he liked the perfume I was wearing at the time,” Ms. Kistler said. “It was called Pavlova, and I remember him asking me what it was. He probably giggled. ‘What is it with this girl?’ That’s how much I wanted to be a ballerina.”

Ms. Kistler didn’t have to wait long. After she performed Balanchine’s one-act “Swan Lake” at the School of American Ballet Workshop Performances in 1980, reaction in the ballet world was ecstatic.

She was young; it took some work to get her there. The Russian ballerina Alexandra Danilova taught her the role; Balanchine chose her for it. As she recalled, his corrections were severe, especially after he could sense that she had been influenced by another performance. Ms. Kistler said she had watched Natalia Makarova.

“In rehearsal I think I did the fast version of her slow version,” Ms. Kistler said before mimicking a panicked Balanchine. “‘No dear! Where did you see? What are you doing?’ Screamed at me. ‘You don’t look anywhere, you don’t watch anything, I want you. I don’t want that.’ When he stomped his foot and raised his voice, you were like, ‘I’m fired.’ The thing that he was on me about constantly was to just be myself. He’d even pull me out of the wings when Suzanne Farrell was dancing.”

Now Ms. Kistler is a nurturer. Jared Angle first started dancing with Ms. Kistler in 1999, one year after he joined the company. “If I missed one thing, I’d be so upset and ready to kill myself,” Mr. Angle said. But afterward, “she’d say: ‘Oh my gosh, that was so much fun, wasn’t it? Thank you!’ instead of being like, ‘Why didn’t you hold me here?’ ”

Though they didn’t have an extensive partnership onstage, Mr. Martins, at Balanchine’s request, danced with her too. “Mr. B would say, ‘You know, dear, she needs help,” Mr. Martins said. “She needs a better partner. Can you do this with her?’ ”

Their dancing now is restricted to City Ballet galas. “I whip her out of her chair and I say, ‘Honey, let’s dance,’ and she’s great,” Mr. Martins said. “As assertive as she is in life and in every other area of her existence, when she gets on the dance floor, she is malleable like nobody else.”

Ms. Kistler has maintained for years that dancing Balanchine ballets makes one a Balanchine dancer. Looking back, she seems to acknowledge what she had: “The real reality is there is nothing in the world like being talked to and being graced by his presence, by his words, by his thoughts.”

There is a quotation, frequently attributed to Ms. Kistler, in which Balanchine instructed her not to think but just to dance. “He knew people better than anybody,” Ms. Kistler said. “I don’t think he would tell another dancer to ‘just dance.’ But that’s what he said to me. He probably thought that I was an overthinker. Maybe he didn’t want me to get in my own way.”

Ms. Kistler began teaching in the early 1990s. Her mentor was Stanley Williams, the celebrated teacher who worked with her after she slipped on a piece of tape during a television shoot and sustained a debilitating ankle injury.

“It was just an accident,” she said. “You know, none of my injuries were ever from overworking. Never. And then the operation went bad. They didn’t fix it. They had to close it up, and then I literally was dancing on a broken ankle. I think my problem is I shouldn’t be able to take that much pain.”

Partly because of injury and partly because of age, Ms. Kistler’s fading technique has drawn critical attention. Writing in The New York Times in 2008, Alastair Macaulay noted that she was “very limited in dance power these days.”

Ms. Kistler wouldn’t address whether she thought some critics turned against her because she married Mr. Martins. Soon after they wed Mr. Martins was accused of assaulting her; later, the charge was dropped. More to the point, his direction of City Ballet has been called into question many times since Balanchine’s death. But Ms. Kistler said: “I was a ballerina before I was with him. Of course, if I wasn’t very bright, I’d think, ‘Oh, this is going to make my career better.’ No. I knew when I married Peter that I had had my career.”

Her professional experience, she knows, is rare, but because she was so young when Balanchine died, and because she is as much a part of Mr. Martins’s era as Balanchine’s, she also has perspective.

“You’re 16, and you have the most incredible moment ever, and then you have to live and grow up and become the woman you want to be, the mother you want to be,” she said. “Responsible. Human. I don’t think a lot of people who were with Mr. B could grow up. That’s why a lot of them became angry or unhappy.”

Yet she said that she could also identify with such anguish. “I magnify the little time I spent with him to people who knew him,” she said, alluding to dancers who devoted many more years to Balanchine and found it difficult to adjust to a new regime. “That loss. How do you fill that? What fills that?”

For Ms. Kistler one way is clearly through her daughter, who, despite her lineage, decided not to dance. “But just the other day she told me: ‘You know, Mom, I think I talked myself out of being a dancer because of you. I thought I’d never be as good as you.’ And I wanted to cry.”

There was a night in early June when Ms. Kistler was scheduled to perform at City Ballet as Mr. Martins was expected across the plaza at the School of American Ballet. “Peter said, ‘Well, Cia, you’ll be my date,’ and she said, ‘No, I really want to sit in the wing and watch Mom,’ ” Ms. Kistler recalled, her eyes welling. “Those are the moments when I tear up. It’s that she’s the one saying, ‘Oh, I’m not going to get to see you,’ and I’m like, ‘Ahhhhh.’ ”

Ms. Kistler took a deep breath. “But she’s never seen me tear up. I just teared up. I would never let her see me do that.”

Why is that? “Oh, because I pretend I don’t care.” Wiping her eyes, she left to teach a ballet class. Her laughter rang down the hall”

Personal comment: I knew Darci when I was at SAB , but only because she taught an occasional class. She was already a Principal by the time I entered SAB in 1987. She is a lovely person. I was never in her social circle or at her level artistically. Her artistry will be missed.