[28/50] Counting down 52 NYCB Nutcrackers this year with stories from NYCB dancers past and present! Today we hear from Gavin Larsen, who was an SAB student from SAB 1986-1992:
[Part 1]
“When my first ballet school, the New York School of Ballet, closed suddenly, I was left with nowhere to train. The school year had already started and SAB's main auditions long past, but I was allowed to do a small private audition with a few other kids and was accepted into Children's 4 and told to start classes the very next day. I had no idea what was going on when all my new classmates couldn't stop talking about the upcoming Nutcracker auditions. Completely clueless about what I was getting into or how big a deal it was, I just went along with everyone else to the audition, after I’d been at the school only a couple of weeks. I was cast as a boy Polichinelle and a mouse by Garielle Whittle, who was this imposing, all-business, utterly multi-talented woman who would come to be one of the biggest influences on my dancing to this day.
“The way Garielle drilled us in the choreography, down to every foot placement, head angle, arm position, and line formation, instilled in me an attention to detail and precision that shaped the way I danced, then and forever. I will never forget her insistence on how to point your foot, plie, and stretch your leg before stepping into B+. No matter what, you never ever slide on a flat foot on stage!
“But for as much a drill sergeant as she was (I remember her making us do the entire Polichinelle dance, and then the hoop dance when I did that role the next year, one at a time in rehearsal one day), Garielle also taught me and my fellow young performers the magnificence, magnitude, and honor of being on stage. The dignity we were to carry as even young kids, next to the best dancers on earth-- the New York City Ballet professionals. As a former NYCB dancer herself, she still carried that dignity as she taught us our steps, how to be on stage, and how to be backstage, balancing total preparation with joy and delight.”
“When we got into the New York State Theater for our first rehearsals on stage with the company, I was immediately hooked-- although I was a very unseasoned performer next to my other 4th Division friends, who'd all been in Nutcracker and other ballets before, I hung by them and learned the ins and outs of the theater quickly. The smell, the aura, the chill of the halls but the warmth of the stage lights. Being in the wings with the NYCB dancers, waiting for our entrance in Act 2, I could not take my eyes off their every move. I even eavesdropped, picking up snippets of conversation and comments that, like Garielle's training, informed me piece by small piece, of what it meant to be a dancer. ‘Always have to finish on the music….' I heard one dancer say, watching the lead Marzipan Shepherdess almost do a triple stepover turn at the end of the divertissement-- but there wasn't quite time, and if she'd hung on for a third rotation, she'd have been late. That, like the perfect way to step into B+, never left me.
“I fully, 100% credit my first Nutcracker (and subsequent ones, as well as being in other children's roles later on) with planting the seed of knowing that I would, and had to become, a professional dancer. The theater was my home, and dance was my life.”
Photos with Brian Simcoe at Oregon Ballet Theatre
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