Word: ballets
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Countless thousands of little girl ducklings each year paddle into this wrenching regimen, known politely as ballet class. Many are shoved by doting mommies and daddies with an atavistic sense of how young ladies are supposed to move. A single-minded few are driven by the demonic notion that they could, some day, be swans. Most are mistaken. Once in a great while though, the real thing comes along, and word rapidly spreads through one of the world's oldest permanent floating meritocracies. Leningrad hears it, and so do Stuttgart, Covent Garden and New York: a star is born...
...Gelsey Kirkland, 25, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, that trial has ended successfully. An obvious prospect at eight and a gleam in the eye of George Balanchine at 15, Gelsey (pronounced with a hard g, as in great) has emerged from ballet's long chrysalis stage as the most exciting young ballerina in the Western world...
...moving into the class of the finest ballerinas: New York City Ballet's Suzanne Farrell and Patricia McBride, A.B.T.'s Natalia Makarova and Cynthia Gregory; and Gelsey is six years younger than the youngest of these. Her stage presence fuses contraries?strength and limpidity, control and abandon, energy and ease. "It's difficult to talk about Gelsey," says Choreographer Antony Tudor, "because she is so right." Many try nonetheless. Rudolf Nureyev commends her: "She has that beautiful fluidity in her movements and an incredible strength for such a small girl." Mikhail Baryshnikov notes that "she advances from performance to performance...
Gelsey has been drawing superlatives from balletomanes ever since she was a tiny dancer. No one who saw her nearly nine years ago in Jerome Robbins' piano ballet Dances at a Gathering doubted the arrival of a technical virtuoso. Gelsey sped through every challenge of the choreography, the visual equivalent of the rippling Chopin score. Though some in those days found her work rather cold, reservations never centered on her talent. The question was not whether she could make it to the top but whether she would self-destruct first. For her fame within dance's inner circle rests...
...also a tartar and grew up in kind, gobbling up ballet lessons, putting her tiny foot down whenever anyone dared to nudge her from her chosen path. Her purpose was clear. Says Dancer Robert Weiss, an old friend: "She wanted to have the extension of the greatest dancer, the jump of the best jumper, the turns of the best turner, the dramatic possibilities of the best dramatic ballerina and the comic possibilities of a comedienne. She wanted to be perfect...