In the San Francisco Ballet's production of the Christmas season classic, the "Nutcracker," a girl dreams of dancing sugarplums.
But this year, the story is about a real girl with big dreams who is told by a prestigious ballet institution that she just doesn't have the right body. Fredrika Near Keefer, 8, who yearns to dance, was denied admission to the San Francisco Ballet's pre-professional school.
Fredrika and her mother charge that the school violated San Francisco's new law banning discrimination against people based on height, weight or body shape.
I am that rarity, a dancer with the "perfect" body. I was accepted and trained on scholarships at the late George Balanchine's School of American Ballet in New York and at the San Francisco Ballet School. My perfect body was not enough, however, for my dream to come true of becoming a prima ballerina with a major company. As every dance professional knows, a successful career involves many ingredients, including access to good training, timing, perseverance and the good luck of avoiding major injury.
What I discovered on my journey through the professional dance world is that there is a tremendous amount of talent -- and an equal amount of talent wasted. For every Evelyn Cisneros, there are many equally talented dancers who fall by the wayside. Perhaps the company is looking for taller dancers that year, or maybe the artistic director becomes fixated on one dancer over another.
When a person is driven to dance, having the "wrong" body rarely stops her. If it did, we wouldn't have the remarkable talent of San Francisco Ballet's own Joanna Berman, who isn't sylphlike, or Cisneros, whose physique is more that of an athlete than a classical dancer.
As for Balanchine, the choreographer (1906-1983) who supposedly imposed some unreal physical "ideal" on modern ballet, his most famous muse, Suzanne Farrell, had wide hips, ample thighs and a foot that had been broken and healed in an odd way. The dancer's idiosyncrasies shape the talent.
The current controversy over body type ignores male dancers. Sexism has always haunted classical ballet.
Men in ballet enjoy a double standard because they are in short supply. Few males admitted to prestigious schools have the physical facility or technical ability of the females. As for physical criteria, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolph Nureyev didn't fit the true masculine ideal for ballet; both were relatively short and stocky.
Of one thing I am certain: This controversy cannot be about the talent of the little girl in question. As a member of the Isadora Dance Committee that sees hundreds of works and gives annual awards for excellence, I have seen Fredrika Keefer perform and hold her own on stage with adults. She is outstanding. In fact, the San Francisco Ballet has placed her in its outreach program, allowing her to represent the company.
There are those who want ballet to stay unchanged, wedded to its origins in Czarist Russia. In their eyes, Fredrika Keefer and her mother are like peasants knocking on the door of the Winter Palace. They simply don't belong.
This isn't just San Francisco Ballet's problem. It's a societal problem. We are addicted to our ideal image of the ballerina as a woman forever young, trapped in a prepubescent body. We are stuck with the idea of the fine arts as something that belongs to the privileged few.
We need standards, and we need artists willing to dedicate their lives to meeting those standards. But we also need institutions and a society that celebrate creativity and honor the individual's special qualities.
Prestigious institutions that receive public support and funding should not be encouraged to waste talent, but to encourage and diversify. We need a healthy arts ecology that makes use of every ounce of talent.
Maybe tomorrow's "Nutcracker" performers will come in a different package. Wouldn't that be a gift?
Kathryn Castle, who danced professionally with the San Francisco Opera Ballet, is now a choreographer with her own company, Anima Mundi.
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