Ballet dilemma

W.'s "report card" had an enthusiastic postscript from one of the directors that told us he should register for the next level in Ballet, Ballet 4. It's three days a week and W. said he was worried about how he would do baseball and basketball but especially baseball.

Three days a week is an awful lot especially for an 8 or 9-year-old. If you add another demanding activity, like baseball, it's a really heavy schedule. W. is a kid who doesn't mind being busy and who seems to thrive on activity but still I worry about him being overscheduled.  I wish ballet were an activity that he could do halfway where he had the option of only taking once a week but it just keeps getting more demanding as he goes.  Ultimately, it may come down to W. choosing between ballet and other sports and he just might choose the other sports.

I don't know why it means so much to me now that W. continue with his ballet. I think it's because he seems to have genuine talent. I realize he would not receive such rave reviews if he were a girl but I still think his reviews are somewhat exaggerated but basically accurate. I also think it's so unique that he's interested in ballet and I'm really proud of him. He's a pretty good baseball player and has potential but it's not as unique a talent.

Anyway, S. suggested that maybe W. should stay back in ballet and I don't think that's a good option.  Then S. said he would talk to the directors about whether W. could sometimes take Ballet 3 so he could fit in his other activities.  But he never ended up doing that because W. said he wasn't sure he wanted to go on to Ballet 4.

This led to S. and I getting into a big argument in which I accused him of not encouraging W. enough and he said I was pushing him into something he didn't want to do.  Neither of us were right, of course. S. does encourage him in ballet and I'm not pushing him. If he said flat out he didn't want to do it, I would be sad but I would be OK with that.  But I do think S. is a little too quick to suggest to W. that maybe he shouldn't take ballet and I see how enthusiastic S. is about baseball and I think that influences W.

In the end, I had a long talk with W. in the car about how he was feeling about going on to Ballet 4.  I asked him if he wanted to do it and he was a little uncertain, "I think so," he said. I asked if he wanted to continue with ballet and  he said, "yes."  So he was a little more certain about that. Then I asked him what he was worried about most about going on to Ballet 4. "I think it will be hard," he said. "Your teachers seem to think you're ready, do you think you're ready?" I asked. "I guess so," he said.  

"What else are you worried about?" I asked. "Are you worried about going to ballet three times a week and fitting in baseball and basketball?" "Yes," he said.  "Which one are you most worried about, the difficulty or the scheduling?" I asked.  "The scheduling," he said.  "Do you want me to talk to your school and see if you can make up classes if you miss them for baseball or basketball?" I asked. "Yes," he said.

So I went into the office and was maybe a little too gushy. "We were thrilled at W.'s evaluation," I started. I explained that he wants to go on to Ballet 4 but still wants to do baseball and basketball.  The director said they were adding a fourth class so he would be able to make up classes he missed. When I told W. that he could make up classes if he had a game, he seemed relieved and I said we would go ahead and register him for Ballet 4. 

We'll see how all this works out next year. I think it will be hard to have three days a week of ballet. It will cut into his play dates and it will be hard to schedule his other sports around it.  But I guess I feel some obligation to follow the teacher's directive to "nurture his talent."  He may not be the next Barishnikov but he has something unique in his life and I'd like him to stay with it for as long as he still loves doing it. 

Getting promoted (in ballet class)

W. got his report card from his two ballet teachers yesterday. It was quite gushy and said that he had "turned a corner" and took ballet very seriously and had excellent posture and great form, although he had to work on his battement tendu.  We all laughed about that because we don't know anything about ballet so W.  had to explain what it was.  We all joked that we had noticed his battement tendus were a little weak. 

I was very touched by these ballet report cards and I guess it's because I'm very proud of him.  It's probably the feeling other people get when their children come home with glowing report cards from school.  My boys school report cards are pretty good but they're not glowing, so I was relishing this rare parental moment.  I also think the fact that we have nothing whatsoever to do with his ballet makes it all the more sweet.  We take him to lessons and cheer him on, that's all. 

I know his reviews get an extra tweak because he's a boy but I don't care. I figure that just gives  him an upward curve but they wouldn't be so glowing if he was mediocre. 

But W.'s glowing report card means that he will be promoted to the next level - level 4 and that's kind of scary because now he will have to go three times a week and that's a huge commitment for both of us. W. was worried about whether he could still do baseball and S. and I thought about both basketball and baseball. It's those pesky Saturday classes. So S. is going to talk to the ballet school and see if there's some flexibility there in baseball and basketball season which is basically the whole winter and spring. 

We looked at this year's baseball schedule and realized that he would miss seven classes or seven games. I hate for him to have to choose between baseball and ballet at age 9 and I'm afraid he might choose baseball just because it's more fun and his dad loves it. I don't know why I care so much about him sticking with ballet. I guess it's because I know that he loves ballet and that he is more serious about it than anything else in his life. He has  a passion for dancing that is unlike anything else I've seen for either of my kids. When he comes out of his ballet class and we go next door to the food court to order some pizza, he dances while he is waiting to be served. When we watch a movie, he does an interpretive dance of the movie.  If he goes to New York and sees break dancers, he tries out their moves.  If he looks in on a class of the "big girls" he tries to figure out how they do certain moves. It truly is in his bones.

This is totally unlike me.  When I took ballet at age 6, I was all over the class and could never get the steps right.  A classic case of the ADHD kid dancing to her own tune. Then when I took ballet in high school, I loved it but I wouldn't say I had much talent. I have always been a self-conscious dancer. I do not live in my body the way W. does. Does that mean I'm living vicariously through him? Maybe. There's a thrill to having a kid who has a special talent for something, especially something that is so foreign.  I would probably feel the same way if he was a math genius. 

After grumbling that I didn't want W. to be promoted, I started feeling that I really did want this for him because it's an accomplishment and I don't want to hold him back. One of his teachers wrote that his talent should be "nurtured," and I felt like it was a rebuke.  Nurtured? We nurture him.  We take him to lessons and tell him what a great job he's doing.  We don't know what a battement tendu is and in fact, I'm not sure I know how to spell battement tendu but that's OK.   I'm guessing this was a reference to W. not participating in the ballet school's performance this spring and I sometimes regret that decision although I'm pretty sure I staved off a nervous breakdown that would have ensued if I tried to have W. do baseball and a ballet performance. I want to say I'm nurturing him as best I can. I'm not a ballerina, I'm not even a former ballerina, I'm just a mom trying to encourage my son as he enters a foreign land.

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.

Time for dance

One problem we've had this year is finding time for dance lessons or really, finding time for all of our activities including dance.  When W.'s dance school announced they were doing a new ballet this spring, I was full of dread.  Rehearsals would be right in the middle of baseball season. I realized it just couldn't be done, so I made Will choose between the performance and baseball. He chose baseball and I was glad. He loves ballet but he also likes baseball and I want him to be able to keep doing it, if he can.

I wonder how long he can do that though if he keeps progressing.  My husband and I joke that we want him to be held back but really I'm not joking.  He goes to lessons twice a week now and if he progresses to the next level, it will be three days a week next year.  We hope that he has to repeat a level and stay at a manageable twice a week.  I peeked in yesterday and they were doing - um - a move I have to look up - and Will looked good.  But again, I have no clue.  The teacher came up to me later and said "he's doing really well" and of course, I was thrilled.  But at the same time,  as I said to my husband only half-jokingly. I want to say, "I don't think he is doing really well, I think he needs to work on this stuff some more."

Oh well, there are worse problems than doing well at ballet.  I fear though that if he continues he will have to start making choices between ballet and the other activities he loves and I wonder what will happen then. 

The dance secret

My friend's son, S., who is 7 years old, started tap dancing about a month ago. He got into it because his mother had been taking tap lessons and he had been trying some of the steps and was pretty good. So the mom called up and asked me about our dance studio and off he went to tap lessons.  This is interesting because they're the kind of family who make a big distinction between "boy" things and "girl" things. (They have two boys). And the Dad is into sports and not very interested in music or dance. But the dad supported his son's desire to dance. 

The mom said that S. had asked that she not tell his friends he was taking dance lessons.  The only one she could tell would be my son W. because obviously he's a dancer already. So she never told his good friends until she overheard S. and one of his good friends talking about it.  "I thought it was a big secret?" she asked. "No, all my friends know about it," he told her. It turns out he was basically tap dancing down the halls and so everyone knew he was dancing anyway. But I suspect he thought he would be teased if he was taking dance lessons and then found out it was absolutely fine.  It's a little sad that it had to be a secret to begin with.  Would basketball lessons ever be a secret? But it's heartening that he learned it didn't have to be that way.