ATTITUDE ! - A new book by Katharine D Fishman

EXCERPTS FROM ATTITUDE!

INTRODUCTION

Talent has always intrigued me. When I was a child, I had a friend named Genie who was a violinist: she was never available for play dates on ordinary afternoons, and twice a year my family and I would troop over to The Mannes School, one of New York’s prime musical institutions, to see her onstage in a pink ruffled dress playing a precious antique instrument donated by a famous performer. I grew up in New York in the area that became Lincoln Center, and there were artists everywhere: actors in my apartment building, singers down the block, painters and writers in duplex studios across the street. For much of my life, my neighbors have been people who came to the city – from the far west, the deep south or the outer boroughs - to test their talent and get away from being different where they grew up.

Living here, I absorbed the New Yorker’s respect for those who are different and have the courage to exploit that eccentricity in positive ways. And over the years I came to wonder exactly how talent reveals itself, and what is necessary to keep it alive. Is talent something that must be grabbed in early childhood, as my friend and her parents had done, for fear of losing it forever? Did different kinds of talent develop in different ways?

As an adult, I wrote magazine articles about education and a book about child psychology and eventually developed a professional interest in how talent emerges. I set out to learn what happens to children who choose – or have someone else choose for them – to build their lives around their talent. The conventional assumption is that these children sacrifice the pleasures of “normal” childhood and adolescence and are given over to the supervision of merciless, knuckle-rapping maestros.

I started my quest by reading about child prodigies, the most sensational type of talented people, but quickly discovered that prodigies don’t often stick to their original bent. The more I learned about these young children with adult-sized talents, the less they seemed to tell me about the “normally” talented people in whom I was most interested: people whose skill and enthusiasm began to gather steam just before adolescence, until at some point shortly after they made a more mature – though still early - decision to invest their whole selves in one domain.

Then, as I was mulling over the sacrifices demanded by talent, events in the news brought in the idea that these days the standard teenage life of hanging out and mall- shopping was not necessarily an easier path. The school shootings at Columbine touched off what seemed like an epidemic of youth crime in hitherto placid settings. Magazines and newspapers began to run articles on the sociology of high school lunchrooms. Both the in-groups and the out-groups seemed directionless and cruel. And teenage society appeared especially rough on kids who were “different” - in anything from their clothes to their music to the way they spent their afternoons, evenings and weekends. In this situation, how could a young artist wrapped up for hours in practice and rehearsal make friends, let alone keep them?

Around this time, as a writer who had expressed interest in talented teenagers, I was invited to a concert of classical music at Professional Children’s School, a private middle and high school for performers and athletes in New York City. The performance was sophisticated and ardent. To make music on this level you had to give your youth to it – as had my friend Genie, who was, in fact, a PCS alumna. One performer, a countertenor – a male soprano – was, of all things, president of the student council. I talked to him at the post-concert reception, and he turned out to be just like every student-council-president I’d ever met, from the big wheels of my own high school days to the achievers trotted out for me when I was writing articles on education – relentlessly upbeat, outgoing, handshaking, room-working, vote-getting – except he happened to sing soprano. What was this environment in which a male soprano was considered not just acceptable but cool, and where – in between mastering measures of Rameau - he could polish his networking skills, rise through the political ranks and become a student leader? Here was a kid who was different, and seemed to revel in it. So, apparently, did his classmates.

I began to make calls, and eventually arrived at the doorstep of The Ailey School, on Amsterdam Avenue and Alvin Ailey Place – actually Sixty-first Street, just south of Lincoln Center. This is the official school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, arguably the most distinguished modern dance company in the world. Although the school does not feed directly into the First Company (as Ailey people call it), twenty-six of the thirty-one dancers in the company have spent at least some time studying at its school.

I did not come to Ailey as either a dancer manquée or an addicted spectator. As a child, I had been sent to classes in modern dance, but for me this was meant to be a remedial measure: my mother had hoped that a few years of skipping around with an elderly, tunic-clad disciple of Isadora Duncan would help my coordination and teach me left from right. No such luck. And while – over years as a New Yorker – I had sometimes enjoyed watching dancers perform, it was the atmosphere of The Ailey School, and what I thought I might learn there about talent as a governing principle in life, that drew me in.

While musicians spend much of their time practicing alone, dancers have to come together daily with their peers, and those at Ailey, I saw, formed a community that began with five-year-olds and made a pyramid whose summit was Judith Jamison, the company’s Artistic Director, who no longer performs but has made an enviable life in dance. Everyone higher up that pyramid had once been where today’s teenage dancers were now. Young students could see their progress colorfully displayed: for girls, pale pink leotards at Level I, white at Level II, light blue at Level III, navy at Level IV, maroon at Level V, lavender at Level VI, black at Level VII and for the older female students. The boys were fixed eternally in white tee-shirts and black tights: illustrating one unfortunate feature of the classical dance world (though, to be fair, less a characteristic of Ailey and other modern dance companies), they derive visual status only from the reflected glory of their female classmates.

I began to visit Ailey more often and at last decided to spend a year there, following a particular group of teenage students. I hoped to see, up close, the texture of the life they had chosen. I asked the school to introduce me to a diverse group of advanced high school students whose talent appeared promising, who weren’t shy, and who had families who were likely to cooperate with me in interviews. Between September, 2001 and June, 2002 I went to Ailey two or three times a week, sat in classes and talked with students, faculty, and parents. This book is the result of that year.

I came in with a number of questions about the lives of teenagers in the dance world, and not surprisingly, more occurred as time went on. I wanted to see how these kids were both like and unlike “ordinary” kids. Would the Ailey environment affect individuals differently according to their temperament and background?

What makes a talented dancer, I wondered? What is physical, what is intellectual, what is emotional, and is there a particular style of acquiring knowledge in this field? How – and how early – does dance talent show itself? How does an expert pick it up? Were the Ailey teachers, for example, capable of predicting which of the students I watched were likely to succeed?

I wanted to learn more about the role families play, both genetically and in terms of nurturing talent. What sacrifices did those families make to encourage their child’s dancing career?

At a time when teenagers’ bodies are changing and their self-confidence is low, these kids live in a world in which the nature – as well as the look – of the body governs the dancer’s success. They face frequent injury and must make mature decisions about when to dance through it, when to sit it out, and when to seek treatment. Are they ground down by the tyranny of their bodies, I wondered? How do they spend eighteen and more hours a week dancing at Ailey and working for their scholarships while getting their schoolwork done and getting some sleep?

Finally, I was curious about how a life in dance – and indeed, deciding to be a dancer - differs for boys and girls. And how do these particular teenagers, who would be so sensitive to adult scrutiny under normal circumstances, deal with being constantly corrected, evaluated, and rejected? Almost immediately, I was drawn to a word recurrent in the Ailey lexicon, a word with two specific meanings and multiple shades of meaning.

Attitude!

First, attitude is a ballet term that goes back several hundred years and is used in modern dance as well: in the dictionary definition, “One leg is bent either behind the dancer or in front…the supporting leg is either bent or straight.” A lovely ah-titude, requests Tatiana Litvinova, the school’s Russian ballerina, of her students; “Attitude! Attitude!” shouts a modern choreographer as part of a difficult combination. But “Attitude” also comes up fairly often in the sense we know better, as something you need a little bit of to survive but had better not have too much of to succeed. Very often among teenagers at The Ailey School, the attitude required titrating.

I began to focus on the eight students you will get to know in these pages: Brian Brown, Beatrice Capote, Afra Hines, Laurence Jacques, Travis Magee, Monique Massiah, Frajan Payne, and Shamel Pitts. During the year I met and talked with other students and many teachers – and they, too, appear in the story. I also visited some of the students’ schools and homes. It was reassuring to discover that neither faculty nor students nor staff nor performers (except Jamison herself ) seemed to have been prepped for me: I had to explain repeatedly who I was and what I was doing.

Indeed, in the several decades I have worked as a reporter, no institution has ever afforded me such freedom to roam the halls on my own and learn what I could. Cynic that I am, I suspect that some of this benign neglect was inadvertent, but it also seemed true that the Ailey people were proud of their school and curious what an outsider would make of it.

After my first few visits to Ailey I began to read more about ballet instruction, which was given at every level in this modern-dance company’s training school. It seemed that while there are three major ballet techniques – the French, the Russian, and the Italian – ballet classes have, overall, been more or less the same for two hundred years. As I watched these wholly contemporary teenagers, their Jansport backpacks piled in the corner, immersed day after day in a regime that would not seem strange to a seventeenth-century Frenchman, I wondered what keeps them doing it. Are there benefits we haven’t thought of? Is there something this guild offers its apprentices that might be imported into the outside world?