While in Boston, I auditioned for a boarding school, Walnut Hill School for the Arts. Although I was a relative late comer to the type of training I needed to be competitive, I was offered a spot with a small scholarship. I had just turned 15. And I had my sights set on a different boarding school, North Carolina School of the Arts. My parents wanted me to wait until I was 16 to go away, so I spent the next months working as hard as I could to be ready. I would do whatever it took. Meanwhile, my family moved to South Bend. I was able to be closer to my training and other company members. And I had what I would consider my first bout of serious depression.
Being such a competitive and intense kid with a multicultural identity made me an easy target at new schools. I was used to being around a mostly white, privileged group of students from ballet. And used to not really fitting in with them. At the big, public school, there was diversity, but the student population was completely segregated. I transferred to a small, Catholic school where some of my dance friends went. That year, I was asked if I was an exchange student, learned that girls I danced with were spreading rumors about me at the two schools I went to, and told to put makeup on to make my skin lighter for a performance. Although I had always dealt with difficult social dynamics, things were hitting me harder. Then our beloved family dog died. Definitely first world problems, but I didn’t know how to process them all.
The ballet world is an interesting one filled with high-achievers. I was one of the few who didn’t also play an instrument, serve on student council, or excel at another sport. And I didn’t know who to trust. Dance became my one, consistent way of processing difficult emotions. It’s all-encompassing nature was what I knew I could always count on. And my commitment to perfection in dance intensified.
The next year, after having just turned 16, I reached my goal. I was accepted to North Carolina School of the Arts, my dream school. I was going to finally get to be in an environment where dance was the priority. I would be surrounded by artists, my people, and we would all be connected by our intense focus on pursuing an art form professionally as teenagers. The summer leading up to my going away included training harder than ever before, restricting my diet to an extreme on the advice from a teacher to lose 10 pounds (I was 5’7” 115 pounds and a size 2), and experiencing my first big heartbreak from a guy much older than me. At the time, I was still holding it together externally, getting good grades, performing well, setting goals. Internally, I was full of what I know now as depression.
Either way, I was going away. I packed up my things and my parents drove me down to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Having never visited the school, I was sure I knew enough people who had attended with successful careers that it was the right school for me. New students arrived early to audition for placement levels. We had ourselves weighed and calipered in an effort to “screen us” from eating disorders. When my roommate found out my numbers, she couldn’t believe my body fat percentage was lower than hers. She had super long, super thin legs. She proceeded to ask every one we saw together who they thought had a higher body fat percentage. This was my entry to performing arts boarding school.
During the first weeks, I flourished. I was selected as one of 5 new students to perform with the opening of the Carolina Ballet dancing in Balanchine’s Serenade staged by Melissa Hayden. It was extremely challenging mentally, physically, and emotionally. But I was proud. We were treated like working professionals and even got a per diem. Melissa Hayden screaming at me that I looked like I was going to the guillotine while rehearsing would only make me stronger.
I got asked to fill in for a returning student in a Nutcracker Gala at the last minute for the Spanish variation. I was over the moon. And the night before our performance, something happened that I will never understand. Leading up to going away to school, I had been having severe stomach issues. I would get crippling pain and couldn’t eat certain foods. I was put on ulcer medication.
As all of us sat in the dorms eating Papa John’s and watching Kids, my stomach flared up. I was writhing in pain and my 16 year-old friends had no idea what to do. One of them, who ended up becoming a human rights lawyer, resolved to call the RA to get me to the emergency room. They had no idea what was wrong with me so they gave me a shot of Vicodin and sent me back to my dorm at 2 AM. The next morning, I didn’t hear my alarm go off. My roommate didn’t wake me up. She simply got herself ready and went to rehearsal, letting the director know I was asleep. In the ballet world, being late to a call is unacceptable. I was not only late, I was still groggy from the Vicodin. I performed, not my best, and was assured by the dance director that she had a hard time with ulcers when she was at the School of American Ballet when she was 16. And that was the last bit of encouragement I got.
What followed was a blur. I didn’t get cast in the Nutcracker performance and I spiraled. The way it worked there, the only ones they cared about were in the big public performances. The other students were relegated to small in-school workshop performances. I knew not being put into Nutcracker meant that I was out. And my depressed, nervous teenage self couldn’t take it. This was the dream I had worked for. I couldn’t comprehend it not going the way I knew it could. A couple weeks later, a friend mentioned that someone was going to get their hands on some whiskey and meet in a guy’s dorm room. I had never had a drink. I decided my highly-disciplined restrictive lifestyle wasn’t doing me much good. So I went.
This was in the late 90s when rave culture was everywhere. I was lucky that I didn’t get into hallucinogens, I saw what they did to people. But alcohol and cigarettes (Marlboro Reds) became my drugs of choice. With a college on campus, no vehicles for high schoolers, and a bunch of artists with raging hormones, you can imagine the scene. So I spent the rest of the year working hard, smoking and drinking a lot, and having not-so-great interactions with older guys. When I was home on break, I was unrecognizable to my parents who had sent away a highly-focused, ascetic ballet dancer who returned a jaded partier whose body had ballooned. I learned a lot that year. And after spending the summer training at an American Ballet Theater program where I was one of the best, but just too big, I came home.
My parents lovingly sent me back to the small Catholic school I had attended before, and I jumped back into Southold. I see now how lucky I was to have a landing place. The guest choreographers brought in loved working with me. And I had an original piece choreographed for me by the director of a small, contemporary dance company in Milwaukee. My body readjusted, and although I was still very self-critical, things seemed to be heading in the right direction. Mentally, however, I was not recovering. In the spring of 2000, I not only had an offer from a company to dance professionally after high school, a loving boyfriend, good grades, I also had a suicide attempt. The perfectionism, the feeling that I had failed and let so many people down when I went away, the inability to properly express myself. It all became too much.
I graduated with honors, still planning to go dance with the company. My family supporting me along the way. And two weeks before I was to move to Milwaukee, the company moved to California. They had a donor opportunity to become a resident company. It had already been a lot for me to be ready to go to Milwaukee, where the two principal dancers had taken me under their wing. They would be staying and had contracts with the Joffrey Ballet. I wasn’t ready. And at the same time a new teacher had arrived in South Bend, the late Patrick Hinson. He had an ability to name all the important ballet greats he had worked with and made big promises. I decided to stay.
Marie’s Move It Story – Part V 