"Finding Her Way"
Feb. 19th, 2009 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skywardprodigal
It wasn't the most orthodox of job interviews. Dancer Aesha Ash first spoke by phone to choreographer Alonzo King.
"I said, 'I don't even know how I'm going to keep dancing,' " the doe-eyed 27-year-old recalls, sitting cross-legged in a studio at the San Francisco Dance Center. "I said, 'I'm so tired. I'm just totally disenchanted with the dance world right now, and I have no inspiration.' "
Her beautiful oval face still looks a bit weary. Just six months ago she was ready to end her stage career, worn down by the ballet world's insistence on rail-thinness and the pressures of being the only African American woman at the New York City Ballet. Now she is the newest member of King's Lines Ballet, dancing in the world premiere "Moroccan Project" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts during the troupe's fall season next week, opening Friday.
The two company's cultures are worlds apart. The New York City Ballet -- founded by the 20th century's dominant choreographer, George Balanchine, in 1948 -- prizes crystalline technique and physical conformity. King -- whose universalizing approach to ballet has made his company a San Francisco mainstay and his choreography an international commodity -- prizes depth of individual expression and human vulnerability.
It's an overwhelming shift for a woman who continually felt she had to fight to make a place for herself at the New York City Ballet. When she was 13, as a little girl from upstate Rochester considering auditioning for the company's School of American Ballet, Ash got her first taste of discouragement.
"People told my mom that it was very difficult for black females in ballet," she says. "But my mother is a bit stubborn, and if someone says no, she says, 'We can do it.' "
Not only did Ash make it into the school, but she was also chosen to dance the lead in Balanchine's iconic "Rubies" for her graduating year workshop, and was given the Mae L. Wien Award for outstanding promise. Her first year as a corps member, she turned to fellow African American dancer Andrea Long for encouragement. "I would go to her dressing table, and she'd say 'Keep your head up,' " Ash remembers. But soon, Long left.
Balanchine had been racially progressive, pairing black men like future Dance Theatre of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell with white ballerinas at a time when the juxtaposition was still scandalous. But Balanchine's ideal ballerina was an "alabaster princess," and even 20 years after his death, Ash could not help feeling she stood out. "When you're onstage doing something like (Balanchine's) 'Symphony in Three' and they're all in a line wearing white leotards and pink tights, how can you not feel different?" she says.
Heartened by letters she'd receive from little girls during "Nutcracker" season, including one that read "I have dark skin just like you," Ash became determined to stay and push boundaries. But during her last year at the School of American Ballet, her sister died. A few years later, her grandparents died, and so did her father.
"I had to give 110 percent at that company," she says. "And after my father died, I had to ask, 'Is this worth it?' It had turned from a dream to a mission." Aside from dark skin, Ash had a lean but curvaceous frame that would look stick-thin only through extreme dieting. Two years ago, after a dispiriting meeting with New York City Ballet Artistic Director Peter Martins, she left the company.
She went to Switzerland to dance with Maurice Bejart's company, but found the culture there also fixated on physical perfection and technique for its own sake. She was considering retiring when retired Lines veteran Xavier Ferla scouted her in class and urged her to talk to King.
King took her without an audition. "She said she hadn't broken through the wall of her artistic depth," he says. "Dancers have an idea of where they want to go. What you have to do is lead them there."
Now Ash is facing fresh challenges. King's slinking, off-kilter dance phrases aren't strings of steps to be executed in a prescribed way. His dancers are expected to improvise. Most important, they must open their souls on the stage.
"You have to dig deep," Ash says. "You can't just hit five pirouettes and think you're amazing. It's a lot of personal work, and I'm still building strength."
But she's settling in to San Francisco and King's way of working, and discovering herself as an artist.
"I'm definitely a work in progress," she says. "The hardest for me is changing my mind-set. Once I tap into that, it's going to open a whole world of wonderful things."
Alonzo King's Lines Ballet Fall season opens Friday and runs through Nov. 13 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 701 Mission St. (at Third Street), San Francisco. $20-$50. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org.
Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.
Source
Ballet: The Last Frontier
More on Ashe here.
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Date: 2009-02-20 04:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 03:50 pm (UTC)Do you think I should xpost this to Mordor?
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Date: 2009-02-20 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-20 04:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 10:24 pm (UTC)