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- Caption: JULIE KENT
- Description:
There is, in her dancing, a quality of longing that suggests a woman in search of love. And that quiet yearning inevitably captures the audience's hopes, whether Kent dances as a princess, swan queen, sugarplum fairy or contemporary woman. Kent's technical abilities and aesthetic have seen a gradual flowering over the course of her career, and a new confidence has recently given her a more fluid technique. Now at the height of her powers, she gives performances that set the standard for excellence. Kent embodies a ballet ideal - beautiful, with a haunting, otherworldly quality, yet romantic and accessibly human.
As a child, Kent observed her mother in ballet class, and began lessons herself at age eight with Hortensia Fonseca at the Maryland Youth Ballet School. "Fonseca was at that time producing dancers who were coming to American Ballet Theatre - like Susan Jaffe, Cheryl Yeager, and her son, Peter Fonseca. She herself was a beautiful dancer, and she gave me a real concept of the beauty of the classical ballet line." Kent credits Fonseca with excellent training, specifically in terms of
pointe. "I think learning how to dance on pointe is the single most important thing in the training of a dancer. You really have to know how to support your body weight with your foot, to stand on your toes, not just sink into the shoe or let the shoe hold you up. Fonseca was very careful about the age she would put the girls on pointe - often we would wear the shoes for 15 minutes at a time, just do half pointe in the shoes to get the strength in the ankle to the feet, to the toes."
After attending American Ballet Theater's II's summer session and the School of American Ballet, Kent joined the company as an apprentice in 1985. The next year, she won a medal at the Prix de Lausanne. In 1990, she became a soloist, and three years later was named a principal dancer and won the Erik Bruhn Prize at The National Ballet of Canada's competition. "I feel that American Ballet Theater has brought me up. Mikhail Baryshnikov had tremendous influence on me because he brought me into this company. He gave me wonderful experiences that other teenagers just dream about, like being in the movie Dancers. But my real joy was that I was now going to be in American Ballet Theater ."
Kent's coming of age as a dancer occurred at a time when the company's very future was in question. "In my first two years as a principal dancer, we only worked 26 weeks a year, and it was right at a crucial time for me. There were several times when we didn't think American Ballet Theater would exist anymore and it was very stressful. It was very hard to build on anything, because I would do one Swan Lake and it would be another year before I would do my next performance. Some people peak when they're 17, 18, 19, and then have to struggle to maintain interest, inspiration and desire, and other people just bloom later. When I became 25, 26, 27, I really started to understand what I was doing. I definitely was a late bloomer," she adds. - Actor/Actress/Director: Julie Kent
- Movie:
- Id: 10479709
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