Fifteen Minutes: Dance, Little Lady: Harvard's ballerinas express themselves

It's a playing field where the toughest competitors sweat exquisite grace, a helmet of poise protects fragile egos and the chosen ones rise to the occasion before age 14. Fierce determination separates the winners from the losers, but not without consideration of classical physique, form, and agility.

And on top of it all, everyone is wearing a tutu.

Dr. James A. Nicholas' study of the demands of 61 sports in the 1970s illuminated the rigorous athleticism of professional ballet. Based on factors such as strength and speed, ballet scored a 55, second only to professional football's score of 56. The next sport, professional hockey, scored 54.

For undergraduates who have experienced the world of pre-professional ballet, the life of a dancer demands far more than mere physical and creative exertion. It involves an infectious drive to succeed, often at the expense of personal growth and relationships. "It's definitely a statement about my experience in the ballet world that I find Harvard so friendly!" reflects Anna K. Weiss, a freshman in Wigglesworth. Weiss postponed college for two years to dance professionally.

Like many young girls with visions of Sugarplums, Weiss began her ballet career as an 8-year-old in New Rochelle, New York. "I didn't really start to take it seriously until I was about 13," she says. "I auditioned for School of American Ballet (SAB) once, but I met a coach the same fall, and started working privately with her. I started taking class every day. It was very intense."

Prior to daily one-on-one lessons with her coach, Weiss would take several adult classes at Manhattan's famous Steps studio. "The classes were open to the public," she explains. "So it was basically like 40-year old women and me!" Weiss chose a more conventional pre-professional path during the summers, attending programs at the San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and SAB.

Though supportive of their daughter's commitment to dance, Weiss's parents were unnerved by the prospect of her not going to college. "They were very, very proud, but they certainly were not pushing me! I mean, my mom went to Yale and my dad went to Cornell. I think they always knew [my desire to go pro] was looming, and then it became very clear that this was what I was going to do, for at least a couple of years."

It seemed just as likely, however, that Weiss was on her way to an elite university. During her junior year, she managed to squeeze in four AP classes before her seven-hour jaunt into Manhattan for ballet rehearsal. Upon graduation, she was accepted by both Harvard and Yale, and chose to defer Yale's offer for one year.

During that time, Weiss guest-performed with several companies in New York. Finally able to pay for her own pointe shoes, Anna's pirouettes caught the eye of American Ballet Theatre director Kevin McKenzie. "I was taking open classes in the evening at ABT," she says, "and I ended up getting along really well with the Ballet Mistress. She invited me to come take Company class in the morning. Kevin McKenzie would come in all the time and be like, ‘Who's that girl?', and that's how I ended up getting an audition." Networking holds for the ballet universe as well.

Unfortunately, her audition coincided with a stress fracture in her foot. "I ended up in a walking boot for three months. I did the audition with the injury, but it wasn't very good, and they said ‘we definitely like the way you look and like the way you dance, but we just need to see you when you're healthy.'"

Having come so close to attaining her dream of professional dance, Weiss wrote Yale a letter explaining her situation. "I told them I'm not coming because I've worked so long for this, and I've just come really, really close to basically one of the most well-known companies in the world, and I want to see if I can do it. And they said, ‘You know that's perfectly fine, we absolutely understand—we're not holding your spot for you.'"

The summer following her first audition at ABT, Weiss experienced a dramatic change in her professional dance aspirations. "I was getting over an injury," she recalls, "and sort of figuring out that ballet wasn't necessarily the world I wanted to be in. It was the ninth time I had been seriously injured—I'd had stress fractures, sprained ankles, bad knee problems that I knew I would be looking forward to during my career."

Weiss also noticed an important void in her life: lack of intellectual stimulation. "After the first year I was really bored! I had read a ridiculous number of books because if I wasn't in class or on stage or in rehearsal, there really wasn't that much to do."

Although still holding out for a possible position at ABT, Weiss decided to keep her options open and re-applied to colleges. Getting her foot in the door, however, was not as simple as it had been the previous year.

"I applied [to Harvard], and was deferred this time, which was completely understandable. So I ended up having three interviews—one phone interview, one with the same guy as the year before, and one here in Cambridge."

Weiss was planning to attend another audition at ABT following her second Harvard interview. When asked about the prospect of an offer from the company, she remained honest about her priorities and told the interviewer, "If I get the contract, I won't come to Harvard."

The ABT audition turned out to be a cattle call, where not one of the 80 talented dancers was offered a spot. Reflecting on her decision to accept Harvard's subsequent offer of admission Weiss says, "I think I could have lasted maybe one or two more years, but I don't need to go through that again."

For another pre-professional ballerina, the decision to focus on college came sooner, and more definitively. Allison E. Lane '02, who originates from Oregon, studied at SAB during her junior and senior year of high school. As the official school of New York City Ballet, SAB generally increases a young dancer's chances of getting into a major company, but not without discrimination against students who desire a college education. "In the school I was at," Lane explains, "it was the type of thing where if they knew you were going to college, they might not consider you for a position, because they knew that's not what you really wanted to do."

While at SAB, Lane attended the Professional Children's School in New York, and always took academics very seriously. When she was offered a spot in both the Miami City Ballet and Harvard in the spring of her senior year, Lane's decision was relatively clear-cut. "I just never saw myself dancing professionally," she says. "If you go that route, it becomes your entire life, and there were just so many other things I wanted to do. I was even hesitant to defer for a year to dance, just because I wanted to be prepared academically to go to school."

Lane and Weiss agree that the discipline of ballet prepped them for the intellectual rigors of the Harvard atmosphere, but the social differences between the environments proved more striking. According to Lane, "Because of the nature of a ballet company, you're around the same people every day. You're in kind of this strange world and it's really hard to get out of it because you're dancing all the time. That was the one thing I loved about Harvard—Every day I would meet someone different."

Upon entering Harvard, Weiss experienced a difficult self-identity transition. "It's hard to figure out my identity now. I had to switch from ‘yeah, she does okay in school but she's really a ballet dancer' to ‘she does ballet for fun, but she's really on her way to Hist and Lit.'"

Elizabeth Santoro '01, co-director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballet Company, echoes the other dancers' sentiments on reshaping her social world. Although she spent several hours a day for six days a week at Boston Ballet School, Santoro never found herself characterized as a ‘ballerina' until she arrived at Harvard. "In high school, I didn't really advertise it. Of course, all my friends knew, but it's not like I walked around in a bun at school. That just wasn't cool."

Nowadays, Santoro has found a stronger voice in her passion for dance, but she considers herself a ‘dancer,' rather than strictly a ballerina. "Coming here, I've been able to choreograph, and maybe have some roles I wouldn't have had if I'd entered a company. I've done a lot of modern, which I'd never done before—the growth in my dancing has been amazing. I'm really happy with where I am now," she says.

With more time on their hands, the women agree that Harvard has broadened their perspectives on the world of dating. Whereas Santoro admits she was "educated" her freshman year, Lane jokes about they irony of her own experience: "In high school, all the guys I lived with were gay. So I knew a lot of guys, but it just wasn't working for me!" More adamant about her priorities, Weiss claims that finding a "normal boyfriend" was the main reason she chose Harvard. Clearly, normal is a relative term.

As for the physical changes associated with decreased time in the ballet studio, the women remain conflicted about their more mature bodies. According to Weiss, "When I look in the mirror sometimes, I don't recognize that body as mine. I did quit ballet because I wanted a normal woman's life."

Glancing downward at recent developments, she adds, "This definitely goes with what it's like to be a normal female. It's a nice change." Inevitably, it forced her to put on some new dancing shoes and spend some extra time in Victoria's Secret.