Gavin Larsen's Blog: What is an Everyday Ballerina? A Luminous New Memoir Tells All

By Gia Kourlas in The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/ar...

Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life

Q:
When did you know that you wanted to write this book?

A:

I didn’t start out with an intent to write a book at all; I simply was spilling out memories, emotional recollections, episodes that had really stuck with me over the years and which struck me as encapsulating something larger about the whole concept of being a dancer and living a life in dance. As my little essays accumulated, I shared them with some people I thought would find them interesting, and some responded that strung together, they’d be a book. If I’d begun with a book as my end goal, I am sure I never would have completed it. Writing it this way felt manageable and more real to me. My grasp of what the dancing life really meant became clearer as I wrote in this mini-memoir form—each chapter really felt like, and is, a snapshot.

Q:
How did you first become interested in ballet?

A:

I started taking formal ballet classes at around age 8, but according to my parents, I’d been dancing for much longer than that. I have vague memories of flitting about the living room in my favorite party dress, putting on shows for my parents and their friends. I also recall just being completely compelled to run, jump, leap and twirl any time I spied a wide open space—covering ground with huge, expansive movement was irresistible.

Q:

What was the hardest thing to overcome during your professional career as a ballerina?

A:

For me, the physical technique was the hardest aspect of being a ballet dancer. Performing, acting, projecting, and being on stage—any stage—were easy, natural, fun, and wholly fulfilling. But often, the technical elements of ballet were what brought me down emotionally. My early training was haphazard and I never had an easy facility. Towards the end of my career, anxiety about not being able to execute the technical feats of any given piece of choreography became bad enough to chip away at my artistry. At that point, I knew I needed to move away from the performing career.
Oregon Ballet Theatre principal dancers Gavin Larsen and Artur Sultanov in George Balanchine's "Duo Concertant." Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.Oregon Ballet Theatre principal dancers Gavin Larsen and Artur Sultanov in George Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant.” Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Q:
What was one of the most rewarding moments of your career?

A:

I think performing the Sugarplum Fairy on opening night of our Nutcracker performance run with Oregon Ballet Theatre in 2003 was right up there with the most gratifying moments of my career. It was a huge responsibility but also an honor that I really felt proud to handle. That opportunity started off the last leg of my career, my final seven years of performing, and also marked the beginning of the era that I feel was my best as an artist.

Q:
Who was one of the most influential instructors you had and why were they so important to you?

A:

I have had so many incredible teachers, and each has had a different type of lasting influence on me. But one in particular, who is a figure in Chapters 15 and 16, is Suzy Pilarre. Suzy captivated my spirit when I was a teenager, inspiring me and opening my eyes and soul to the possibilities I had as a dancer and an artist, and the power within me. I am forever grateful for her belief in my potential and her willingness to push me. Her energy and devotion to her students is unparalleled.

Q:
Who are your favorite authors, and how have they influenced or informed your own work?

A:

As a youngster, I drank up every ballet book I could find. Every biography, autobiography, history, book of photos, anything and everything about ballet. I remember poring over the pictures, analyzing every line and shape, expression, and nuance. My vision of balletic style was formed by those works, both the words and the images. In particular, Suzanne Farrell’s Holding On to the Air compelled me by making this legendary ballerina a real person, without revealing too much of her humanity—she remained a mystery. That’s a bit of what influenced my own book’s format, and why I did not fill it with too many personal, non-dance stories and details. I wanted it to be about the dance, and the person who danced, and express the inner self through those avenues.

Q:
What is one thing you hope readers will take away from your book?

A:

I hope readers find themselves in my book, whether they are dancers or not. We all, as humans, have an inner drive that compels us through difficult challenges and towards an elusive, sometimes amorphous goal. We’ve all felt wonderment at our physical selves, and gone through periods of confusion, questioning of purpose, direction, and doubt. I navigated through that with ballet at my side and in my body, and I think readers will discover (if they haven’t already) that the drama of ballet is inherent in the art form itself.

Q:
What advice do you have for young people considering a career in ballet?

A:

My advice to young dancers considering a career in ballet is to just do it. Just keep going, keep moving forwards, with courage and the knowledge that you have the power, ability, and strength of dance inside you. Life in ballet is not unlike any other passionate career—especially in the business of making it your profession—but no matter what disappointments you encounter, the beauty of ballet is yours and no one can take away.

Q:
How is writing like dancing for you?

A:

For me, writing this book really did have equivalent feelings to dancing, both studio work and performing on stage. Dance is a solitary pursuit; we work alone in the company of others, with common goals and partnerships, but ultimately all alone inside our own bodies. As a dancer, I expressed my feelings silently, through movement, and that felt incredibly powerful. I am not a talkative person, but I have a lot to say. Through dance, I could say it all, to audiences large and small, who were sitting there to watch and witness while I silently said my piece. I could command attention without having to shout anyone else down, and with the protective barrier of the stage, theatricality, costumes, and music. My writing process is similar to my dancing: I throw it all out there, and then refine. I feel brave about saying what I need to on the page, because I have the buffer of not being face to face or delivering that message out loud. I feel the page is my stage now.

https://floridapress.blog/2021/04/28/...

This interview was conducted by Cherilyn Lee, Editor-in-Chief of The Ballet Herald, on April 14, 2021. Cherilyn asked me poignant and astute questions about the underlayers pinning my book, BEING A BALLERINA: THE POWER AND PERFECTION OF A DANCING LIFE.
https://www.balletherald.com/


CL:
What were some of the principal motives for writing this memoir and why do you feel that now is the time to share it to the world?

GL:
I really did not have a motive when I began writing this book. It began as a way to cement memories and thoughts about my dancing life that I feared I would lose if I kept them only in my head. As I wrote the early bits of the book, the memories, recollections, and fragments of episodes came crashing at me with so much speed and strength that I just kept writing. Pretty soon, it seemed like a neat idea to string them together in a somewhat logical way, though I did not at all want to turn it into a straight-up, chronological telling of “The Story of My Life.” I wanted it to be more of a collage, or a quilt, a patchwork of glimpses into the life of any dancer, that when seen (or read) as a whole would illuminate to some degree what it means to live with dance as the core of who you are. As for ‘why now,’ the reason it’s coming out now is because I finally got a publisher and this is the date they decided to release it! I thought I had ‘finished’ the book a few years ago, but after several editors read it and gave me significant feedback, I ended up making many amendments, additions and subtractions, so the version that is about to greet the world didn’t coalesce until about one year ago.
Having said that, however, I do think that this is a really opportune moment for people to read Being a Ballerina. There has been a lot of relatively negative and melodramatic depiction of ballet in popular culture over the past few years, and while I am happy for ballet to be on the national radar, I don’t feel any of it is honest about what it really, really really means to be a dancer. To exist as a dancer. I hope my book does express that. Not the stereotypical bloody-toes-and-bruised-ego type of existence, but the soul of the life.

CL:
Being from the same generation as you, having both grown up in New York City and attended SAB, there is so much that I could relate to and memories I could recall while reading your essays. Did you have an intended audience in mind while developing the content of the book?

GL:
No, I really didn’t, much to the distress of every agent, editor and potential publisher I approached! The first question they ask, is “who’s your audience? Who can I market this to?” And you’re really not allowed to say, “Everyone!” I may be naive, but I do think most anyone who is human would find the concept of feeling a passion in your core, so strong that you can’t ignore it, and the gradually dawning thrill of walking alongside it through life, quite fascinating. But in practical terms, the most likely audience will be other dancers, students and professionals and recreational dancers, audience members. I really hope I can reach artists in other forms, too, though. I have gotten amazing feedback from other writers and visual artists who’ve read early copies and say they feel incredible synchronicity with the episodes and feelings I describe as a dancer. I would be over the moon if the book would be recognized as a work of literature, too, on the merits of the writing itself, not merely as a dance book.

CL:
Being a Ballerina is written in such fine detail. Did you refer to journals that you've kept over the years, source anecdotes by others, or do you simply have an incredible memory?!

GL:
No, I really did not refer back to any journals or anything like that. It’s all from memory. Sometimes I’d see an old photograph from some ballet I’d done, or see a performance of a ballet I’d done, or something like that which would spark a memory.

CL:
Although you candidly speak of your emotions related to events from childhood through the present, there are only a few moments in the book where you directly reflect on how your personal life - meaning that beyond the studio or stage - has influenced your professional one. Was this a designed effort on your part?

GL:
Yes, it was. As I mentioned earlier, several editors read early versions of the book and one main critique/suggestion was that I needed to show more of the non-dancer Gavin. That was something I had deliberately avoided, because also as I mentioned, I wanted this book to be something of a distillation of the essence of being a dancer, and I thought that adding details unrelated to that would distract from the clarity of that message. Plus, I am a very private, introverted and shy person (many performers are, ironically), and simply could not stomach sharing details about myself with the world. That’s a big part of how and why I wrote many chapters in voices other than my own: it was a tactic that made me feel brave enough to express completely openly what I felt. It was sort of like being onstage, actually— as shy as I am, I’m absolutely uninhibited onstage, because I can “hide” behind a costume, a character, or the simple buffer of theatricality. Here, I was hiding behind another voice.

CL:
There seems to have been an intentional decision to mention some of your teachers by name and others by descriptive title. What is the reasoning behind this distinction?

GL:
Again, it was a strategy to allow myself to be completely honest without worrying about hurting someone— in this case, my former teachers— and to tell it in a fictional style, while it was of course completely factual. And then I enjoyed the veil of mystery around the descriptive ‘names’ I gave to certain teachers, as if it helped the reader carve out a picture in their own head of what they looked like and what their aura was like.

CL:
As your dancer colleagues can attest to, and what others can safely assume, is that there are many ups and downs in a dancer's career. Which of your characteristics do you feel have been your best friends throughout the journey and which your challenging enemies?

GL:
I definitely have the advantage of trust in the future. I never questioned my career choices, because I had this bizarre feeling of ‘it’ll all work out’, along with comforting myself with the self-talk about how no choice is forever. That’s one neat thing about the dance life— it’s transient, mostly, so even a bad situation is relatively easy to get out of. I did often tell myself that during difficult times throughout my career: I always have an exit. I can always bow out, go somewhere else. I also have a pretty extreme ability to push myself, both physically and mentally. That has definitely gotten me through some very hard ballets and very hard moments. A characteristic that has been my ‘enemy,’ though, is a significant tendency towards self-deprecation. I have always had a hard time accepting and believing the validity of compliments. I wish I’d been able to internalize those positive motivators more, while acknowledging my flaws without letting them pull me down emotionally. That’s a hard balance to strike!

It was a spring day, sometime in 2011 or ’12, and I’d just finished teaching a ballet class for the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre. On my way out of the building, I passed through the lobby, which offered a wall-sized window into the company’s main studio space. Whatever dance activity happened to be going on in that large Studio 1— dancers taking class, warming up, rehearsing ballets or learning new choreography— was on full view for any and all visitors or employees of OBT, as if life in the studio was also, in a more relaxed form, a performance.

That particular afternoon, company dancers were in rehearsal with the artistic director, Christopher Stowell, for his ballet, The Rite of Spring. I had been in the original cast of the ballet when Christopher choreographed it a couple of years before. It had been an unusual experience for me— and for everyone— since the piece was largely en masse: almost the entire company of dancers was in it, but only a couple people danced apart from what was, literally, a mass of bodies. As a principal dancer at the time, being back in an ensemble was jolting, but I soon began to relish it. The warmth of camaraderie, the deeply moving sense of power in numbers versus the that of using my own single voice, and the hilarity we shared to break the tension when the going got tough, brought me back to my early career, when dancing in a group was how I learned to be a professional.

The snapshot moment my eyes caught that day stirred up a strong, visceral reaction. The dancers were working on a section we called, amongst ourselves, the “human monolith.” Christopher didn’t give us any technical steps to do; he simply told us to “ooze” our way into a tower of people, with one dancer sort of becoming the capstone at the top, supported by a few of the strongest men in the group, and the rest of us cascading downwards from there in gradually smaller, flatter, muddier positions. The only direction he gave was that everyone had to be touching at least one other person at all times— a hand or a foot or a neck or a torso— and no one except the supporter-men could be upright. And no ballet positions allowed. We were to embody humanity emerging from primordial slime.

I watched the dancers work on “oozing” into the monolith and immediately felt myself in there with them— as if I was outside my own body, watching myself in the past, yet physically present. Sort of like reliving a dream. Every feeling, physical and emotional, came flooding back with such force I almost thought I was late for rehearsal and needed to run into the studio to join. But seconds later, another emotion overcame the first one: relief that I didn’t have to.

I was retired, had no need to pull my body into shape and into a leotard, no need to be ready to do what a choreographer dreamt up. But what I wanted to do was remember those experiences, capture them, and find within them a thread of truth about what on earth that dancing life of mine had been, what it had meant. Why had it happened, and why had it happened to me? How had it happened?

I went home, opened my laptop, and began to write. The essay that came spilling out, in one sitting, is my book’s Chapter 46, The Human Monolith.

After that day, more snapshot memories came cascading down, so many and so varied that I feared losing them if I didn’t work fast enough. I wrote them down; some were a couple of pages and some a couple of paragraphs (or less). There were episodes, fragments of episodes, slivers of thoughts, reflections, images, conversations. Eventually, feeling I needed some instruction in how to do what I was doing (always a dancer at heart, wanting corrections and instructions) I signed up for a memoir writing workshop, led by the marvelous Merridawn Duckler, who gave title prompts each week with the assignment to write two pages. Five of her title prompts, and the essays they inspired, became chapters in my book. I distinctly remember how excited I felt to run to my computer to write about The Fork in the Road, The Time I Taught Someone Something, and My Scar. As nervous as I was to share my work with the group each week (and to read aloud) I saw for the first time that I’d been right in my conviction that people— not just other dancers, but real people— could be fascinated by ballet as much as I was, if they were shown something a little below its surface.

And that is how Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life came to be.

~Gavin Larsen
April 1, 2021

Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life
Gavin Larsen