Straight from the heart: Gelsey Kirkland looks back … and ahead

Dance Magazine, Sept, 2005 by Kate Lydon

Last May, after a 13-year absence, Gelsey Kirkland was back at American Ballet Theatre. Kirkland, a dance legend who has been out of the limelight for nearly 20 years, came to New York from her home in Melbourne, Australia, at the invitation of John Meehan, artistic director of ABT's Studio Company. During her three-week stay she taught classes for ABT's Studio Company and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and coached various dancers in the main company. Even walking casually through the halls of 890 Broadway where ABT is headquartered, wearing an oversized shirt, her hair untamed around her face, the petite Kirkland (who still looks like she could perform) causes a flurry of excitement. In the classroom, her simplest gestures tell entire stories.

During her stage career-at New York City Ballet, ABT, and finally The Royal Ballet--Kirkland was famous for her ability to bring audiences to their knees. Her dancing combined a tender, almost childlike innocence with strength, Speed, musicality, and soul. Her portrayals in ballets like Don Quixote, Giselle, The Leaves Are Fading, and Theme and Variations were exquisite. And thanks to video, young dancers are still watching her perform. Baryshnikov's widely aired production of The Nutcracker, in which she melts into the role of Clara, is perhaps the most well known.

Sadly, in 1984, substance abuse and burnout halted Kirkland's stage career. Shortly thereafter she co-authored Dancing on My Grave (with her first husband, Greg Lawrence), a tell-all book that was also full of insights about the artistic challenges of ballet. Critics who thought dancers should be "seen and not heard" slammed her in the press for questioning Balanchine's sovereignty and insulting her famous colleagues. Seen as a traitor, she was shunned by many in the dance scene. Three years later, in The Shape of Love, she chronicled her triumphant return to the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty with Anthony Dowell at The Royal Ballet. It was during this period that she discovered teaching.

Today, Kirkland, 52, teaches in Melbourne and conducts master classes in the United States with her husband Michael Chernov, a theater director and former actor and dancer. Through her interest in the Vaganova teaching method, she has studied with Robert Ray at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia and continues to study and work in collaboration with former ballerina and teacher Nina Osipian (a graduate of the GITIS Institute in Moscow and former student of Marina Semyonova). Kirkland has also developed a series of strengthening and repatterning exercises which she and Chernov have named Core Dynamics. It includes floor exercises as well as standing upperbody work, some of which are Pilates-related, culled from teachers Dreas Reyneke and Donna Krasnaw. She is furthering her love of Bournonville by studying the Fifty Enchainements, a traditional series of exercises, selected and reconstructed by Vivi Flindt and Knud Arne Jurgensen, available on video.

In this interview, Kirkland lives up to her smart, blunt, and honest image. But there is a lesser known side--funny, warm, generous, and self-effacing. When asked to name the teachers who had the most influence on her, she quickly named the coaches she worked with privately, but then went on to list scores of NYCB and ABT colleagues and choreographers until Chernov interrupted. "You know," he said laughing, "she will go on to list the entire history of ballet if you let her." And she almost did.

Kirkland's return to ABT last spring has many hoping she will find a permanent home back in the United States as a teacher and mentor.

Kate: How did you feel being back at ABT?

Gelsey: It was like returning home. There were so many old friends, colleagues, and memories. It was all positive, no ghosts or goblins.

K: How do you feel about being involved with the Studio Company?

G: All of the dancers are so gifted, and they greeted me with unexpected warmth and enthusiasm.

K: Are there any specific areas of technique you like to focus on?

G: The explosion in bravura technique over the past several decades has been fantastic and I would certainly like to learn some of those tricks! But other, more subtle areas of technique have perhaps been neglected. What I try to do is to see where the need is, and one of the needs seems to be in exploring and respecting the boundaries of classical port de bras and explaining it with an artistic perspective. I like to help people find the beauty inside the restrictions.

K: Is there one particular style that you use in class?

G: It is difficult to speak about style. It is not something you can layer on top of a person; it has to be intrinsically understood. Style and technique should be one, not separate. Both have to be inspired from an artistic perspective. Finally, everything needs to be integrated to create the whole picture. But people like labels, so, at the moment, with the upper body, I am working with the Vaganova "style." I feel that without the exact port de bras people are left in the dark and find it difficult to feel their epaulement.