Balance
I considered phoning my parents and telling them there were two comp tickets if they wanted to see me tonight rather than Saturday, but ultimately decided against it.
Dad hated having his plans upended at the last minute, and I vaguely remembered he was taking his team from the trading floor to dinner.
Seated at the brightly lit vanity by myself, while the Prologue was underway onstage, I certainly could have used a hug from Mum.
When the cast list first went up for Beauty and we all crowded around the performance grid, Carolyn had graciously – or ominously – told me that if I could dance Aurora, I could dance anything.
I had been too stunned by a principal deigning to speak to me to dwell on it, but she was right.
Alongside Odette/Odile and the Sugar Plum Fairy, Aurora is one of Tchaikovsky’s holy trinity of prima ballerina roles.
This was my event horizon: no going back now.
I tried not to watch the entire Prologue on the flickering backstage monitor, but I couldn’t resist peeking at Annie Petrowsky, one of the few principals left standing, looking regal in her lilac tutu as she confronted the evil fairy Carabosse, played by one of our cherished character artists Noemi Loizou, who always hammed up her character’s silent cackles with aplomb.
This was one of the most important mime monologues in classical ballet, an arcane language unto itself.
Using only the sweep of her arms and articulated fingers, Annie declared to the gate-crasher: You…
have said your piece. Now you… will listen…
to me. I… love… that baby. You… want to kill her?
Why? I decree… that she will prick her finger…
but she will die not. She will sleep, and be awoken by the kiss of a handsome prince.
I clapped along with the stage manager and prop assistants as the curtain came down on a relieved, hopeful queen standing over her baby’s bassinet, the Lilac Fairy having sent Carabosse into exile… but not for long.
As the teenaged Aurora, I didn’t get to go onstage with the rest of the corps, or even with the character artists in their plush royal robes.
I didn’t know how the ballerinas before me had ever managed it, forty nerve-jangling minutes of waiting, heart blurring beneath skin and bones.
For the first third of Act I, I stood in the wings, slowly unzipping my gilet, stepping out of my leg warmers, slipping off the covers that protected my pointe shoes from tracking grime onto the stage.
The reed of pain was still in my leg, but it had been dulled by adrenaline and the chill that always overcame me in the minutes before I was due to go on.
A couple of dancers lightly patted my shoulder, while others whispered “merde” and “toi toi toi” for good luck.
After the orchestra built to a crescendo and the notes dissipated like a wave, I rode in on a hummingbird bourrée, practically gliding upstage until an entire court of dancers – and two thousand paying audience members – were facing me.
As if to compensate for her belated entrance into the story, Aurora hits the ground en pointe and essentially doesn’t stop until curtain down.
It’s a sprint and a marathon, a constant exchange of allegro for adagio, delicate footwork for mighty turns, joy for determination.
And I had to make it all look as carefree as playing hopscotch, as if I had no idea the first balances were coming.
Even for the most experienced principal, the balances in the Act I Rose Adage, when Aurora celebrates her coming of age and accepts a rose from each of her four potential suitors, are the stuff of nightmares.
A ballerina could do the role of Aurora for ten seasons in a row and still be caught out by the raw, electric fear that comes with going en pointe on your supporting leg, raising the other behind you in a perfect ninety-degree attitude, and keeping it up there while you take four different hands in succession.
The half-second when each suitor prised their fingers off mine, and left me with nothing for support but thin air, was the ultimate test of my mental and physical strength.
To the audience, it was all over in ten seconds; to me it was a small eternity in which my thoughts dissolved.
All that remained were frenetic calculations about my centre of gravity, my eyeline, how much time I had until the suitor let go, my risk of toppling backwards if I dared to let my lungs expand for breath.
And that was just the first time around.
After accepting the roses, then cheerfully tossing them aside, I had to close out the Adage by doing the four balances all over again, with the addition of slow turns in a circle, leaning (but not too much) on each suitor’s forearm.
This was why my teachers had always tapped well-manicured fingernails against my hand on the classroom barre if I was gripping it too hard.
This was why they’d insisted I practise every variation with just two fingers resting on the barre, to be sure I had the core strength to keep myself from falling.
By now, as well as the expected ache in my lower back, the pain in my right leg – which had been supporting me on all eight balances – was beyond pins and needles.
From the kneecap down, a steel pole was driving through my muscles into the floor; from the kneecap up, fire ants crawled under my skin.
I had found my own bespoke version of hell.
Then, suddenly, the fourth suitor stepped away and I remained suspended. My arms extended into open fifth, up and out. The air held me. I was outside of time.
As I touched down into the final steps of the Adage, applause rippled out from the dark.
By the time the orchestra struck their final note across strings and reeds and horns and drums, the applause had reached the rafters.
It wasn’t the polite rainfall I was used to as a soloist – this was a thunderstorm.
Someone in the dress circle shouted, ‘Brava!’
The happiness was something cosmic. But I only had a few minutes of recovery in the wings before it was time to come out again for the Act I finale. I barely had time to powder my face before I was executing pirouettes and jetés en tournant like nobody’s business.
I played Aurora as a teenage princess unable to grasp what it means to become a queen.
Sheltered by her fearful parents, she appreciates all they’ve given her, but is impatient to discover who she is on her own terms, to experience as many new things as possible.
No wonder she’s so curious about an old woman handing her a knitting needle wrapped in a skein of wool.
They’ve been outlawed from the kingdom all her life – she has no idea what it is, and that fascinates her.
Of course she wants to keep it hidden from her parents, if only for a moment, only playfully.
She probably never had the freedom to keep secrets before, and it grants her a new kind of agency…
until her collapse. Until she sinks onto the queen’s knee, a child again, woozy and afraid.
The sweat on my brow could only have added to the authenticity. My right shin was still protesting, louder now. It was like the rumble of a bass line from an amp, rattling my whole body.
The violins and cellos jumped over each other in staccato apprehension as I stumbled to my feet: Aurora convincing herself she’ll be fine, nothing to worry about, not quite comprehending the gravity of the situation until it pulls her this way and that, feet pattering like moth wings, too fast, too feverish, up into a final piqué arabesque, reaching for something – reaching out of herself – until her body is the only thing left and she succumbs to Carabosse’s curse.
I learned during the dress rehearsal that it’s much easier to land on your side, with one arm flopped over your chest. If Aurora is supine, the audience can see her lungs pumping like bellows until her royal parents shield her with sorrowful faces and long, brocaded sleeves.
While Carabosse revelled in her victory, and the suitors chased her around the stage until she disappeared through a trapdoor, I kept my eyes closed, wishing I really could conk out for the rest of the Act. If only my lungs would stop burning.
If only my leg would stop burning.