4/7/2023 0 Comments Onstage glenview![]() ![]() (When teaching young American dancers his Russian-influenced stagings of the classics, Rose recalls wryly, Baryshnikov “would mimic you, which was not very nice. And he brought in a lot of new ballets, new ideas. ![]() “He liked using younger people, trying them out in new roles. Baryshnikov’s emphasis on young dancers whom he could shape into what he wanted proved a boon for Rose. Though she was hired by Chase, Rose soon found herself answering to a new boss–Mikhail Baryshnikov, who took over ABT when Chase retired and ran the company until last September, when he left after a bitter showdown with the troupe’s board over finances. If you’re very young, it can all be kind of intimidating.” And it can be very stressful, living in close quarters on the road. A lot of times we’re in the worst sections of town–the theater’s in the porno district or something. You’re on your own a lot here, you’re responsible for doing your own makeup, your own warm-up, feeding yourself. They don’t know how to put on stage makeup or do a warm-up. You know, some people come to this company never having had a recital. “It depends on the kind of life-style you’ve had, whether you’ve ever performed on a big stage. “It’s different for everybody,” says Rose. Though ballet requires youthful performers, it also presents intense pressures to kids who may have spent their whole childhoods buried in the rigid technical training the art demands. She had hired a 15-year-old a year before me who had had a complete nervous breakdown, so Lucia said, ‘Never again.’ But they never asked me how old I was, and I didn’t tell them.” Lucky for me, Lucia Chase didn’t know I was just 16 at the time. After a long tour people leave–they get injured, or tired, or whatever–and I happened to be right there at the time. “The company was just coming off tour, and they needed people. Rose joined ABT in 1979 at age 16, “by luck and by chance,” she says, with the nervous giggle that punctuates much of her conversation. Rose also makes her debut in the female lead of de Mille’s latest work, The Informer, in its February 14 matinee performance. Rose is featured in several works, including Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs on an all-Tharp program February 8 and Agnes de Mille’s classic piece of Americana, Rodeo, on February 15. Today, at 27, Rose is a soloist with ABT, the nation’s premiere classical dance company, which is appearing now at the Civic Center for the Performing Arts. She’d studied under the superb teacher Larry Long at Chicago’s Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance since she was 11, and had danced lead roles in Page’s annual Nutcracker at the Arie Crown she knew what she wanted, and unlike many in the competitive and highly emotional world of dance, she got it. She finished her schoolwork in correspondence studies with Indiana University–“the toughest correspondence school we could find,” says her mother Loretta–while studying dance and waiting to audition for American Ballet Theatre. So at 16 Rose picked up and headed to New York. Another girl before me, Lynn-Holly Johnson, the ice skater, had the same problems, and she left too.” “But they made it so difficult, by not letting me out of gym and things like that, that I just left. ![]() “I wanted to graduate after three years,” Rose remembers. But the powers at Niles North High School were not, she says. Her family was supportive–after all, they had started her in dance classes when she was four years old. So when Glenview teenager Amy Rose knew that she wanted to pursue a dance career, she figured she’d better do it while she was still young. While exceptional artists who’ve been able to dance in middle age do come to mind–Margot Fonteyn, Natalia Makarova–ballet is a young person’s profession. The work life of any dancer, especially a classical ballerina, is very short.
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