Gelsey Kirkland: American Ballet Dancer

A Semi-Related Thread

Bump.

I read her bio: Dancing on My Grave which details her drug abuse.

She was certainly a beautiful dance but hit over and over with the ugly stick

Really really mentally troubled. Reading that book, she was just a bottomless well of illness and resentment.

I'm going to check out her book now.

Her Nutcracker with Baryshnikov is often televised at Christmas time. A great performance.

Incredibly fabulous dancer though. I saw her do "La Sonnambula" (The "Sleepwalker) at ABT years ago, and the way she moved it was like her feet were barely touching the floor, almost like a hovercraft, yet so graceful and animated. I believe she is ranked among the greatest of all time. But she must have been nuts: at that same performance, people threw her flowers at the ovation, and she through them back into the audience (two times if I'm not mistaken). Baryshnikov was also on the program that night in another ballet, but Kirkland was the dancer who blew me away that night.

Unfortunately Kirkland's landmark performance in "Giselle" is not publicly available. The only thing on YT is this solo...obviously. Simply amazing but what a total cunt. She once got into an argument with her pas de deux partner right before a number and performed it as a solo.

[quote]Incredibly fabulous dancer though. I saw her do "La Sonnambula" (The "Sleepwalker) at ABT years ago, and the way she moved it was like her feet were barely touching the floor, almost like a hovercraft, yet so graceful and animated. I believe she is ranked among the greatest of all time.

She hated Balanchine with every fiber in her being. Hated every piece of choreography he ever did. She absolutely trashes him in her book, implying he was a creeper who liked to feel up the dancers in exchange for gifts, among other claims. Not a single person has backed up her up. Not one.

She trashed [italic]a lot[/italic] of people in that book. Many years later when she was asked if she had any regrets about some of the things she said, her reply was basically, I probably went too far. Oh, well.

How did she have the energy to dance on no food?

Yes, the blow, but eventually don’t your adrenals just give out until you rest and recharge?

I’m also going to check out her book!

My favorite part of the book is towards the end when she's with the man who will become her first husband and the co-writer of her book. They meet pounding on the door of their mutual drug dealer. They then spend weeks snorting coke and bonding over their drug induced grandiosity and pretentiousness. It's pretty funny.

My favorite part of the book is when her stockbroker/boyfriend/pusher asks her "have you ever had cocaine up your ass?" BTW, did you know that Jackie Onassis was the editor of this book?

I liked when Heather Watts told her that Peter Martins said that sex with Kirkland was like masturbation.

Heather Watts is so cool. It speaks volumes that she’s friends with everybody, young and old in the dance community, but Kirkland is friends with no one.

Needless to say, Watts does not come across well in the book.

Didn't Martins beat the hell out of Watts on a regular basis?

Watts only speaks of Martins fondly so I'm going to say no, he didn't. They had a tempestuous fiery relationship, but that does not equal abuse.

Gelsey was Jackie O's first big celebrity auto bio. She almost ghost wrote the book.

I have very little to add, but I am so here for this.

So much plastic surgery! So many drugs! So much fucking! Dancers are not celebrities anymore.

So envious of R7. I would like to have seen her Giselle as well.

I was a ballet dancer as a younger man, before an injury, and took class from Baryshnikov. He complimented my jumps and I nearly died on the spot.

There is a scene Gelsey describes in the book where she works with a young dancer teaching him how to approach and kiss her character---I can't recall for which ballet this was. Over and over and over they practiced this one moment. At one point the dancer wails, I'm so afraid you'll give up on me! Kelsey used that as an example of a dancer who was grateful for her guidance and attention to detail.

The dancer was Robert LaFosse who said in [italic]his[/italic] book that that wasn't exactly how it went down. He said that he was beyond exasperated with her obsessive compulsive need to rehearse the most minute details for hours on end. And that having to kiss her over and over, when she had destroyed her lips to the point of grotesqueness, was really unpleasant.

The two words on everybody’s lips: Gelsey. Kirkland.

Fosse, not LaFosse was a cocaine pal and he wanted to get her in "Dancin'" and create a ballet number for her. I would have loved to see what Fosse would have done with ballet. I think Kirkland in "The Dream Barre" would have been hilarious.

She and her ex-husband are such pretentious snobs. When they were trying to get off drugs, she said they only listened to classical music and read classic literature because they wouldn't be able "to reclaim our lives by staring at soap operas and listening to rock and roll music." Her ex-husband later squeezed out a career on dance biois like Donna Mckechnie and Jerome Robbins.

Getting her book!

I loved her book but it was a long time ago. I forget the title.

She did two. The famous Dancing on My Grave, and a little known follow up The Shape of Love.

Her dad was an author but only had success with his Broadway adaptation of "Tobacco Road."

Speaking of dads, did you know that Allegra Kent's dad was on the Gong Show. He told some weird story and began cracking raw eggs on his head.

Dancers were reknown until the 70s when they became celebrities but dance was a quick causualty of the 80s.

Glasnost ended the Russian defector superstar dancer period of ballet.

Gelsey

I ordered her book and it just arrived!

Woo!Woo! Report back after you have read it.

My middle name is Gelsey.

Great dancer but based on my impression of her book OCD as hell. Exhausting. Her book was exhausting. That said, I believe her crazy allowed people to dismiss some of the stuff she said. I don't think people cared she was drugged up, or tempermental, or obsessed. They cared that she called out Mikhail Barishnykov, Peter Martins and Balanchine, and it was really easy to crucify her and say her claims were baseless. I think she was probably right about all of them, and if she had been as sober as a judge and the most reliable dancer who ever danced, she would still have been crucified for daring to call out the sacred male icons of dance, not only as personalities, but as talents.

The most interesting part of her book, for me, or rather the two most interesting parts, was she was obsessed with Natalia Makarova, envying so many qualities Makarova had, even stealing a piece of fabric from a costume once hoping it would help, but she had no reason to think herself second to Makaravoa. The second was when she talked about studying the Alexander technique, which is basically what anyone who wants to move properly now studies in some derived form or other - initiating everything from the core, using your entire body to move, opening your chest and pelvis, keeping your spine aligned, etc., understanding your own alignment before you challenge your range of motion, etc. According to her book, the ballet companies and choreographers were purely results oriented, didn't care how you got there, and that's why so many dancers ruined their bodies. It seems to have been a very unsophisticated era in that way.

It's evident from reading her book that she had (has?) serious mental problems; the anorexia, the obsessive compulsion to be perfect, the drug addiction. The book is all complaints and whining. She makes merciless fun of Barishnykov's Russian accent and sneers at his admiration for dancers like Fred Astaire. She meets her true love Greg Lawrence (I think that's what she considered him then; they eventually divorced) when they both show up at a drug dealer's place looking to score. He's the man who "saves" her; she kicks her drug habit when they hole up in some country home and read great books and listen to classical music. Yes, that's supposedly how she got off drugs. Anyway, her book is interesting but it reveals what an absolute pill she was.

In the 60 Minutes piece on her she looks rather ghastly; those silicone stuffed lips look like a pair of squashed slugs. And her voice is as grating as nails on a blackboard. I don't think age has improved her appearance any.

Well, I will say even one page into Chapter 1 it’s already a little exhausting R34. Some of these sentences just make me roll my eyes.

Talking about her childhood— “In recollecting that vanished time during the fifties when we lived on the family farm, I hold a picture framed by a little girl’s innocent hands. Those years left their mark, like a smudged fingerprint on the heart. Each fragmentary image is a clue to the mysterious continuity of love. The line of devotion can be traced back in our family to the romance that brought my father and mother together.”

The parts about Marakova and the Alexander technique sound fascinating. Can’t wait until I get to those.

I’m not even close to the part where she meets Barishnykov yet, but I did find it interesting that she put a note at the beginning of the book about the accents. “Note: A few of the names have been changed for the usual literary or legal reasons and are introduced with quotation marks on first appearance. My efforts to render foreign accents are not intended to ridicule any person or national group, but to lend authenticity to the voices as I heard them. Some of the individuals recalled in this book have in fact won acclaim in the stage or in films, for those readers who might wish to hear the real voices for themselves.” I was wondering what that was about.

People don't celebrate Makarova enough...