Female ballet dancers and stress

Natalie Portman, the new face of Parfums Christian Dior.

Ballet dancers and psychoses: You don’t hear much about it but the more talented a dancer the more likely she is to have mental issues. I think it’s because we are pulled in so many directions simultaneously and because we have the determination to succeed. I don’t think men are nearly as affected by the mental strain. That’s because women are not only judged on artistic ability (musicality, classical technique and dramatic presentation), but on physical beauty and body image as well. In addition we are pulled by societal norms between career and marriage and children by our non-dancer family and friends. We are talking about women who are comfortable playing dress-up portraying doomed temple dancers, enchanted swans and ghosts of betrayed virgins for a living while being expected to function flawlessly in a 21st centaury world. Sometimes that gets complicated.

Being a classical ballet dancer is a career (not a lifestyle) that many young women aspire too but few actually succeed in attaining, because the physical, societal and mental demands of the profession are so at odds with 21st century social norms. The 1948 film The Red Shoes portrayed some of the stresses that pull on female dancers. Today the film The Red Shoes is considered over-the-top by some because it stresses an either-or situation; dedication to the dance vs. marriage and family. Over the years not a whole lot has changed for most female dancers. It’s true that Stars of major companies can take a year off to have a baby but if you are a young aspiring dancer with talent having a family is something carefully avoided for fear of being overtaken and passed by your competition.

Sorted by scents: Forty years ago George Balanchine (of blessed memory) sorted his favorite women in the NYCB by scents, giving his favorites different perfumes so he could tell by the fragrances who was in the building. All his wives were dancers, women who were his muses: Vera Zorina (December 1938–1946), Maria Tallchief (1946–1952), and Tanaquil LeClerq (1952–1969), as was his girlfriend, Alexandra Danilova (1926–1933). Toward the end of his life a muse who resisted his charms and managed to get away (to the determent of her career) was Suzanne Farrell.

Farrell joined NYCB in 1960 and was promoted to Principal in 1965. In 1969 she married Paul Mejia, another dancer in the company, over Balanchine’s objections and the couple left the New York City Ballet in 1970. After a period of self-exile in Europe, where Farrell danced for Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century, she returned to Balanchine and the New York City Ballet in 1975, where her partnership with Balanchine lasted until his death in April 1983; his last works were solos for Farrell.

Christ and the Magdalene: The Balanchine-Farrell relationship is the stuff of legend, a real-world fantasy that played out for all to see on the NYCB stage at Lincoln Center. In 1965 Balanchine choreographed his version of Don Quixote for Farrell. In the first performance Balanchine danced the role of the Don while Farrell danced Dulcinea. The ballet was not a critical success. However, it is remembered as a striking example of the real-world lust of a man for a woman presented as ballet. For me the most telling scene in the ballet is where Dulcinea washes the Don’s feet and dries them with her hair, a scene reminiscent of Mary Magdalene drying the feet of Christ with her hair, a relationship not much different than the one between Balanchine and the then 19 y/o Farrell.

Now, more than forty years later, even though Feminism has advanced women’s rights much further than in the sixties, the role of women in ballet while better has not changed all that much. That’s because the competition, mental focus and physical requirements necessary for young women just starting their careers are so intense that few can mix dedication to a career and life outside the ballet world. I don’t think Nina will be another Victoria Page, but it will be fascinating to see what Darren Aronofsky, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis will do with Black Swan, a 21st century Hollywood film about a severely stressed ballet dancer.

Natalia Osipova – her back story

Bolshoi Principal Natalia Osipova

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Determined Ballerina, Propelled to the Top

THE Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova smiled brightly, theatrically, projecting outward as she danced the solo that Princess Aurora performs moments after arriving on stage in Act I of “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In a plain black leotard and a shabby practice tutu, Ms. Osipova was working before a single ballet mistress, Irina Kolpakova, in a rehearsal studio many floors under the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. There, on Saturday night, she will dance this role with American Ballet Theater, with which she is spending a second season as a guest artist.

Ms. Osipova was suffering from a throat sore enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment immediately after the rehearsal. Later she would cry, feeling ill and frustrated at her inability to perform the steps as she would like. And a week later she would be the victim of a mugging that would leave her bruised and shaken. But for the moment she was Aurora, shy and curious, looking tentatively at the four suitors with whom she will dance the Rose Adagio.

Ms. Osipova’s single-minded focus in rehearsal comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen her perform. Since she burst on to the international dance scene in show-stopping performances of Kitri in “Don Quixote,” during a 2007 Bolshoi tour to London, the sheer energy and intensity of her stage presence has been as remarkable as her improbable floating jump and astounding technical prowess.

“Resistance is futile; you adore her on sight,” Luke Jennings wrote in The Observer. “Let us not exaggerate, but six stars seem to be in order,” Clement Crisp began in The Financial Times, adding, “Not since Plisetskaya and Maximova have we seen so adorable a Kitri and never one so divinely destined to claim the role as her own.”

Ms. Osipova, just 24, is now in demand by major ballet companies all over the world, and in Moscow she is an acknowledged star with a devoted following. But that wasn’t always a predictable fate for her, said Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, who invited Ms. Osipova to join the Bolshoi during his tenure as the artistic director there.

“I watched the final exams at the Bolshoi school,” Mr. Ratmansky said, speaking on the phone from Jackson, Miss., where he was on the jury of the USA International Ballet Competition. “She got a lot of criticism from the examiners — not classical enough, no aesthetic, almost vulgar, just wrong,” he said. “But I felt you could see the physical talent and the openness, so I hired her.”

He gave her solo roles right from the outset. “There was a big division about her among the audience, and also among the dancers and coaches,” he said. “I don’t remember any dancer in my experience causing as much difference of opinion.”

Ms. Osipova’s extreme flexibility and steel-sprung jump — watching her hover in the air makes you realize how people felt when they saw Nijinsky — are quite possibly the legacy of her early training as a gymnast, which she began at 5 in Moscow, where she was born.

“I was very, very serious,” she said last week, speaking through a translator during an interview backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I saw myself at the Olympics. When I seriously injured my back at 8 or 9, and my teachers recommended I stop, this was a tragedy for me.”

Her parents took her to audition at the Bolshoi academy, hoping ballet would distract her. She was accepted but remained, she said, indifferent to dance for several years and wanted to return to gymnastics. Then she was given a solo to perform during a school show at the Bolshoi.

“Afterward the audience was applauding, and I understood that this is incredible,” she said. “In that moment I realized, yes, I want to dance.”

Offstage Ms. Osipova is wiry and feisty looking, with pale skin, wide-set eyes and jet-black tresses. (She dyes her light brown hair to correspond to her ballerina ideals: Margot Fonteyn, with whom she shares a birthday, May 18, and Diana Vishneva, also a Ballet Theater guest artist.) Onstage she is a theater animal for whom the presence and attention of the public is the oxygen that she needs to come fully alive.

It seems unsurprising that one of her heroes is the similarly avid Rudolf Nureyev, whose “Romeo and Juliet” with Fonteyn is, she said, the single performance she would most like to have seen. Ms. Osipova described Juliet as her “dream role”; next month, she will dance it with David Hallberg and Ballet Theater.

“I am a very emotional person, and those emotions have to go somewhere,” she said. “So I am always happy when I have a role where my feelings can come into play. Of course sometimes I scare people. They say, Natasha” — Ms. Osipova’s nickname — “you’re crazy. But I have to go out onstage and give everything I have.”

Mr. Hallberg, who has danced with Ms. Osipova at the Bolshoi as well as in New York, said their performances together had been among the greatest experiences of his career.

“She doesn’t care what people think,” he said. “She is so artistically involved in each role that she is continually questioning, validating every moment. She taught me to release a lot of my inhibitions, just through our physical communication.”

Ms. Osipova, who was invited to perform with Ballet Theater by its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, after he saw her on tape, said that she was extremely happy at the Bolshoi, where she was promoted to principal in May. But a ballerina in the 21st century, she added, has the opportunity to travel and experience the repertory and schooling of different companies.

The crime of different countries is an unpleasant extra; after the mugging, close to her rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she said she was simply relieved that only her face had been bruised. “It was so quick that I think I felt more shock the next day,” she said. “But now I am thinking only about my first performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

After just a few performances with Ballet Theater, it seems clear that Ms. Osipova’s technical gifts have raised the bar several notches higher for every other ballerina.

“If someone that talented comes out, it influences the dancers around her, and the younger ones,” Mr. Ratmansky said. “After her there was a wave of physical talent coming from the Bolshoi school. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Asked if he would like Ms. Osipova to join Ballet Theater’s roster of principal dancers, Mr. McKenzie said in an e-mail message that he “had that objective in mind.” Ms. Osipova said that while she would love to have a more permanent link to the company, her home was at the Bolshoi, where, she said, she felt she hadn’t yet fulfilled her potential. But she sounded touchingly girlish when talking of Ballet Theater.

“As little kids in school we were just thrilled looking at the stars of A.B.T.,” she said. “And now I’m walking next to them. It’s phenomenal.”

Natalia Osipova performs in “The Sleeping Beauty” on Saturday and “Romeo and Juliet” on July 10 with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, abt.org.

Natalia Osipova

Natalia Osipova as Kitri in a Bolshoi production of Don Q

The New York Times
Dance Review
Sending an Old Dreamer Airborne
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 4, 2010

“Dancing as Kitri in “Don Quixote” on Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera House, Natalia Osipova proved herself the most sensational ballerina now before the public. Kitri was the first major role for which Ms. Osipova — a Russian star of the Bolshoi Ballet, now in her second spring season as guest artist with American Ballet Theater —earned international acclaim. It’s clear why. She has a gamine quality; you can imagine this Kitri as the most riveting of street urchins. And she’s a theater animal. …”

The complete review can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/arts/dance/05osipova.html?scp=2&sq=Natalia%20Osipova&st=cse

The New York Times
Arts Briefly
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
June 15, 2010

Star Ballerina Attacked Near Lincoln Center

Two muggers attacked Natalia Osipova, right, a major international ballet star, as she left an American Ballet Theater performance early Tuesday morning, striking her in the nose and stealing her bag, her agent said. Ms. Osipova had attended a performance of Ballet Theater’s “Sleeping Beauty,” in which she is scheduled to dance on Saturday night, at the Metropolitan Opera House and was crossing Amsterdam Avenue on her way home when she was mugged, said the agent, Sergei Danilian. “Two guys just came from her back and they hit her and they took her bag,” he said. “She was so brave and so smart — she didn’t scream,” he said of the 5-foot-4 ballerina. Ms. Osipova had left her money at home and her computer at the Met, but the muggers got away with her point shoes and a small hammer used to shape them. The Met doctor was to examine her on Tuesday, Mr. Danilian said, and would determine whether she could dance full-out during an afternoon rehearsal or would just walk through it. She will “absolutely, no doubt,” perform on Saturday, he said. The police also interviewed her at the Met, he said. Ms. Osipova, who is Russian, is a star of the Bolshoi Ballet and in her second season as a guest artist with Ballet Theater.

Personal Comment: The good news is she wasn’t hurt and only lost some pointe shoes. If Sal had still been living on the upper west side that wouldn’t have happened! No dancers or other performers at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall would have been dissed like that in Sal’s territory. The Don who is responsible for that area should be ashamed of himself!