Every Step You Take (23 page)

Another ballerina I began to dance with more and more by this time was the supremely talented and intensely dedicated Wendy Whelan. Wendy had joined the company in 1986 and had been promoted to principal in 1991. In February, the month after Heather retired, Wendy and I danced the premiere of Dick Tanner's
Operetta Affezionata
, and we were extremely comfortable together onstage. Over time Wendy began to take over some of the roles Heather had always danced with me, and slowly I could feel a special rapport, almost like a new language, beginning to develop between us as we performed. By the end of that year—a year that had started with me seriously considering retirement—I looked back and realized that I had premiered four new ballets: Tanner's
Operetta Affezionta
, Kevin O'Day's
Huoah
, Jerry Robbins's revival of
West Side Story Suite
, and Peter Martins's
Adams Violin Concerto
. In the fall I traveled with the company to Paris to dance for two weeks at the International Festival de Danse de Paris. Maybe I wasn't completely washed up after all—in fact, I realized, I felt invigorated and very enthusiastic about the future.

One of the reasons for my enthusiasm and optimism may have been a new relationship—one that would affect both my personal and professional lives—that was just beginning at about this time. To trace this relationship back to its roots, I have to go back to an evening in 1993 when I was dancing Robbins's
Afternoon of a Faun
. A couple of times while I was performing this ballet I had the strange feeling of being watched intensely by someone in the wings—anyone who has been onstage knows this feeling. When I looked over I saw a young dancer named Christopher Wheeldon, a former member of the Royal Ballet in London who had recently joined the NYCB, staring intently at me. For my role in
Faun
I wore tights and no shirt, and I remember wondering briefly if it was possible that this boy had a crush on me. No, I decided.

My next encounter with Chris came quite a while later when the company was in residence in Saratoga. I was in transit between rehearsals for my own ballets, passing through the main rehearsal hall, where ballet master Victor Castelli was rehearsing
Dances at a Gathering
. Chris was dancing the Giggle Boy part of
Dances
, a passage where he had to lift Wendy Whelan. He was having some trouble lifting Wendy all the way, and as I passed, Victor stopped the rehearsal and called out to me.

“Jock!” he said. “Can you help Chris with this lift? He's having trouble. What should he do?”

It was a hideously hot and humid day, and I was sweating like a pig and already late for my next rehearsal. I looked at them, and the first words to fall out of my mouth were “Well, he should do some push-ups.” Then I walked out of the rehearsal studio without another word. That was our first exchange—what a bitch I was.

My next significant encounter with Chris was not until 1995, in New York, when Lourdes Lopez and I were warming up for a ballet—I think it was
Midsummer Night's Dream
—that Chris was dancing in too. Between our passages onstage Lourdes and I wound up talking about Chris, and I admitted that I thought he was very talented and “kind of cute.” The truth is, by this time I knew a little more about Chris, and I was intrigued. I was attracted to his boyishness, of course, but I could also feel how eager and driven he was. He was a beautiful dancer, with beautiful legs and feet, but he also had great ambition and potential as a choreographer. I had seen some of the work he had choreographed for the SAB, and it was very, very good. In many ways he reminded me of Damian, who had already choreographed some pieces for both the school and the company; they were both go-getters with big talents and big visions. They both had that special aura that radiates from people who you know are going to become exactly what they want to become.

I was attracted to all of these qualities in Chris, but given my recent history of bad romantic choices, I was not really in the market for a boyfriend. In fact, I was somewhat aghast that night when Lourdes called Chris over and asked him what he was doing after the performance. I just stared at her—what was she doing? Chris said he had no plans, and when Lourdes pressed him to join the two of us for dinner, he agreed. It was, essentially, my first date with Chris—engineered not by either Chris or me, but by the dynamic Lourdes Lopez.

Sometimes it shocks me to think about what a kid Chris was when we got together. He was twenty-two and I was thirty. I had always been the one who dated older men, but in this case I guess the passage of time kind of turned the tables on me. Not long after we got together Chris moved into my apartment, and we ended up living together for the next six years. Those years proved to be a hugely important period of my life—perhaps most significantly in terms of the professional collaboration that evolved between the two of us. I knew that Chris had been brought up in the Royal Ballet and was a true classicist—he was a Kenneth MacMillan fan. But I also knew he believed Balanchine was a genius, and that he harbored a hunger for Balanchine's invention and freshness. I was attracted to Chris's obvious talent and understood his desire to create ballets that combined a feeling of innovation and classicism. It seems quite likely that Chris's attraction to me was also at least in part professionally motivated—I was an experienced and established dancer who by then had been choreographed on many times by many artists. We sensed that we could help each other learn and grow, and while I take no credit for Chris's choreography, I do feel that we were both right. We did work well together. In the ballets for which Wendy Whelan joined Chris and me as a third partner in this collaborative process, the experience expanded into something truly sublime.

Although Chris and I may have sensed the potential in our professional collaboration from the beginning, this was not something we were able to explore immediately. For one thing, in November 1995, shortly after Chris and I got together, I suffered one of the worst injuries of my career. I was dancing Balanchine's
Allegro Brillante
, a very intense and fiendishly fast ballet, and during my final leap in the second entrance with Wendy I felt a stab of pain and heard a sickening pop—I had torn a calf muscle. As I exited to the wings, limping, I knew there was no way I could dance the next entry. I screamed to Damian, who was warming up for his own ballet later that evening, and explained the situation, and then limped back onstage for an ensemble passage that I knew I could fake my way through. When Wendy began the solo that leads into the next pas de deux, I exited with the rest of the corps. Damian, wearing his warm-up tights under a tunic he had grabbed from somewhere backstage, heroically leaped in and took over my part. His rescue was so smooth and seamless.

That torn calf muscle was my first really serious injury—dancing is a very risky business, and I was comparatively lucky not to have had a major injury earlier—and it gave me a foretaste of the frustrations to come. My roles were severely curtailed for the next year as I worked on getting my calf back to strength, and it was not until 1997 that I had fully recovered. But there were some upsides from that year of reduced dancing, one of which was that because I had more time on my hands, at Peter's suggestion, in 1996 I began teaching some classes at SAB for the first time. It is strange to think back and remember how nervous and uncomfortable I was with these duties in the beginning—no doubt because I was insecure and unsure of my abilities as a teacher. Now I love teaching, so much that I cannot imagine not having it as part of my life. Another upside of dancing less was that I could devote more time to the new project Heather and I were working on together. After toying with the idea for some time, we were working seriously on a cookbook based on the informal dinners and gatherings we cohosted for friends. In 1997 we managed to complete our book, and published it with Riverhead Press under the title
Our Meals
.

It was not until I fully recovered from my injury, in the spring of 1997, that Chris and I began our collaboration in earnest, when Peter asked him to choreograph his first ballet for the company on me and Monique Meunier. It was called
Slavonic Dances
, and in addition to Monique and me, it featured a big corps. I was impressed by how crafty and inventive Chris was about using a big corps, and I think he was grateful for the ways I was able to help him with some of the partnering passages.
Slavonic Dances
was one of six new ballets created for the annual Diamond Project that spring, and it would be one of three ballets chosen to premiere that summer at Saratoga. I remember Chris and I were both insanely busy at that time—he was dancing as a soloist with the company and also choreographing, and I was dancing four premieres in the month of June alone: Chris's
Slavonic Dances
, Peter Martins's
Them Twos
, Miriam Mahdaviani's
Urban Dances
, and Robert La Fosse's
Concerto in Five Movements
. In fact, it was probably a good thing Chris and I enjoyed our professional collaboration so much, because we had very little time to explore much of anything else. We did go to South America together that fall when one group of company dancers went on tour in the Pacific Rim while a second group—including Chris and me—toured Brazil. My main memory of that trip is that everyone in our group ate a little too much Brazilian food and drank a few too many caipirinhas, and as a result we all waddled home a little fatter than when we had left.

The following January marked the beginning of the company's fiftieth anniversary, and the launch of a series of special celebrations and performances at home and around the country. As always, Peter Martins was brainstorming a number of new ballets that year, with a wide range of feeling to them, and I was lucky enough to work with him on two pieces—
River of Light
and
Stabat Mater
—that were wildly different. The former was a stark and futuristic ballet set to a Charles Wuorinen score, and showcased the special talent Peter has for finding and expressing incredible beauty and grace embedded in a passage of music that can be difficult to count and even unappealing to the ear initially. Three couples danced in virtual rivers of light created by lighting designer Mark Stanley, and when Darci and I performed our final pas de deux we danced inside a ring of light that seemed to be floating in the water.
Stabat Mater
, by contrast, had a feeling of great antiquity and classicism, and featured three couples who come to life amid what appear to be Greek ruins. Peter created
Stabat
as a somber and moving tribute to the amazing ballet teacher Stanley Williams, who after thirty-seven years with the SAB, had died the previous fall. Stanley was renowned worldwide, and he taught so many of us so brilliantly. I remember I was driving uptown to take Stanley's class when my cell phone rang. It was Heather. She said, “Jock, are you going to class?” I said, “Yes, I'm going to class.” Then she said, “Well, prepare yourself. Stanley died this morning.” I was stunned, but I just kept going. I drove to the school, I parked, I walked upstairs, I changed, and I headed into the studio. Everyone else in the class had done the same thing—we were all so upset, but we didn't know what else to do. Somebody said, “Peter's going to teach.” Then Peter Martins walked in and said, “Stanley would have wanted this.” Then Peter started teaching.

Stanley's death was a blow to the school and to the company, and to the dance world at large. It was followed by another sad milestone in July 1998 when Jerome Robbins died. He was seventy-nine and had been very ill, and it had almost felt as if he might have been waiting to see NYCB reach its fifty-year birthday before letting go. Jerry had been such a force in my career and in the company overall—a genius as a choreographer and always so intense during rehearsals. I will always especially remember our rehearsals in 1995 for his groundbreaking
West Side Story Suite
, in which I danced the part of Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, and Nikolaj Hübbe danced Riff, leader of the Jets. Jerry had choreographed this work for Broadway, but it had never been performed by a ballet company before, which made the project both exciting and ambitious. And demanding. I remember Jerry screaming at all of us, insisting that we had to confront one another with more passion, and begin to show a real hatred for one another, as rival gang members would. We were nervous and insecure and jittery under his eye, and his tactics could be so brutal. One day, when Lourdes Lopez and I were rehearsing the gym scene together, Jerry arrived, leading a Broadway star by the hand, and he came toward me and then just slipped her hand into mine. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lourdes pick up her bag and leave the room. I wanted to cry, I felt so bad for her. But she wasn't the first dancer he had done that to—Jerry was Jerry.

A few weeks later, Nik and I came in for rehearsal and in the dressing room we decided we had really had it with the way Jerry was treating us and the whole cast. We decided that if he screamed at either one of us that day, or at anyone, we would walk out of the room and never return. He had pushed our last button. We walked into the rehearsal room together and stood in the back. When everyone else had finally arrived, Jerry told us all to sit down. Nik and I remained in the back, leaning against the barre.

Jerry started to talk about the importance of our roles, how we had to become the characters we were portraying. Then he looked up and pointed to Nik and me and said, “Everyone in this room has to come up to Jock's and Nikolaj's level. Everyone has to become a true Shark or Jet.” Nik and I felt our anger deflate; all of our resentment just disappeared. All of those rehearsals when Jerry had been so frightening and so mean faded away. It was almost as if the savvy old beast knew he had pushed us as far as he could, as if he knew we were about to walk out. In the end, I have to say, dancing
West Side Story Suite
was truly one of the best experiences I ever had. Jerry was a true genius, and I am so grateful I got to work with him.