Kirkland, Gelsey (1952—)

views updated

Kirkland, Gelsey (1952—)

American ballerina known for her legendary partnership with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Born on December 29, 1952, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; one of three children, two daughters and a son, of Jack Kirkland (a playwright) and Nancy (Hoadley) Kirkland (an actress); attended public school in New York; attended Professional Children's School, New York City; studied ballet at the New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet; married Greg Lawrence (a writer), on May 13, 1985.

"Speed was her natural pace and air her habitat," wrote one critic of American ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, who is credited in part with the renaissance of ballet during the 1970s. "Her equilibrium was uncanny in all those off-balance Balanchine postures," he continued. "She could turn on a dime, stand on one point forever, all slim curves like a Brancusi." Kirkland's professional success, from her meteoric rise as a soloist with the New York City Ballet to her legendary partnership with Mikhail Baryshnikov, was indeed the stuff of fairy tales. The enormous pressures of the ballet world, however, took an exacting toll on Kirkland, very nearly costing the young dancer her life.

The daughter of playwright Jack Kirkland (author of the long-running Broadway play Tobacco Road) and his fifth wife, actress Nancy Hoadley , Gelsey spent her earliest years on the family farm in Bucks County, amid an extended family that included children from her father's former marriages and a constant parade of visiting friends. Kirkland, a contented but private child, did not talk until well into her second year. "Little did anyone suspect that someday I would speak with silence," she wrote in her autobiography Dancing On My Grave, "that I would make a career out of being seen but not heard."

When Kirkland was still a child, financial difficulties forced the family to give up the farm and move to an apartment in Manhattan. Her father, in the midst of a physical and literary decline, lapsed into alcoholism and outbreaks of fury which left Kirkland struggling between her intense love for him and her resentment over his behavior. Her mother, perhaps to compensate, was overprotective, fueling yet another kind of anger in her daughter. Kirkland later saw ballet as a creative arena in which to vent her rage. "By devoting myself to the discipline of dance, I was able to establish a measure of control that was otherwise lacking in my life, or so it seemed."

Gelsey was eight when she was taken by her mother to audition at the School of American Ballet, where her older sister Johnna Kirkland was already a student. When she earned a place in the first division, she was furious, thinking that the only reason she had been accepted was because of her sister. "The anger that I felt after that first audition became one of the guiding emotions for my entire career," she recalled. Throughout her early training, Kirkland remained fiercely competitive with Johnna, who went on to become a leading dancer with the Los Angeles Ballet Theatre.

Kirkland remained at the School of American Ballet for eight years, while working as a part-time child model to earn extra money. When she was 15, she officially joined the New York City Ballet's corps de ballet, becoming its youngest member. Now completely focused on dance, she gave up modeling and left school at the end of the 11th grade. Kirkland spent her first months with the company taking classes and learning the repertory. The following spring, she danced her first solo role as the Butterfly in A Midsummer Night's Dream and went on to perform leading roles in John Clifford's Reveries and in Balanchine's Monumentum Pro Gesualdo. In the annual performance of The Nutcracker, she played the Sugar Plum Fairy, winning accolades from Clive Barnes, the critic for The New York Times (January 3, 1970). "There is already such authority and breeding to this young dancer," he wrote, "that you can hardly wait to see the dancer she must surely develop into in a few more years."

With her success in The Nutcracker, Kirkland was promoted to the rank of soloist and selected by Balanchine, then director of the company, to dance the title role in a revival of his 1949 triumph Firebird. The new production premiered at Lincoln Center's State Theater in New York on May 29, 1970. Although some critics found Kirkland's interpretation wanting, most were awed by her technical ability. "This Firebird is not Rima the bird-girl, but an honest-to-goodness magical bird, stripped of sentiment, grateful for freedom, always in flight except when the Prince cunningly and gently traps her," wrote Herbert Saal in Newsweek (June 8, 1970).

Just 17, Kirkland became the darling of the media. A six-page spread on her appeared in Life magazine, followed by articles in Dance Magazine, Forbes, Seventeen, and Saturday Review. "Everyone seemed to have an angle on me except me," Kirkland recalled in her autobiography. Indeed, Kirkland's young life was all about conforming to the rigorous demands of Balanchine, who held his dancers in what appeared to be an unyielding grip. In an effort to please her mentor, she starved herself through anorexia and bulimia, surgically altered her face and body, and danced through painful injuries. According to Kirkland, Balanchine's tyrannical approach stripped his dancers of their individuality. "He sought to replace personality with his abstract ideal of physical movement," she wrote. "Even in his choreography that retained plot and character, the drama was distilled and the passion of the dancers quelled. Those were his instructions. There were not supposed to be any stars in his theatre who might detract or steal thunder from his choreography."

During the 1970 and 1971 seasons, Kirkland danced leading roles in Jerome Robbins' The Goldberg Variations, John Clifford's Tchaikovsky Suite, and Richard Tanner's Concerto for Two Pianos. Her repertory further expanded to include Brahms Schoenbert Quartet, Symphony in C, Theme and Variations, and Harlequinade. She particularly delighted audiences in Jacques d'Amboise's Irish Fantasy, in which critic Don McDonagh of The New York Times noted marked improvement in her ability to combine characterization with her extraordinary technique. With a promotion to principal dancer in 1972, Kirkland took on additional roles, but by this time she had also begun to rebel against Balanchine's harsh demands. She took additional classes with British choreographer Maggie Black , who helped her with a placement and a linearity of movement designed to reverse the training of her earlier years. She eventually gave up her classes with Balanchine completely, stomping out of a session one day in 1971, after he made some particularly mean-spirited remarks about dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn . Balanchine retaliated by shutting her out of new roles, thus setting the stage for Kirkland's final split with the New York City Ballet.

It was an offer to perform with premier danseur Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected from the Kirov Ballet in 1974, that prompted Kirkland to change the course of her life. "Misha was more than the ultimate romantic fantasy …," Kirkland wrote. "His very existence inspired me to clarify and confirm the direction in which I had been moving." Hired by the American Ballet Theatre as Baryshnikov's partner, Kirkland entered into a professional and romantic partnership with the dancer that turned out to be as dominating as her relationship with Balanchine had been. The pair first danced together at the Winnipeg Ballet, performing the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote. On October 22, 1974, they performed the piece with the American Ballet Theatre in Washington, D.C., an event which also marked Kirkland's debut with the new company. Notices were simply glowing, some suggesting that the partnership with Baryshnikov seemed to spark a new maturity and daring in Kirkland's performance. "Her dancing didn't just shine, it radiated," gushed Alan M. Kriegsman in the Washington Post (October 24, 1974). "Before this she seemed a youngster of exceptional promise. Now she looks and poses and moves like the star she has become." During the two-week Washington run, she and Baryshnikov made seven triumphant appearances, dancing La Bayadère, Theme and Variations, and Coppélia.

During the company's 1974 season in New York, Kirkland won particular acclaim in the role of Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, which featured a breathtaking series of perfectly executed fouettés. Also spectacular was her debut in La Sylphide, in which she was partnered with Ivan Nagy. "Miss Kirkland made a lovely thing out of this Fokine ballet," wrote Clive Barnes in The New York Times (February 3, 1975). "Her softness and romanticism, yet also her spring and strength, looked perfect. Her jump was exceptional, as was her delicacy." In the title role of Giselle, one of the most difficult of all ballerina roles, Kirkland reached her zenith. She first danced the role during the American Ballet Theatre's two-week spring season in Washington, D.C., partnered with Baryshnikov. Barnes thought it one of the most memorable debuts of all time. "It was the coming together of a dancer and a role that had been made for each other.… Since her school days, Miss Kirkland has justifiably been the darling of the ballet's cognoscenti, but here irrefutably was the emergence of a great American ballerina. She did not put a foot, a hand or even a gesture wrong—it was the fairytale debut little girls dream about." (The New York Times, May 19, 1975.)

In July 1975, Kirkland returned to Lincoln Center in New York for the six-week summer session. In addition to her usual repertory, she appeared in two works by Antony Tudor: the premier of Shadowplay, in which she danced the role of the Queen of the Celestials, and a new work, The Leaves Are Fading, in which she danced the second of four linked pas de deux, partnered by Jonas Kage.

In 1976, Kirkland was contracted to play the young ballerina Emilia in the Herb Ross and Nora Kaye film, The Turning Point, opposite Baryshnikov. Unhappy with the script and feeling increasingly out of control, Kirkland regressed into the anorexia and bulimia of her Balanchine days, starving herself down to barely 80 pounds and seriously jeopardizing her health. Eventually replaced by Leslie Browne (the god-daughter of Nora Kaye), Kirkland was demeaned and exhausted by the whole experience and barely pushed herself through the 1976 performance season. Just before the American Ballet Theatre's spring tour of 1977, Kirkland's mother was hospitalized, an event which shocked the dancer into making a concerted effort to overcome her problems. Her performances brought pronouncements from the critics that she had returned to top form, but shadows remained. Her personal relationship with Baryshnikov had soured because of his infidelities, and their dancing partnership suffered as she grappled with his criticism and her own increasing need to find direction and fulfillment. "Had I been able to speak as well as dance, I might have won the support of those who, like me, longed for a dance that portrayed the human drama with more depth and diversity," she explained. "Such a dance was a seemingly impossible dream. I never uttered such ambitious words about my art, even to myself, without feelings of absolute loneliness and derangement. The fanatical extremes of my commitment isolated me."

In 1978, Baryshnikov left the Ballet Theatre to join the New York City Ballet, after which Kirkland partnered with Patrick Bissell, Anthony Dowell, and Peter Schaufuss, among others. Her spirits continued to decline through the breakup of a new and promising romance and a brief but confusing reconciliation with Baryshnikov when he returned in 1980 to take over directorship of the American Ballet Theatre. Finally, her despair became so overwhelming that when an old ballet partner introduced her to cocaine she was a willing victim, "an accomplice in my own destruction," as she later recalled. Through the nightmare of her increasing addiction to the drug, she continued to dance, fooling the audience and the critics for the most part. "Kirkland is like some lyrical phenomenon of nature, a willow bending beside singing water," wrote a critic for the Boston Globe in a review of Other Dances, which marked her first performance under the influence of cocaine. "I was a total wreck. I was dying," Kirkland remembered. "Both my brain and my body were out of order." A review of the pas de deux from Don Quixote by Arlene Croce , in February 1981, was one of the few that reflected her terrible decline.

"It was the saddest exhibition given by a dancer whose artistry is increasingly placed at the service of a gift for mimicry," wrote Croce. "She's dancing the public's idea of Gelsey Kirkland as a star."

Kirkland continued her downward spiral through a dismissal and a rehiring by the American Ballet Theatre, through visits to drug dealers, brain seizures, and confinement in a mental institution. In 1983, at the doorway of a Manhattan drug dealer, Kirkland met Gregory Lawrence, a writer and manager of a television production office, and a cocaine addict himself. Ironically, it was Lawrence who eventually convinced Kirkland to confront her addiction. After a final performance with the American Ballet Theatre on May 1, 1984, Kirkland resigned and took off with Lawrence to a farm in upstate New York, a refuge offered to the couple by a friend. There, over a two-year period, she withdrew from drugs and began to examine the destructive forces in her life. She also took up the education she had forsaken many years before, concentrating particularly on the arts. "My approach was not academic. I was looking for ideas and values that I could use in my life," she wrote. "It was not any particular work of art that helped me overcome drugs, but the continuous process of mobilizing my mental resources, supported by a man who needed to be saved as much as I did." The preparation of her autobiography provided the last therapeutic stage of her recuperation. (She has also written a second autobiography, A Dance of Love.)

Kirkland and Lawrence were married in May 1985, and in 1986 Kirkland returned to the stage, dancing Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Ballet. More important than the performance, however, was the fact that her life now had profound meaning off stage as well as on.