It's hard to believe, but Karen Kain, the Canadian wunderkind who made the dance world sit up and take notice at the Second Moscow International Ballet Competition, will celebrate her twentieth anniversary a ballerina this season. That famous tourney in Moscow was staged in 1973, and Kain has been a leading light of the National Ballet of Canada almost from the moment she joined the company, in 1969.
So the troupe from Toronto is holding a "birthday party" for Kain at the start of its 1988-89 season. On November 29, dance luminaries from around the world, as well as local representatives of Canada's arts establishment, will gather at O'Keefe Center to pay tribute to one of the country's most prominent cultural celebrities.
Members of the administration of the National Ballet, including artistic directors Valerie Wilder and Lynn Wallis, "have gone out of their way in the last few years to show me how much they appreciate me," says Kain. It was the company's idea to throw a party, admits the dancer, who didn't realize the anniversary was coming up. "What, already?" was her response.
Blossoming Artistry
The ballerina to be honored is not some ancient denizen of the dance but a young woman of thirty-six whose artistry continues to blossom. Yet Kain rose to star status so quickly and has remained firmly and dependably in the front ranks of Canada's largest ballet company for so long that some ballet-goers seem to think she's been around forever. They forget she was barely twenty when ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev plucked her out of the corps to dance The Sleeping Beauty. Or that it was only a year later when she won the silver medal in the soloist category at the Moscow Competition, along with the first prize in pas de deux with fellow Canadian Frank Augustyn.
"A lot of people who are maybe three or four years younger than I am are considered 'up and coming' or 'new on the scene,' and I? I'm the veteran?'" Kain laughs. It is a muggy afternoon in late summer, and she has just finished a performance at Toronto's Ontario Place, a lakefront playground with a popular amphitheater. "People see me on the street and say, 'Oh, are you still dancing?' They kind of can't believe it." She shrugs at the flip side of fame: having one's extraordinary achievements taken for granted. "Once you're over thirty…," she threatens with a smile.
Some threat. Kain is one of those lucky people who grow into their looks. At ease in her dressing room, she radiates a soothing clam. Her translucent skin and almond eyes are, if anything, more appealing now than when she was in her twenties. Then, she had a rather prominent jaw, which, coupled with her sturdy (but never heavy schoolgirl frame, made her appear larger onstage than she actually was. Now, Kain is svelte. And her movement is plush rather than plumb-line plain. She lacks the careful artifice ballerinas of an earlier age employed; Kain is glamorous in a very contemporary way.
When you consider that ballet dancers, like doctors, take ten years to train, the realization that a dancer's career can last less than two decades comes as a shock. Who ever heard of a surgeon in his thirties being forced to retire? Yet just as she's becoming a mature artist, a ballerina's performance opportunities may
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