San Francisco Ballet. - Balancing acts: three prima ballerinas becoming mothers

HILTON ALS

I think it was the late poet and publisher Patrick OConnor who was the first person to take me to see live ballet; I was still in my teens, but he wasnt the first person in my life to love dancemy mother was, but she didnt have access to tickets, she wouldnt have known how to get to Lincoln Center unaided, but we had a television set, and that was our portal into the world of culture our mother adored; she had six children, and there was no money, but among the vital things she taught us in our relatively limited world was that poverty didnt mean shit when it came to the imagination, poverty cant kill your dreams, or curtail anything; art making was a way to transcend the worlds strictures, and how exciting was it that there was an artthe dancethat celebrated the body in space and the bodys ability to change the atmosphere; and I remember now, as I try to write this sentence that is an attempt to linguistically approximate the joy one finds in Lucy Grays evocative photographs of women as mothers, as dancers, as performers, as choreographers, as musessometimes all at once, because thats what these women look like, one beautiful sentence unwinding in an atmosphere of work and play and realized enjoymentthe enjoyment one feels doing what one means to doa sentence thats tied to the rise and fall of the breath, which these dancers understand, too; its their breathing that informs the danceI can hear their breath in these pictures (cant you?); in any case, in those old but not forgotten days of my mother and the television and her dreams, I remember hearing, from another relative, that my mother had wanted to be a dancer when she was a girlshe loved social dancing more than anything, they called her the girl of a hundred steps, and in my imagination I see her unwinding like a ribbon at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem (this would have been in the 1940s and right after the war); she was a girl then, wearing saddle shoes and bobby sox, and maybe she had on a little black skirt, tooshe liked blackand maybe she had a ribbon in her hair, the way certain of the prima ballerinas in Lucy Grays book wear ribbons, but unlike the dancers who mother in Grays pictures, my mother had to be her own prima ballerina; there was no choreographer who contributed to the dance of her life, but dance she did; years passed, and I met a gay man named Patrick OConnor who loved glamour and movement; he took me to the New York City Ballet and appeared to be so interested in what I had to say about the performance that it was as if someone had turned an enormous spotlight on mehis attention exposed my brain to itself, like a flower looking at itself, and what we watched in those New York City Ballet afternoons and evenings were ballerinas like Darci Kistler and Lourdes Lopez andwho else? well, it was a world only Joseph Cornell could have imagined, all that fairy dust and the sound of wooden pointe on the floor, the perspiration dancers wear like a second coat of makeup; and it was through Patrick that I met the great dance critic Edwin Denby, who was thin and beautiful and white-hairedPatrick had published his books in paper-backand when I wrote him a fan letter to thank him for his work, asking Could I see him? Edwin Denby told Patrick that as much as he loved the young, and my note, he was too old to make new friends, but there was his work, and in those marvelous pieces, there were descriptions of the prima ballerina, and how important it was to look at her line and openness of expression, and one sees what Denby described in his books in Lucy Grays photographs, an openness of expression thats italicized by the openness of expression one sees in the dancers children, their sweet desire to emulate their mothers in their toddler- sized awkwardnesswhat a dream for a boy or a little girl, to have access to this world of make-believe, just as I had access to my mothers make- believe as she watched Margot Fonteyn or whomever on television dancing, dancing, dancing, as if there were no such thing as unhappiness in this world, dancing as though there were no tomorrow, but the dancers in Lucy Grays images know theres a tomorrow: its standing, sometimes, right in front of them, baby legs stretching to meet a mothers legs, legs that can perform feats their baby legs cant (and isnt that a mother, the woman who can perform feats your baby legs can never catch up to?); one of the great things about Lucy Grays images are that they are free of competitionall of the dancers captured are supporting their colleagues right to movement, since their freedom informs their ownbut they are not free of joy, which is essential if you want to mother, if you want to dance, if you want to become anything; joy is what carries you through the hard work of living, the hard work that must go into the imagination to make the dream real; in 1944 Marianne Moore, writing of the legendary Anna Pavlova and the exacting discipline of dance, said: [Pavlova] was compelling because of spiritual force that did not need to be mystery, she so affectionately informed her technique with poetry; and isnt that the point of anything: to inform it with poetry, whether that poetry be a mothers dreams for her children, or a stagestruck gay mans dreams for his adopted child, or the poetry one sees in Lucy Grays subjects grown-up or baby faces?

When I first started this project, I was a working mother, like the ballerinas in this book, although my boys were a few years older than their newborns. From the start we had a natural affinity and, yes, we did talk about our children, but I was not inspired by our likenesses. It was our differences that made me want to photograph these women and keep at it for fourteen years. It was my hope, even my intention, that they would reframe my views, open my mind, and help me let go of prejudice. They did not disappoint.