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An Appetite for Movement
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11340 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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11 / 1986 |
2,520 Words |
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Alexandra Tomalonis
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"I like to dance because I like to move," Kristina Windom said. "And I like ballets with lots of movement in them." This athletic approach to dance, this basic need to get out there and move, is evident the moment seventeen-year-old Kristy appears on stage. In a decade where young ballerinas are more likely to be kittens than fillies, where the favored type is small and waiflike rather than tall and elegant, Kristy's dancing, bristling with energy and revelling in her height (she's 5'7") and a solid technique, is different. Different enough to make her one of two junior entrants from the United States at the prestigious International Ballet Competition at Varna, Bulgaria (both Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova have won medals there); different enough to win her a professional, rather than apprentice, contract with the Washington Ballet.
This July, at the crest of Washington's eternal summer heat wave, I watched Kristy's final rehearsal before leaving for Varna with her dance partner, Michael Bjerknes. He is a more experienced dancer and would be a non-competing participant in the competition. Ballet Master Janek Schergen, who had had to teach Kristy and her partner four pas de deux in as many weeks, had the dancers run through each pas de deux completely, "and then we'll pick at them." By this time, the steps have been mastered; style and artistry are the concern.
Two of the pas de deux are from the nineteenth-century classics; both are, in a way, about birds, a fact Schergen finds amusing. "Finished with bird number one," he said at the end of the Blue Bird pas de deux from "The Sleeping Beauty." "Now on to bird number two," as the dancers prepared to do the in-famously difficult Black Swan pas de deux from "Swan Lake." No one is worried about Kristy's performance in the Blue Bird. Her strong technique makes the steps look easy, and she's mastered the crisp, skittish arm movements perfectly. The intensive coaching of the last month has given her movements polish and style. The Blue Bird will be danced at the first round of the competition; it's difficult enough to show what Kristy can do, but the real challenge will be in the dances planned for the later rounds: Ron Cunningham's "Etosha," to fulfill the competition's requirement for a contemporary work, George Balanchine's "Sylvia pas de deux," a twentieth century classic never before performed in competition, and, for the final round, the Black Swan.
It's the latter that worries Schergen and Mary Day, artistic director of the Washington Ballet and director of the Washington School of Ballet (WSB), where Kristy has been a student since the age of twelve. Technically, few seventeen-year-olds could get through the piece, which ends with a series of thirty-two fouettes, or whipping turns, where the ballerina has to stand on one foot, on point, and turn, using her other leg to propel her body, thirty-two times. The fouettes are dreaded by experienced dancers; the strength to do them is beyond most teenagers. "I like the Black Swan best,” says Kristy, "because of the turns."' She has no problem with the fouettes. The previous Sunday, at a benefit performance of her competition program for an invited audience in the same studio, she'd done them brilliantly.
But the Black Swan pas de deux is a dance of seduction in which the woman must convince her partner, Prince Siegfried, that she's someone she's not. She has to be consciously evil; she has to enjoy her trickery. None of this comes easy to Kristy's straightforward, honest approach to dancing. "Be
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