Nothing is quite like the experience of watching a ballet dancer get injured onstage. Sometimes, when it happens, you’re not sure at first that it really did happen. Even if the dancer crawls offstage (I’ve seen it), it could be part of the choreography, no? Once, at American Ballet Theatre, I was watching Antony Tudor’s “Lilac Garden,” which is about a sort of engagement party. The tall, grand Martine van Hamel was playing “An Episode in His Past,” (the cast-off mistress of the groom) and Richard Schafer was the groom. At one point, van Hamel, pleading with Schafer, fell into his arms, and he lifted her. As he did so, van Hamel whispered to him that she had hurt her foot (in fact, she had broken it) and that he should please carry her into the wings. He obliged, and after a few seconds, the curtain came down. The woman in front of me said to her friend, “Well, I guess that’s how it ends.” I knew it wasn’t how the ballet was supposed to end, and, for all of us, it was terrible to have the piece cut off like that, with no explanation. In opera, there’s always somebody in a suit coming out in front of the curtain to say that the tenor has a sore throat tonight and begs your indulgence. I wish the same thing would happen in the case of ballet injuries—that someone from management would come out and tell us that, yes, what you thought you saw did in fact happen, and that the dancer was with a doctor. And, if she was replaced, the name of the person who stepped in. That way, you could settle it in your mind, and talk about it at intermission.
But the experience is hard to assimilate no matter what, because your feelings are often mixed. For the audience, shamefully, an onstage injury is not just a misfortune. It’s also an adventure, like something in a movie. The element of surprise is huge. Ballet dancers are physical heroes, so when they’re felled, it seems as though there’s been an alteration in the universe. Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has a rousing hunt passage where, in a drifting mist, Hippolyta—the Amazon queen, in a red cape—comes tearing across the stage in grands jetés, again and again. Then, in culmination, she does a long, flashy series of fouettés. (Those are the turns, with the leg whipping in and out, that the Black Swan in “Swan Lake” is supposed to do thirty-two of.) I once saw a dancer—I can’t remember who—fall on her rear in the middle of the fouettés and drag herself offstage. I even thought I heard a crack. I’ve never been so shocked in my life. The fall was clearly not as bad as it looked, because the dancer reappeared in the final moments of the act. You could actually hear the audience relax and sit back in their seats when they saw her again. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is an exciting ballet, but that fall was the biggest drama of the evening.
Last Saturday night, in the middle of a duet in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia,” Jennie Somogyi, a dancer of extreme purity, suddenly stopped, turned to her left, and hobbled offstage. Once she was gone, her partner, Gonzalo Garcia, tooled around for a few moments, and then he, too, exited. “Polyphonia” is a piano ballet, and the pianist, Alan Moverman, went on playing, thereby, it seemed, promising the audience that everything was going to be O.K. It was. The next section was supposed to be a trio that included Somogyi, but the two other women valiantly turned it into a duet. A few minutes later, Tiler Peck, a superb dancer who wasn’t cast in “Polyphonia” but had danced it before, was onstage, in costume, performing Somogyi’s role. Peck had been in the first ballet that night, Wheeldon’s “Les Carillons.” What I was told by New York City Ballet’s communications director, Rob Daniels, is that after “Les Carillons,” Peck went backstage to have her hair and makeup redone, because she was going to dance in the third ballet of the program. As she was walking back to her dressing room, a call came over the loudspeaker: “Tiler Peck, to the stage.” Peck hadn’t rehearsed “Polyphonia” recently, but she quickly betook herself to the wings. The staff got her into a leotard and put her in pointe shoes. Out she went, and she completed Somogyi’s assignment. I get tired of hearing that old business about how the show must go on, but it truly is touching to see how a company makes it go on, no matter what they’re coping with.
Kelly Ryan, the press director of American Ballet Theatre, says that, because of the depth of the company’s casting (how many people have been taught a given part), a second for any important role is more or less always in the house. Rob Daniels at N.Y.C.B. says there’s often somebody backstage who can replace an injured dancer. (But often is not always. What if Peck had not been cast in the third ballet, and had headed home? She could never have returned to the theatre in time to replace Somogyi.) Also, both press representatives say that at every performance there is a doctor in the house—usually in the auditorium, watching the show—as well as at least one of the company’s physical therapists.
Somogyi, who is thirty-four, is a dancer whom we don’t see enough of. I don’t know why that was true in her early years, but in 2004 she ruptured a tendon in her left foot during a performance and was out for a year and a half. The morning after the “Polyphonia” incident, we found out that this time it was her right foot. She had torn the Achilles tendon. She went onto the operating table Tuesday.
Illustration by Yuko Shimizu.