But how would Griffin Colapinto fare as a
ballerina?
But of all the most gracious, most beautiful
arts there are on the face of this gorgeous earth, where do you
place professional competitive surfing? For my money, it sits right
above collegiate ice hockey, right below light welterweight boxing,
nowhere near ballet which just so happens to occupy the absolute
peak of perfection.
My love for the ephemeral, yet dictatorial, dance has been
growing steadily over the past three years, a product of my young
daughter’s being caught in its snare, I suppose. When she was an
infant, the wife of a wonderful surf industry friend stretched out
her baby leg and said “she will dance ballet.” I disregarded,
imagining her reaching fame and fortune synchronized swimming or
being a jockey (she liked to swim wearing makeup and ride horses as
fast as she could until instructors screamed after the safety of
their beasts).
Maybe even a professional snowboarder even though my
ex-professional snowboard wife declared that would only happen over
her (wife’s) dead body. An extremely high price to pay, all things
considered.
Destiny, thankfully, is destiny and she took a ballet class,
then another, then became impossibly trapped. Ballet chooses the
dancer, they say, not the other way around but it also must choose
the dancer’s father and this past year has found me reading
everything I could, watching everything I could, learning
everything I could.
Obsessed. A full balletomane.
The Mariinsky, Sylvie Guillem, Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky, Rudolf
Nuryev, arabesques, France, Russia, Italy, the
Staatsballet, Mother Ginger
etc. ad infinitum.
So there I was in Copenhagen, down a deep rock n’ roll
hole but salvation was nigh for I knew, through
research, that the Royal Danish Ballet would be performing outdoors
in the evening, just off the harbor, on the perfectly designed
porch of their opera house, and the grime of Gloryhammer would be
washed right away.
We showed up early, thanks to inside information from
Copenhagen’s most famous woman, in order to watch the dancers warm
up on the barre to gentle plunks from a piano. Our spot on the
cement, slightly stage left, perfect. The sky, overhead, filling
with clouds. We sat on that slightly stage left patch of cement,
young daughter on lap, and felt the hammer of glory. Have you ever
heard toe shoes clicking on a stage floor? That is exactly what it
is.
The rock hammer of glory.
The warm-ups lasted for an hour and a half, or such, the dancers
filed into a black tent off to the side and the director came to
the front, telling the audience, which had swelled to the
thousands, that light rain, sprinkling for fifteen minutes or so,
would delay the beginning of the program, slightly. Taking a toe
shoe and banging it on the floor for emphasis. Or at least that’s
what I imagined he told the audience as the whole exchange occurred
in Danish.
I sat, young daughter on lap, for a further ten minutes then
decided to stand and stretch, to prepare my soul, except when I
stood, I could not feel my left leg and decided that stepping with
it would return sensation. Next thing I heard was a quick pop, pop,
pop emanating from my ankle and I was suddenly sitting in a heap on
our patch of cement, thoroughly embarrassed.
The Royal Danish ballet took the stage soon after my collapse
and I watched them come out in their beauty and watched my ankle
turn a hideous purple, puffing like a balloon, like a diabetic
hoof. Well what to do? Damn it. I made the regrettable decision to
hobble to the hospital, imagining those pop, pop, pops must have
been breaking bone.
My young daughter stayed, thankfully, and thoroughly enjoyed the
performance, getting to see rare pas de deux due the Danish crown’s
largesse. I FaceTimed her from the waiting room and she gushed
about Balanchine. Everything wonderful except me missing. The
doctor told me I had snapped a handful of ligaments, not bone,
after a quick X-ray, and I was out the door, hobbling, happy that I
had been injured ballet-adjacent and wondering how Griffin
Colapinto would fare as a ballerina.
Filipe Toledo, spins and all, is simply too short no matter what
enthusiastic Brazilian fans say.
