Always a dancer… - ballerina Allegra Kent - Interview

The exquisitely beautiful, erotically charged, yet always vulnerable Allegra Kent - one of George Balanchine's favorite ballerina's - talks about the unique shape of her thirty-year career and the challenges and satisfactions of life after ballet. Her new autobiography, Once a Dancer ..., has been hailed as one of the finest books ever written about the life of a dancer

Allegra Kent, one of America's greatest ballerinas, was a dancer of extraordinary beauty and feeling, who, by the time she was seventeen, had been singled out by the great choreographer George Balanchine as a major inspiration for new ballets and as a central performer in the already-established repertory. Her lengthy career was brilliant, if somewhat erratic, interrupted as it was by a very early marriage to celebrated photographer Bert Stern and by her determination to have children. As beautiful as ever at the age of fifty-nine, she recently published her fascinating autobiography, Once a Dancer . . . .

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Allegra, you were how old when you joined the New York City Ballet in 1953?

ALLEGRA KENT: Fifteen.

RG: And you were young for your age, weren't you?

AK: Yes, I was young because I had concentrated on dancing, so I didn't date boys and I didn't go to baseball games or football games. Anyway, the Professional Children's School didn't have a football team.

RG: And did you think you'd have a problem getting into a ballet company?

AK: No, it never seemed to me I would have a problem, because my teachers were very enthusiastic about my dancing, so that gave me a lot of confidence.

RG: Yet you started studying quite late for a dancer.

AK: Yes, I started at eleven.

RG: And do you feel that starting that late led to any difficulties?

AK: Well, I think I could have started earlier, but I wasn't ready to, because I hadn't yet seen dance when I decided to dance. I was suddenly very struck with music when I was in boarding school. I really seemed to hear it, and it compelled me to start dancing, right there at school.

RG: Another type of person would have wanted to play music. For you, the immediate response was to move to it.

AK: Yes. I wanted to move to it. Also, I like liked running fast and jumping high, crawling low, screaming high - those kinds of things.

RG: Do you think that this impulse to move is basic to all dancers?

AK: It might be basic even to amoebas. [laughs] Yes, I do.

RG: There are dancers who don't start from the music - the kind who get labeled "unmusical."

AK: I don't know how most dancers start - I assume they hear music and they move. But if anyone wants to give me a nice label like being a "musical" dancer - well. . .!

RG: Do you think starting so late -

AK: Yes, I probably could have benefited from real systematic training, which I didn't have. Because I began with ex-GIs in an open classroom - grown men - and I was a little eleven-year-old. So I didn't learn the systematic strengthening of the body, the muscles to produce, and things like that.

RS: And yet one of the things you're most famous for is your extreme extension. Isn't that true?

AK: The minute I understood that I needed to stretch, I started working at it. I knew my muscles were peculiar and that I had to stretch them.

RG: HOW did you know your muscles were peculiar? What does that mean? AK: I got very muscle-bound too quickly. Other people had greater endurance. I seemed to need massages from the age of twenty-one. But all muscles aren't the same; like, grasshoppers don't have the same muscles we do. [laughing] Do grasshoppers have muscles?

RG: I never asked one.

AK: They must be cute, those little grasshopper muscles. Quick-twitch muscles.

RG: Did you have any sense of why you were taken into the company so young?

AK: Well, probably they needed to fill a place. It was very small then. There were nineteen principals and thirty nonprincipals. And the ballet mistress made fifty.

RS: In times of trouble.

AK: In times of trouble. And there's always trouble in a ballet company.

RS: I remember those crazy performances of Symphony in C, where people would double from one movement to the next.

AK: Yes, they'd come running on again, with slightly different expressions on their faces.

RG: [laughs] Expressions of alarm, as I recall.

AK: [laughs] Panting, small pants.

RG: But that doesn't explain why it was you who was the chosen one.

AK: Well, here's the other thing: In those days, they didn't have school performances. And Balanchine recognized that I needed some sort of experience, or else the idea of performance would just be too far away. It would never become a reality if I just kept practicing and practicing. You have to experience the stage. And my first experience of it was a little shocking because it was on a professional stage; it wasn't even a school stage. It was at the City Center, where the New York City Ballet performed before it moved to Lincoln Center.

RG: You hadn't even been a mouse in a Nutcracker.

AK: Later, I achieved mousedom.

RG: But do you have any sense now what It was about you that so quickly inspired Balanchine to create roles for you? I mean, you were, what, seventeen?