Free Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet by Jenifer Ringer

rehearsals were over, and I would never get to rehearse my problem spots again. What if everything went wrong? What if I fell out of the two consecutive double pirouettes? What if even just
one
thing went wrong? Would that mean I had blown it and my chance to join the company was over forever? Should I put my pointe shoes back on, find Arch, and practice again? No, there was nowhere to rehearse, and company members were all over the place, watching. I needed to stay cool. I had done my best. Obviously I would just have to deal with the nerves fluttering in my stomach for another few hours until the performance began.
    My fellow students and I were sent down to the basement of the theater to get ready for the show. The New York State Theater is located in Lincoln Center, a complex of buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The three main buildings are grouped around a great fountain; the State Theater, renamed the David H. Koch Theater in 2008, is to the left of the fountain. In the center, behind the fountain, is the Metropolitan Opera House, and on the right is Avery Fischer Hall. The New York State Theater was built in 1964, and Balanchine was involved from the beginning in making the theater perfect for dance. From the sprung floor, to the acoustics meant to dampen the clicking sounds of ballerinas’ toe shoes, to the great sight lines and lack of center aisle so that every seat in the house was good, Balanchine had thought of it all. A cement block of a building, with its face made almost entirely of long windows, it is actually not that beautiful inside; the primary colors are white and gray, and there are hardly any windows back in the working part of the theater. But the stage is the perfect place to dance ballet. The basement of the theater, quaintly called the Lower Concourse, is a labyrinth of dim hallways lined with large crates and filing cabinets. I’d never beenin the backstage area before, and the only way I found my way to our dressing area was by following the sound of excited chatter.
    Meg and Katey came down to visit me and offer encouragement. They checked out my stage makeup and told me it was fine. I slicked my frizzy hair back with an enormous amount of hair spray, until it was hard and shiny. If I was anxious about a performance, I usually took my nerves out on my poor hair. I felt a surge of confidence, knowing that at least I could depend on my hair not to pop out of my bun and let me down. I don’t remember warming up or putting on my costume. All of a sudden I was backstage, waiting the final ten minutes before
Serenade
would begin.
    Suki came up to me and assessed my appearance.
    “You look good! Good luck,” she said encouragingly. Then she cocked her head and started brushing the hair on my forehead downward, against the hair spray. “You could do your hair a little softer though, you know.” She gave my hair a dissatisfied grimace and moved on to another girl.
    I silently screamed inside my head.
    I ran to a backstage mirror and was horrified to see that she had made my hair stick up like Alfalfa’s in
The Little Rascals
. Breathless, I took water from the water fountain and attempted to reslick my hair. Luckily, the quantity of hair spray I’d applied made my hair like glue, and my problem was quickly solved.
    Arch appeared beside me.
    “Do my shoes look the right color?” he asked, looking panicked. “They told me to dye them blue to match the unitard, but there were a million shades of blue spray paint! I tried to mix colors, but I don’t know . . . and I think I did it too late. My shoes are still wet! And look, my hands are BLUE!” I later learned that for the boys,
Serenade
blue is a notoriously difficult color to achieve on ballet slippers. And no one had told Arch to wear protective gloves.
    He held his shaking hands up to my eyes. Obviously I wasn’t the only one trying not to freak out.
    “I’m sure you won’t be able to see that from the stage,” I told