I became aware of Gavin Larsen when our first books were published. Mine was my debut novel, Three Muses, featuring a ballerina protagonist. Hers was Being a Ballerina, a memoir.
I lapped up Larsen’s book. It had twin virtues of putting the reader inside the ballet studio with the author while illuminating the myriad steps—physical and emotional—that a dancer takes to become a professional ballerina. Larsen’s most recent book, Infinite Steps: Thirty-Three Dancers and Their Lives in Ballet, is a collaboration with dance photographer Gene Schiavone. In clear, elegant prose, Larsen provides a narrative to Schiavone’s stunning color photographs,bringing out the emotions of the people in the photographs, in addition to documenting their professional experience.
The book features dancers from all over the world. Through interviews, Larsen elicits the ups and downs of their calling. Many of them love their careers; others leave due to injury, stress, or personal preference. But Larsen does not avoid ballet’s dark side, where looks and body type drive careers. She profiles “Marie,” devastated by a life-threatening eating disorder which began when she was ten or eleven “because the only caveats whispered about her potential for a brilliant ballet career had to do with the shape of her body.”
Body image and body shaming are no small matters in ballet. In addition, the physical demands are relentless: ballet dancers take class, rehearse, and perform, often all on the same day. Even when they’re doing well, they deal with searing pain and exhaustion, powering through injuries at great personal cost.
At its best, however, ballet is ethereal. It combines motion with music, which each occur in a moment of time. A dancer expresses herself, and her steps vanish. The accompanying music dissipates as soon as it’s played.
Against these realities, the dance photographer faces a major challenge. He must capture the instant—the height of a jump, the apex of an extended leg—while staying out of the way so that dancers can fully express themselves.
In an interview with me, Schiavone talked about getting to know his subjects in order to help them get comfortable with photographing them. He doesn’t like posed pictures—his aim is to show movement. His philosophy is that the photographer makes the dancer appear by disappearing himself.
Schiavone started into this line of work following early retirement from a business career. At that time, he was a well-practiced amateur photographer. His wife was on the board of the American Ballet Theatre and encouraged him to come with her to performances. He knew nothing about ballet, but over time he began photographing and traveling with ABT’s studio company. Eventually he was hired as part of ABT’s pool of photographers. He ended up working with other dance companies around the world as well.
Schiavone navigated the switch to digital technology and learned about ballet by watching, listening, and talking to dancers. He had to learn how best to light them, and learned the difference between a good move and a bad move. Over time, he realized that there is only a single moment that is right for the shot. To capture that moment, one must not only understand the camera equipment and technology, but also what technique means to a dancer. A key part of Schiavone’s education was watching class and rehearsals to learn “what they were trying to accomplish.”
During his decades with ABT and other troupes, Schiavone followed dancers’ careers, and began to think of his pictures as telling a story. “Some dancers fall out along the way,” he says, as documented in Infinite Steps. Others have a magnetic stage presence, a way of connecting with the audience. He retired at the age of eighty with a library of 300,000 photographs. He intends for Infinite Steps to be a piece of his legacy.
So much of ballet is a mystery to its viewers: how do ballet dancers accomplish such extraordinary physical feats? How do they train? What does it feel like to be on stage? How do they connect with the music? Do they coordinate with each other? Memorize the steps?
From the beginner to the professional, class is the bedrock. It is the source of technique and stamina, as well as the basis for understanding rhythm and music. The throughline is endless repetition. The first half of class is virtually the same across different dance studios over the world . It consists of barre work (forty-five minutes or so): a sequence of steps from pliés (slow knee bends) to grands battements (leg kicks), first with one hand holding the barre and then with the other. Both sides of the body must be exercised equally. This ironclad rule is designed to overcome the natural preference for the dominant leg by strengthening the nondominant side.
A cycle of exercises at the barre—done in a similar order everywhere—focuses the mind, warms up the muscles, and flexes the feet. These steps constitute the building blocks for all future performances. As American Ballet Theatre ballerina Devon Teuscher says in Infinite Steps, “the challenge she’s set for herself … is to show us why those steps exist in the first place. What are they for, if not to say something?”
Center work follows barre work. The teacher puts together combinations of steps for the students to execute. The pace of center work progresses from slow (adagio), to fast (allegro) at the end, often consisting of jumps.
Classes are accompanied by music, with either a live piano player, or a recording. I stopped studying ballet by age thirteen, but during that time I had internalized a large portion of Chopin’s piano music, the scores of major ballets, and big chunks of work by other classical composers that had been transcribed for piano. I didn’t know the names of any of the pieces until I started getting serious about music. Eventually, I realized how accomplished the pianists who accompanied our ballet classes were and how extensive their repertoire was.
One cannot overstate the level of discipline and drive it takes to reach a level of proficiency, let alone professionalism. Many of the dancers profiled in Infinite Steps allude to this. “Alina [Cojocaru] was born with a sense of purpose, even before knowing just what it might be.” Skylar Brandt, now a major star, had a plan by the time she was eight—“she’d train hard, get into ABT’s junior company, then become an apprentice and work her way up to principal status. She never doubted that she’d see her plan through, but she also didn’t anticipate how much more there was to success than just working hard.”
Infinite Steps bridges the space between the classroom and the stage. Unlike actors, dancers perform without speaking. Instead, the drama is in how their bodies illustrate the music.
Author Larsen deeply understands this. She grew up in New York where she trained at the School of American Ballet, and later, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. She danced with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Alberta Ballet, and the Suzanne Farrell Ballet before becoming a principal dancer at the Oregon Ballet Theatre. She now lives in Asheville, NC, where she teaches ballet and writes about dance.
Like Schiavone, Larsen came to her writing métier as a gifted amateur. She loved writing and was always a reader, but her career left no room for school. Larsen was a professional dancer for eighteen years before retiring to write and teach about dance. Her trajectory—retiring from the stage in her mid-thirties—is not unusual for a ballet dancer. Workdays and work nights are long, and it is ultimately a grueling profession—taking its toll on bones, muscles, and ligaments.
Joseph Gatti, also profiled in Infinite Steps, was so concerned about this toll that he left a traditional ballet career inside a company to strike out as both a freelance dancer and teacher. He wanted to “break the cycle” of injuries that are exacerbated by company dancers hiding their pain due to fear or reprisals.
Gatti founded the United Ballet Theatre, “a ballet company to focus on dancer health, well-being, and longevity.” His Gatti Method is a protocol that mixes traditional classical ballet with Pilates and VertiMax resistance training in order to minimize injuries and maximize strength. As a director, Gatti sees it was part of his job “to understand each dancer’s ability and utilize their wisdom to balance their load in the company.”
Larsen completed her formal education with high school, not unusual for a professional ballet dancer. One of her skills as a writer is to offer readers an insider’s view of her subjects. She points out that having grown up before the internet, books and photographs were all she had to “peer at the vast, enthralling world of ballet.” In her view, photos are “the most revealing, poignant, and precious records of [her] dancing, much more so than videos.” Pictures tell her “a thousand things by taking her back to that specific moment while also giving me an outsider’s view of myself. I could see who I was, in ways I did not at the time—even if the photo had only been taken a few days before.”
Ballerina Anastasia Matvienko (along with her dance partner and husband Denis Matvienko) agrees. She notes that Schiavone “caught in his pictures exactly what we felt in each moment, not just the ballet poses…. Our feelings on stage.”
These are two enigmas—how to make a connection with the audience through transmitting this feeling and how to capture that moment in a still picture. As Xiomara Reyes, who grew up in Cuba and enjoyed an international ballet career, says in the book, “Creating a connection with the imagination is so important when you are … a dancer…. It’s not just your body. It’s a mind-body connection.” The art happens when, after years of excruciatingly difficult training, the dancer communicates something magical from the stage, putting it into words.
In her book Serenade: A Balanchine Story, former ballerina Toni Bentley does an exquisite job putting the reader inside a ballet troupe on stage. Serenade is an iconic ballet which George Balanchine choreographed early in his career. It consists mostly of a group of ballerinas, clad in pale blue, moving in patterns on stage to the music of Tchaikovsky ‘s 1880 Serenade for Strings in C, Op. 48.
Like many of Balanchine’s ballets, Serenade is “plotless.” The dancers create mesmerizing patterns, weaving in and out and around each other—linking hands, rising to their toes, circling one another. Against meticulous notations on rhythm and music, Bentley describes the contribution of one ballerina to the ensemble. The book is a rare example of a writer who conveys the painstaking individual work that helps create the kaleidoscopic effect of ballet ensemble work.
Infinite Steps communicates something parallel by bringing readers inside the ballet studio and onstage through the stories of individual dancers. Each person is an individual artist, yet together, they create a whole. They have their own nationalities, personalities, and professional history. Knit together, they share ballet’s hallmarks—discipline, relentless physical work, how to inhabit the music, and the importance of connecting with an audience.
Larsen’s clear and thoughtful exposition along with Schiavone’s dazzling photographs make for a beautiful reading experience.
