The Tamesis
I grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, a western ski town nestled among rolling hills alternately covered with sagebrush and snow, and surrounded by majestic mountains. One day, my mom received a VHS tape in a padded manila envelope in the mail. The footage shows her riding a mountain bike at blurry speeds while being chased by a black bear. It turns out that some people in the camper had been feeding and photographing the bear from the beginning. As my mom innocently rode by, I suddenly decided she could make better snacks. Fortunately, she was able to speed away and into the safety of the camper while they captured the harrowing scene on camera. So Idaho.
Mom grew up in extreme poverty in a small village near the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where the sun shines in the summer and freezes in twilight and darkness in the winter. She and her sisters would ski to the one-room schoolhouse where children of all ages studied together. Now in her 70s, she’s still a fierce Nordic skier. Skiing 25 kilometers is her average weekday jaunt. She excelled academically, which provided her with a ticket to the wider world. She became the first in her family to graduate from college, attending Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (basically the Swedish equivalent of MIT) and became the only woman in her class to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering. During a business trip to HP in Sun Valley, she met my musician father on a ski lift. They skied together for a few days, and eventually she moved to the United States, where they lived in a trailer shared by the two of them, Dad’s golden retriever, and, soon after, my brother and I.
She slept with me in a sleeping bag when I was a baby—there was no distance between us and the stars—and taught my brother and I to forage for berries and mushrooms once we learned to walk. Mom’s love of nature and adventure, athleticism and perseverance are qualities I think I inherited from her and subconsciously translated into my experience as a ballet dancer – since 2014, I’ve been a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater. When I dance, I often think of the sense of fascination I felt while hiking in the wilderness or stargazing in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, which helps me convey my emotions to my ballerinas. The back row of the opera house. The sense of awe experienced when listening to a live orchestra is strikingly similar to drinking wine or smelling the aroma of earth and pine trees in a beautiful landscape.
As I got older, my mom drove me to endless ballet classes, sewed ribbons on my first pair of pointe shoes, and made my costumes on the sewing machine in our basement. (By then, we had moved to another beautiful mountain town, Boulder, Colorado.) She almost never wore makeup, so she tried doing my makeup for a recital, and I ended up looking no different than Aunt Gladys in the movie. arms. During my teenage years, my intense love for her would sometimes be replaced by intense rage, like the time she gave me a bad haircut and I locked myself in the bathroom and let out a wordless, blood-curdling scream while banging my hairbrush on the counter.
Perhaps the most useful thing I inherited from my mother was her courage and determination. Any professional ballet dancer you meet has an exceptional ability to work hard and endure frustration and physical pain.
But that inner fire keeps me going even on my worst days—from doing 32 turns on an ankle with torn ligaments to showing up to morning ballet class on a sleep-deprived schedule with calcified joints from performing. Swan Lake the night before. This determination also led me to finish ABT’s notoriously difficult The Nutcracker when I was three months pregnant – one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I will never forget how thrilling it was to play Tchaikovsky’s most romantic Adagio in front of a packed house while my baby was secretly on stage with me.
