David Hallberg’s road back to the stage
After an injury jeopardized his career, the ballet star discusses his recovery and return to D.C. with American Ballet Theatre.
David Hallberg has performed leading roles with ballet companies around the world, but a 2014 injury to his leg put his career in question. Unsure if he would take the stage again, Hallberg withdrew from a public spotlight he had grown used to and spent 14 months going through difficult rehab, where he both had to relearn how to do basic movements and rethought his approach to life and dance that brought him to a crossroads.
In November 2017, Hallberg released his memoir, A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back, where he reflects on his life and his difficult road back to the stage. Hallberg had performed at the Kennedy Center with the American Ballet Theatre at many stages of his career, and he will return for the first time since his rehabilitation in the D.C. premieres of Benjamin Millepied’s I Feel The Earth Move and Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream. Hallberg took time during rehearsal for that performance to talk about his recovery, writing his memoir, and his return to the Kennedy Center.
Dancing on stage, you’re used to putting yourself out there in a very public and intimate way. In some ways, I have to imagine writing your memoir felt like a similar act. How do you compare the experience of living publicly physically in performance and personally and psychologically with your book?
I can see the parallels between being a performer and writing, having chosen to write the book that I wrote. But I haven’t really compared the two because they have felt like two completely different entities. One is being on stage, which I’m very used to. I’m used to what comes with the body and its reaction, the nerves, critiques, reviews, all of that. There is a level of vulnerability on the stage. You’re putting yourself out there. You’re putting your best product forward, and you’re open to art being subjective, where people may like it and some people might not care for it.
But I spent over four years writing the book, and I feel like I made the conscious decision very early on to be as honest as possible. I thought that it wouldn’t be a story worth reading if it weren’t really to the depths of who I was as an artist and what I went through as a dancer. I chose very early on to make myself vulnerable in a way. I feel like I’ve normalized, in a way, that vulnerability. From the very beginning of the story until the very end, it is a very raw, honest portrayal of what I’ve gone through in my life.
Did you find writing out your experiences during those four years to be something of an outlet for you, particularly when you were going through recovery?
When I was going through what I went through in terms of injury, I couldn’t write it in real time. I had to write it in about four to six months retrospect. Because I think the emotions and the experience was just so intense, and it was so uncertain that I couldn’t document things as they were going on.
You’ve talked and written about a responsibility or sense of duty to the art. How do you balance that with your responsibility to yourself, and are those two ever in conflict?
In fact I used to think that they were [in conflict] constantly because I used to think of this balance of self and balance of duty, don’t go hand in hand. Relaxing equals laziness. But now I’ve learned the hard way that [doing nothing but] working drives you into the ground, and you absolutely have to have this balance of your own life and your own experiences and what you devote to your work and craft. It feeds my craft even better now than before that I have found a healthy balance between my personal life and my work life.
Something else you’ve written about is a never-ending-cycle of looking for what was next for you in your career. Have you found that what you’ve gone through has allowed you to find greater joy in what you’re accomplishing in the present?
Absolutely. I feel like now every experience or everything I take on in terms of my creative life is done very consciously. Before it was this insatiable hunger. It was never enough for me. Now there’s still this ambition, there’s still a desire to dance certain roles and certain places, but there’s also contentment with where I’m at in my life. I have a gratitude for being able to spend a day rehearsing in New York City, and not also wanting to be in London and Paris and Milan as well as New York City.
Your technique is so much a part of the identity you’ve built as a dancer. What is it like having to relearn parts of that the way you did?
That was the hardest process with the journey because it involved me forgetting my ego and forgetting what I felt I knew how to do. I’ve had a career that people have more or less celebrated for 15 years, and it was difficult for me to realize that my physical approach to that wasn’t working, which resulted in me getting injured. What I had to do was drop my ego and my preconceived notions of what worked, and come to someone else, trying to reassess how I approached movement. It boiled down to the most basic movements: A plié, a stretch of the foot, anything. That was the most arduous process during all of it, but once I eventually relinquished control, that’s when I really started to make the progress.
How do you approach something like a plié differently now than before?
A plié is just a bend of the knees, but I relearned where the movement originated from, where the sort of impetus of the movement comes from. Before it was in my knees, my feet, and my ankles. And now it originates at the very top of my legs: my glutes, my quadratus femoris, and my hamstrings. It’s the activation at the top of my legs that sort of supports the plié instead of doing the plié almost on a surface level.
You’ve danced on the world’s most celebrated stages. Can you talk about your relationship with various theaters or audiences?
I think a relationship with a theater is instinctual, or at least part of it is. You have a feeling from the very beginning about how comfortable you are dancing on a stage and about how the audience responds to you. Some theaters feel very cold and impersonal. Some theaters feel very warm and embracing. It varies everywhere. I find the older theaters around the world are some of the most comfortable.
For the Kennedy Center, I honestly do feel it is one of the two best dance houses in the country. The red velvet and everything just feels very comfortable for me. I’ve shared beautiful memories with the audience. Much like the New York audiences, they’ve seen me grow from when I first joined American Ballet Theatre to now as I’m making my return.
Do you think about those memories on stage?
It’s more in retrospect. Like even now, I’m thinking back to the firsts I’ve had at the Kennedy Center. I had my first Romeo there. I had my first principal role there doing Balanchine’s Symphony in C. So there’s just some great memories attached, but when you get into a theater to do another production, you really just focus on the task at hand.
