Ty Granaroli interview

Ty Granaroli is best known now as the designer of theme park rides like the Borg Invasion 4D in Las Vegas but he remembers launching into his earlier career as a ballet dancer when he was reluctantly dragged to a performance by Mikhail Barishnikov by his then girlfriend.

Granaroli, 50, lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., with his wife, Gabriella Brown, and their two girls, Alessandra, who is almost 8, and Daniella, 6.  He is a screen writer and has created theme parks all over the world from Dubai to Australia after a dancing career in the late 1970s and 19780s that lasted more than a decade.

He grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif. and he had played football and acted in plays in high school and had taken one ballet class but it never clicked until that moment when he saw Barishnikov leap across the stage. "When I saw Barishnikov dance I thought, "He's an athlete."  It was the first time I saw anyone dance like that. I thought, "I'm an athlete too and I can do that."

Granaroli dropped out of college and came home. He began taking every dance class available at his local dance school. He took 22 classes at week at all levels and with all different ages and he would stay at the studio all day dancing. "It was the most exciting time of my life and I would see something and I would just do it," he explains.

He grew up with a lot of theater people  but everyone, including him, assumed that if you were dancing "you certainly had to be gay. "  And when Granaroli decided to become a dancer friends and some family members questioned whether he was gay.  A lot of my friends were very skeptical about it, they couldn't relate to it," he recalls. "They'd make disparaging comments about gays - "faggots."  People were very uncomfortable with it."

So Granaroli lost many friends during that time partly because of their prejudice but also because he was so focused on dancing. "It was the first thing other than athletics that I loved to do," he says. "It just didn't matter."

Granaroli trained in Los Angeles and then went  to the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia as an apprentice for three years.  His big break came when he was trying out for the American Ballet Theater.  His hero, Mikhail Barishnikov, walked in to the class and then left.  The teacher came to him afterward and told him that Barishnikov wanted to see him.   Barhsnikov told him, "I want you to join the company tomorrow."  He stayed with the ballet company for four years and  played Paris in a 1985 production of  "Romeo and Juliet."  But he left ballet for good at age 30 when he hurt his hip. After doing two more years of theater dancing, he began taking classes and soon launched his new career.

 Granaroli says his parents were supportive but puzzled about his career choice until they came to see him perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. "They started to say, "Look what he's accomplished," he says. "They were so proud of me.  They realized they'd never seen someone work so hard at something."

Being a straight man in a world where there are a lot of gay men was sometimes challenging, Granaroli says.  He recalled one director who offered to help his career if Granaroli would sleep with him.  For some choreographers and directors, "it seems like a conquest to get the straight guys to sleep with them."

But Granaroli adds that it generally wasn't a problem. "I was so confident I was doing what I wanted that it was never a huge issue for me because I was very confident I was doing what I wanted," he says. "It was never a huge issue for me because I was very confident about myself.  I wasn't ambivalent at all about it."

Granaroli's wife, Gabriella Brown, teaches dancing and she still sees very few boys in ballet classes, Granaroli says.  Parents want to know why a boy dancer isn't playing football or tennis, he says.   Male dancers get positive feedback only with achievement, he says. "It comes later with excellence or achievement, then the parents or friends are proud of you," he explains. "It's a threshold you have to step across. People wonder  why you are doing it, what you get out of it.  When you take a ballet class, if you have any talent at all, you immediately understand the fun of it."

Dance is "endlessly challenging," Granaroli explains. "You never really master it. You can play basketball and it doesn't matter how you look - you just have to master it. In athletics, the goal is to win or achieve - it doesn't matter how you look. In dance you ahve to do those very difficult things - dance, jump and lift other people over your head, but you have to look perfect at the same time."

"You can't do one thing well," he adds. "You have to be really versatile, you have to look good when you do it and you have to do many different things. I used to love partnering and working out different lifts with girls and it was so athletic and so challenging. It was really fun and it was really fun and I was a huge jumper. I loved to jump so that was a big part of it for me."

Boys need role models who can point them in the direction of dance like Barishnikov did for him, Granaroli says.  Dance shows like "Dancing With the Stars," and "So You Think You Can Dance?"  are helping to break some of those barriers but there are no break-out male stars in the ballet world like Barishnikov, he says.

But ballet also isn't part of American culture the way it is part of European culture. Dancing also has to be a labor of love because it's so hard to make a living at it, Granaroli points out. Dancers also have to have second careers, Granaroli says.  He was able to switch careers through some classes he took when he was injured but no everyone is so lucky.

"People are much more aware of dance," he says. "Dancing is looking like a reasonable and rational goal to have. Once it's celebrated parents and friends are more open to it."

Interview With Kathleen Mooore, former prima ballerina at ABT

Kathleen Moore (now Kathleen Moore Tovar), a former prima ballerina at American Ballet Theater and now a master teacher at American Repetory Ballet, says that most children are natural dancers. When you look at little kids they always are dancing around and where does that stop and why does it stop, what’s the thing that makes that break?" she asks.
One answer might be that parents don't even consider having their boys take ballet and that's a shame because ballet can do so much for boys and young people, Tovar says. It teaches them "coordination, balance grace presentation, just those things alone, how to follow directions - following directions is a huge thing in a ballet class.
Tovar believes that the lack of boys in ballet is partly a cultural phenomenon. She points out that in Eastern Europe and Asia and even Spain, boy ballet dancers are viewed in a much more positive way.
" I think it's a cultural thing and here it doesn't appear to be a manly thing," she says.
The cultural difference also has to do with the fact that the arts are state-supported in many countries in Europe and especially in Eastern Europe. That means that dancers can make a better living dancing in those countries. In the United States, dancer in smaller companies like American Repetory Ballet in New Brunswick, N.J., may have to hold two other jobs to suppor themselves, she says. An apprentice, for example, might only get $100 a week plus benefits.
But Tovar says that the negative view of ballet primarily comes from a perception that all male ballet dancers are gay. " I think that there’s so much homophobia and I think it’s funny because it’s such a great place to meet girls," Tovar ays.
The fear that boys who dance will somehow become gay reflects real ignorance about what makes someone become gay, Tovar says. "It's such a misperception that every male ballet dancer is gay," she adds. "In all my yeaers in ABT there were 35 or 40 men and rarely wasit even at a 50-50 point. There were so many straight men."
At her current company, one boy got no support from his parents and had to come to rehearsals and his performance himself - taking the bus to get there. Another boy had the full support of his parents, even though they didn't know much about ballet, and they were at every rehearsal and performance.
Another reason boys might veer away from ballet is the same reason that girls drop out of ballet is that dancers have a very demanding schedule and that is very likely to affect other activities and school. Many ballet dancers, of both sexes, drop out of ballet at age 16 or so.
Not only is ballet a low-paying career, it also may mean sacrificing college at least temporarily. The top ballet dancers often start their careers at age 18 or so, Tovar says. And if they don't attend college, there are fewer career options later in life when they retire at age 40 or so. Some universities, like Indiana University, now allow students to major in dance and get their college degrees, Tovar says.
Ballet had a resurgence in the 70s and 80s when Mikhail Barishnikov, who is a friend of Tovar's, was at his height, Tovar points out. " Barishnikov awas on the cover of Time amgazine and he was clearly heterosexual, really handsome, really talented and exotic," she recalls. Howmany people did it get into the studio? I don’t know. But I’m sure it allowed sone people who wanted to go less resistance."
The popularity of television shows like "Dancing With the Stars," may help encourage boys too, Tovar says. But fundamentally, the ballet world is an isolated world - a world unto itself - and most people don't see the sheer athleticism and talent needed for boys and girls to dance.

Choosing baseball over ballet

W. is missing his ballet school's show this spring. We had to make the difficult decision of whether he should play baseball or dance in the show. He chose baseball. We knew he couldn't do both because the rehearsals are on Saturday and so are the games.
When my husband ran into one of the school diretors and the choreographer for the show, she said she had a part in mind for W. Sigh. It gives me a pang, not because I think it was the wrong decision. I think it's probably the right decision. He just did the Nutcracker and he needs to do other activities as well. But I worry that it won't be long before he really has to choose other activities and he might give up ballet for that reason. Ballet is so time-intensive and I guess this is like a lot of other sports where it ends up taking up your whole life. But even at W.'s level, it's hard to just take lessons. Maybe that's one reason that it's hard for boys and girls to stay with ballet at a certain level.