Elizabeth Roxas: battered but still bowing - dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs despite injuries - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1997 by Paul Ben-Itzak

Tim "The Hebrew Hammer" Puller was mad. A Madison Square Garden referee had stopped his heavyweight fight with Lou Savarese three minutes into the second round, because the Hammer was getting pummeled. "This is the fight game," the bloodied Puller told the New York Post. "I risk my life. I know that. Maybe I should be a tennis player or a ballerina if they're not going to let me fight."

Hebrew Hammer, meet Elizabeth Roxas.

A twelve-year veteran of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Roxas betrays no sign of injuries in performance. (The Ailey tour brings the company to the University of California at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall from January 31 to February 9.) She dances with abandon in Donald McKayle's Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, lyrical grace in Ailey's Memoria, and emotional heat in Lar Lubovitch's erotic duet, Fandango. Like the Hammer, however, the five-foot-four, 105-pound Roxas has been battered.

Bad catches by partners have left her with what doctors call "anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) - deficient knees." The tendons that hold her knees together and act as shock absorbers are gone. Athletes and dancers who get this injury typically have the ACL replaced by a tendon from another part of the body, an operation that can take them out of action for up to a year. Roxas, like the fighter who refuses to leave the ring to get bandaged because he sees victory in sight, has rejected this course. At age thirty-eight, looking at the twilight of her twenty-five-year career, she feels she can't afford to lose a year.

Unlike the boxer, Roxas may not be taking her life in her hands every time she steps onto the stage, but she is definitely playing with fire. Either knee could buckle at any moment, as the left one did in 1986, when the ACL was busted during a performance of Ailey's Bad Blood in Vancouver. "My partner threw me up, but he didn't quite have me on my way down," Roxas recalls. "As I fell, my foot went down, but my left knee went the other way, and I heard that sound. I started crawling and moaning. I was screaming. They had to stop the show and close the curtain so that they could drag me off the stage." The Hebrew Hammer's ideas to the contrary, this is no work for softies.

The problem was compounded in 1992 when Roxas, perched on a bar stool, turned to talk to another patron. Without an ACL to lock it into place, her left knee went out. "Normally, I could put it back in," she says. "But this time it went out, and within a matter of seconds it swelled up like a basketball." Roxas had lost the ACL in her right knee in 1975, while dancing with Ballet Philippines in her native Manila. Now, in addition to having no ACL in either knee, she had mush where the cartilage in her left knee used to be.

Three doctors told her she would never dance again. The third was Dr. Donald Rose, who cleaned out the cartilage. It was Rose who operated on performance artist Molissa Fenley in 1995 after she tore her ACL and replaced it with a tendon from her hamstring. Roxas was the first of Rose's patients to decline the surgery, compensating for the missing ACLs with a heavy regimen of physical therapy.

"She is very unusual," Rose says, "in that she has been able to dance for in extended period of time having ACL-deficient knees . . . What having ACL-deficient knees means is that she is a set-up for having subsequent cartilage tears, as well as in the future having arthritic changes." Roxas already has early arthritis, Rose adds, and she risks aggravating it by continuing to dance on wounded knees.

Why take the risk?

"I'm out to prove something," she says. "I could have easily just taken off a year in 1992." But she thought she would be retiring soon anyway to raise a family. "And for that injury to stop me from being able to finish a segment in my life, I thought, would be terrible. I believed that this was my challenge - that this was brought upon me to either test my faith or test my guts or my strength."

The injuries are not apparent to anyone watching Roxas onstage. She is eloquent and sinuous, with a way of dancing that is light in its gracefulness and weighty in its emotional content and impact. She can also be a fireball when the role demands it, whipping vigorously through a maze of dancers to open George Faison's Suite Otis.

"She's an amazing artist," says McKayle, whose frequent work with Roxas includes setting the solo Angelitos from Negros on her. "That's a very deep solo, and she did it beautifully. [The role] is like the eternal woman. If you were to make an archetype of it, it would be that: a figure that steps out on the ground, and she's scanning space and saying, 'Everything around here I have nurtured, I have given life to, and I will sustain.' That's very demanding, and she made it absolutely beautiful. And it's a slow solo, so you can't get away with fiery footwork - you have to draw from your emotions."

McKayle first noticed Roxas "when she was a young dancer. Some dancers, you'll be watching a whole stage, and they just pull your attention. She was doing more than movements and steps - she was completely into what she was doing." He likened her to Alicia Alonso in her prime.