The Rejection Seat - Fredrika Near Keefer's rejection from the San Francisco Ballet Company - Brief Article - Column

Dance Magazine, March, 2001 by Janice Berman

THERE I WAS, all set to be on CBS's The Early Show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson as a talking head, a pontificator. We would be discussing whether the San Francisco Ballet was within its rights to reject an aspiring ballet dancer. The network would send a car for me, or maybe put me up in a hotel. I'd even planned to go out and get a broadcast-worthy suit--oh, something Donna Karan or Armani.

And then the woman who books the segments called with the bad news. The Early Show had been scooped by GMA, as in ABC's Good Morning America. They'd decided to cancel the story. My services would not be required after all.

So believe me, I know what it means to be rejected. In fact, that was what I'd been asked to discuss with Bryant and Jane and 40 million of our closest friends: the issues centering around the story of 9-year-old Fredrika Near Keefer, who auditioned for and was turned down by the San Francisco Ballet School. Her mother, Krissy Keefer, a dancer, choreographer and Bay Area dance activist, has filed a complaint with the City of San Francisco, charging that the company has violated an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of height and weight. The city comes in because it gives an annual $550,000 grant to the school and therefore, Keefer maintains, the school must give everyone equal access regardless of how they look.

The question would seem to be, then, did the school discriminate? But the question is really whether the school is entitled to set aesthetic standards. Since the school prepares children for careers as professional dancers, the answer is an unequivocal yes. And aesthetics are just the tip of the iceberg. Kids with poor turnout tend to destroy their knees under rigorous training at a school that insists on turnout. And that would be a lousy school; good schools avoid the problem by screening ahead of time.

There are additional practical arguments, doubtless considered elitist by the complainant, but the point is this: Being discriminating isn't the same thing as discriminating. If it were, this magazine would be out of business and so would most of the people we write about. We are entirely about artistic criteria, judgment based on years of training, observation and the forces of memory and history.

It is a question worth considering, though: Have we all had our aesthetic sensibilities mugged by George Balanchine and his successors? Had he lived eternally, would Balanchine himself have turned away from his Suzanne Farrell ideal, the small head, long legs, skinny body, toward something more muscular and differently beautiful, along the lines of Ballet-Is-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar? Would we be idolizing bigger, more robust dancers? We'll never know. But I suspect that for ballet technique to prevail, the standards of flexibility and rotation and some uniformity, whatever it might be, of body type would remain in force. If the bigger-size ballerina were to become the yardstick against which all others were measured, then the discrimination would go against the slender stereotype of the Balanchine ballerina today favored by major companies all over the world. Choices will always be made and life is not fair.

Again, this school is a pre-professional school (although the company also administers a Dance in Schools program, to which Fredrika was offered, and has not accepted, a full scholarship). About a quarter of the children who audition for the pre-professional program are accepted, based on whether they have good turnout, a flexible spine and well-proportioned height and weight. Keefer says her daughter never got the chance to audition, to show the administrators what she could do, that all they got to do was walk around. The school says, well, duh! That IS our audition.

And if Fredrika had been allowed to show how well she already danced (so well that she actually got the lead in a local Nutcracker--not SFB's), wouldn't that have discriminated against the youngsters who hadn't had the benefit of in-house pre-training from Mom?

We are all of us born with certain advantages and certain challenges. That a little girl who loves ballet can do it so well (Keefer invited TV news crews to videotape the child going through her paces), but doesn't meet the physical standards of the company her mother--oh, excuse me, she--wants to join will perhaps eventually exact its own poetic justice. Perhaps the standards promulgated by the Balanchine aesthetic will give way to a more democratic aesthetic already in evidence in many modern dance companies. One quakes, though, for the classical repertoire and indeed for the whole transformational experience of watching classical ballet.

This child is 9 years old with her future in front of her. She may decide to be an acrobat, Web designer, physician, modern dancer, choreographer, or, yes, a ballet dancer. She can also audition for the school again; Allan Ulrich, who, along with Octavio Roca, wrote thoughtfully about this situation in the San Francisco Chronicle, points out that one member of SFB's corps, Ikolo Griffin, is a product of the Dance in Schools program.