‘Swan Dive’ proves-There’s artistic brawling in the ballet world

SAN FRANCISCO 2.24.2024

Growing up I was surrounded by the world of the San Francisco Ballet.

My parents were regular attendees of performances at the San Francisco Opera House. Had dancer friends. Were close with the SFB hierarchy. And took ballet lessons themselves.

My mom worked at the San Francisco Ballet School for many years.

While I never danced myself, I definitely respected the physical ability and attractiveness of ballet dancers. I find the book ‘Swan Dive – The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin’ utterly fascinating.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable engrossing read and definitely lays bare the tough world of professional ballet.

Excerpted from The New York Times 7.14.2021

The brave part wasn’t writing the book.

“The brave thing,” Georgina Pazcoguin said in an interview, “is going to be walking into the rehearsal studio Aug. 3.”

Like many ballet dancers these days (or so it seems), Pazcoguin has written a memoir. Hers is not timid. In “Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina,” this New York City Ballet soloist writes candidly about Peter Martins, the company’s former leader — she refers to him as her psychological abuser — as well as staff members and dancers, including Amar Ramasar, one of the male principals who lost his job after a photo-sharing scandal in 2018, and was later reinstated.

Pazcoguin now believes that part of the reason she was held back in the New York City Ballet company had to do with race. “A lot of feedback is presented in a correction,” she said. “Like you should correct this. Then you get the off comment, and you’re like, what? I can’t correct my features. And that’s when you’re like, what just happened?”

The company’s first female Asian American soloist — her father is Filipino and her mother is Italian — she is outspoken about her aim to bring equality to the ballet world. “Ballet is at a watershed moment,” said Pazcoguin, who with Phil Chan formed Final Bow for Yellowface, which aims to rid ballet of degrading and outdated depictions of Asian people. “We can either shift and become relevant or it’s going to fade off into the distance. That would be such a failure to me.”

Some of the experiences Pazcoguin relates are disturbing, others are just plain weird. She writes that for years, Ramasar would greet her in class “by sidling up close, whispering, ‘You look fine today,’ eyes locked on my chest, and then he’d zero in on the goal at hand by — surprise! — tweaking my nipples.” (In an email, Ramasar said “I flatly deny this allegation”; Martins didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

She writes about the time the repertory director Jean-Pierre Frohlich, rehearsing the dancers in Jerome Robbins’s “The Concert,” told them to imagine the beauty of spring and “women walking around in tank tops and short dresses, shorts! You know … ’” He paused, she writes, before ending “with this crazy bomb: ‘It’s amazing more women aren’t raped these days.’” (Frohlich said he hadn’t read the book and had no comment.)

Top photo: From left, Amar Ramasar, Robert Fairchild, Sara Mearns and Pazcoguin, who danced a villain role, in Peter Martins’s “Ocean’s Kingdom,” in 2011. Credit…Paul Kolnik