Everyone knows that a dancer’s performance career ends with age. But what about a dance teacher’s? At the School of American Ballet, a generational shift is under way. Not only do former and current New York City Ballet members, including Arch Higgins, Darci Kistler, Katrina Killian and Jonathan Stafford, dominate its staff, but Peter Martins, the artistic director and chairman of faculty at the school, has put programs in place to pump even more new blood.
“When people decide to teach when they retire, it’s too late,” Martins said in an interview at the City Ballet-affiliated school. “The obvious reason is, why? Do you want to have a paycheck? You can’t be a teacher for that reason.”
In striking early, Martins, also the ballet master in chief of City Ballet, is following George Balanchine’s lead. When Balanchine asked Suki Schorer to begin teaching at the school in 1961, she was 21 and had only been in the company for two years. After the venerable Danish teacher Stanley Williams died, Martins approached Peter Boal and Jock Soto – at that time still dancing – to fill the gap.
“You have to keep constantly finding people who will be the teachers for the future,” Martins said. “It’s not a science. You don’t know who will end up being a good teacher. So you have to ask people, and you have to give them a chance. You put them in front of the class.”
As part of his mandate to develop new teachers, Martins started a fellowship program, now in its third year, in which company members watch classes at the school and fill in when necessary. The fellowships are open-ended; currently, Megan Fairchild, Jenifer Ringer, Abi Stafford and Sebastien Marcovici are taking part and are paid $50 for each class they observe.
The program appears to be working: Kaitlyn Gilliland, a fellow who stopped dancing because of injury, was just named assistant children’s ballet master.
“When I left dancing, I left because I still wanted to love it and I felt like that was slipping away from me,” said Gilliland, who is also a pre-med student at Columbia University. “Being here makes me love it again in a very different way.”
Dena Abergel, another former City Ballet dancer, will take over the children’s ballet master position from Garielle Whittle, who recently retired. Kay Mazzo, the school’s co-chairwoman of faculty, who began teaching there in 1983 at Balanchine’s request, said that while the fellowship program is not a broad teaching program, “it’s specific for securing the faculty that we want here.”
She added: “We’re fortunate in having our students go to the company and then come back. We’re all speaking the same language, which is the Balanchine aesthetic.”
Last spring, Martins expanded his program to include School of American Ballet students, choosing two that showed promise as teachers. He assigned them classes – not to watch but to teach.
Silas Farley, an apprentice at City Ballet, and Christina Ghiardi, a member of Boston Ballet II, relished the experience. For Farley, teaching other students wasn’t a new opportunity. He presided over his first class at 13 as a student at North Carolina Theater School of Dance. While teaching a men’s class over the summer, he was clearly in his element as he led dancers through a brisk series of jumps.
“It doesn’t lose any of the brilliance at high speed,” he said while clapping out the tempo. “We go fast. The School of American Ballet – faster than your school since 1934!”
Farley’s enthusiasm for ballet holds no bounds. Martins found much to admire in both of his student teachers; in the case of Farley’s classes, he said: “Every step had a purpose. It was perfectly constructed with the music. It was a little bit on the complex side, but it was not too bad.”
Later this fall, more students will be selected to participate in the fellowship program, which Martins said also helps them improve as dancers: “You listen to music differently, you learn manners, how you talk to your colleagues and how you deal with the pianist. The hope is that one day they might get bitten.”
That hope also extends to Fairchild, who has spent much of her time observing children’s classes.
“You get involved in this professional world, and you forget that this used to be something so exciting that you would get to do after school,” she said. “It reminds me of a more innocent time, and it’s wonderful while I’m dancing to get to see that again.”
Some company members, like Stafford, who is on faculty, have even changed the course of training. He proposed a basic partnering class for younger dancers and now teaches it on his day off. Martins admires Stafford’s seriousness.
“I’m not looking for clones,” Martins said. “Everybody has to be individual, but they all have to buy into the aesthetic – the way we teach, the way we dance. How we dance is so different than anybody else in the world, and it all starts here. So you continue the cycle.”
For Farley, that cycle means everything.
“It’s kind of a miracle that anyone gets into a professional ballet company, when you think of all the different points where the funnel gets finer and finer,” he said. “You get to a company audition, and all your best friends, who you worked your whole life with, don’t make it, and you are the one girl who does. The whole stage is filled with the survivors. To think of all the sacrifice to get them to that moment? People are laying their lives down so that someone else can have an opportunity, and that’s teaching. It’s the lifeblood of ballet.”. — NYT
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