Jenifer Ringer: a smooth transition - soloist Jenifer Ringer is segueing into stardom at New York City Ballet - Interview

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Susan Reiter

Jenifer Ringer, currently one of New York City Ballet's most distinctive and promising soloists, was noticeable as soon as she began appearing in the company's corps de ballet in January 1990. The amplitude and warmth of her dancing, with its touch of old-world charm, recalled the glamour of an earlier era. The intense commitment and evident joy that infuse her performances, her ability to communicate very directly and eloquently with an audience - these gifts were recognizable from her early seasons with the company and have blossomed as she has taken on greater responsibilities.

From the start, it was clear that this was someone whose dancing was a direct, complete expression of who she is, who connects very personally with her roles. This individuality has been evident in the many Jerome Robbins ballets in which she has been featured during recent seasons. She has revealed dramatic flair in such roles as the ditzy, flirtatious central woman in The Concert and the demure passerby in Fancy Free who dances the cautiously sensual duet with one of the sailors. She has also given wonderfully vivid and detailed performances in several less overtly theatrical Robbins works - Dances at a Gathering, Goldberg Variations (in which she performed two parts last season), and 2 & 3 Part Inventions, his most recent ballet.

Ringer, who was promoted to soloist in January 1995, was also quite busy during the company's two Diamond Project festivals, when a bevy of choreographers created new dances during a concentrated period of time. And she has steadily and quietly been acquiring an impressive Balanchine repertoire. Particularly memorable were her deeply romantic abandon in the second movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet and her crystalline lyricism in the third variation of Divertimento No. 15. Just before her promotion, she danced her first Sugar Plum Fairy, a role she regards as an important learning experience and a rite of passage.

The raven-haired twenty-two-year-old was skeptical about ballet as a way of life during her childhood years in South Carolina until she encountered an influential teacher named Terry Shields. "She was the first teacher who really believed in ballet as an art form and as a career," Ringer recalls during a recent interview at the New York State Theater. "In my hometown, dance was something you did after school, that the relatives would come see once a year. Terry Shields was passionate about ballet and very disciplined. She had high standards for us, and the challenge was exciting for me."

Although she became more dedicated and continued her studies at Mary Day's Washington School of Ballet after her family moved to Washington, D.C., she had not yet had her moment of truth: "It really wasn't until I performed with a professional company in Serenade at the Kennedy Center that I knew this was what I wanted to do as a career." She had been selected as one of several students to fill out the ensemble in this Balanchine classic. "That experience was the first taste of Balanchine I'd gotten," Ringer explains. "I had never seen the ballet. Being taught the steps was my very first experience of Balanchine, which I think is a great way to be introduced; I had no preconceived notions of Balanchine dancers or what anything was supposed to look like. I got to know him through seeing how musical his steps were and feeling how right they felt."

She was accepted for the School of American Ballet's intensive summer course when she was fourteen, and after those five weeks she knews she had to come back. "I fell in love with SAB: I felt I learned so much in five seeks." she says. "In a lot of ways it was a shock to me: a totally different way of dancing. They moved faster. of course: they wanted us to wear pointe shoes for barre and center technique class. The Balanchine vocabulary they tried to instill in us was very different, but it made sense. It was a challenge and something I really wanted to learn how to do. I cried when I had to leave. I was learning so much and felt this was the place where I wanted to be. I fell in love with the city, too!"

After returning to SAB the following summer, she enrolled for the full year. The transition was eased by the fact that her father was transferred to New York City at the same time. "I was able to have the stability of my family and live at home while I was going to SAB," she notes. Her big, role at the school's annual spring workshop, toward which months of work are always devoted, was to have been - appropriately - the "Waltz" woman in Serenade, but a last-minute foot injury kept her offstage. Her devastation was somewhat mitigated by the fact that she and her fellow students had been invited to perform part of Serenade on the closing night of NYCB's previous winter season, so she had been seen in the role. The eager, dedicated sixteen-year-old was hoping that this would not be her only appearance on the State Theater stage.

"Once I came to SAB, New York City Ballet became the only company I wanted to get into. I didn't have a Plan B," Ringer admits. She was made an apprentice in October 1989 and a member of the corps the next January. "It was overwhelming in some respects," she recalls of her initial season with the company. "I remember looking around in company class and seeing all the faces I would watch twice a week onstage, and realizing that they were normal people and had to take ballet class too! The work load was harder than I had anticipated. When you first get in, you have to learn so many ballets. It was definitely a big adjustment, being at the theater ten to twelve