A four-year-old girl finds herself twirling and leaping all over their living room imagining herself a ballerina. The clumsiness of childhood keeps her company as she knocks over lamps on her way to completing her own choreographed moves.
At that age, she has that gnawing hunger to learn the craft and not a day passes her by that she begs her parents to let her take ballet lessons.
Ballerina and art connoisseur Ashley Moffatt, who now teaches at the Glushko Academy of Performing Arts, clearly remembers those days when she was still learning the basics of ballet. It never fails to make her burst into laughter plucking out those childhood memories.
Trying to convince her parents of her insatiable interest to learn ballet, Ashley often uses their living room as her stage and show her parents her budding terpsichorean moves.
Ashley says, “My audience was on the other side of the large window in the living room. There was a television show at the time called the Dinah Shore Show and Dinah would dance and sing and I just dreamed of being Dinah.”
She’s dazzled by Dinah’s costumes and how the male dancers carry her around the stage. “I found it all quite magical.”
Her fondness for Dinah burrows deep into her consciousness that watching her show has become a staple.
She even has a purple skirt, her Dinah skirt, that she dons the moment her show would come on.
“I would run up to my room and put on my purple skirt and pretend that I was one of her dancers,” Ashley says.
Seeing her daughter’s unrelenting desire to learn to dance, Ashley’s mother called the ballet studio one day and asked if they could let her audition for possible admission into their school. Although there was hesitation in the beginning to let her because she was only four, the school final agreed to let Ashley audition.
“I was an athletic child and very disciplined so I could concentrate for long periods of time, and they accepted me. I was the youngest pupil, and an avid student. I kept up with the older girls and began to excel rapidly,” she says.
Ashley later finds herself meeting Dinah in person at a lighting showroom in The Design District of Los Angeles, CA. It’s an overwhelming experience for her to meet Dinah who had a profound impact on her life. The performer whom she holds with high regard was moved by Ashley’s telling her story how she got into dancing.
When she was 17 years old, Ashley went off to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson where she majored in elementary education. As the university did not offer ballet program, it’s a good consolation that it did offer modern dance which Ashley signed up for to fulfill her physical education requirement. She didn’t stay very long as she got sick adjusting to her new environment and had to come home to recuperate.
Ashley admits, “The intense dryness and heat were hard for me to handle. I missed the lush, green, rolling hills of Wisconsin, and the humidity.”
Coming back home to Wisconsin proved to be an opportune time.
As Ashley got better, she learned that Rudolph Nureyev had agreed to perform with the ballet company that Ashley had been dancing with.
Nureyev’s group needed dancers to fill the Corps de Ballet to perform “Les Sylphides,” the last ballet that Ashley performed prior to going to college.
Ashley in a heartbeat agreed to take part in this corps of ballet dancers.
“I had performed the solo of ‘Prelude’ and had danced the Pas de Deux, but had also learned the corps parts so I thought that this would be an interesting opportunity,” says Ashley as she remembers with gusto those glorious days of her dancing career.
Nureyev, she says, had invited Lynn Fontayne to be his partner; however, she had just given birth and had gained weight and wouldn’t be able to perform.
Being the only dancer who knew Pas de Deux and Prelude, Ashley was at the right place at the right time. It was a golden opportunity to dance with Nureyev who agreed to give her a chance.
Having been rusty for not dancing for one year, she worked hard to get back in shape and be performance-ready.
“I frantically practiced and took classes and got myself back into shape in time for the performances,” she says.
Despite the danseur’s looming and overwhelming presence, Ashley managed to hold her own on stage.
She describes her experience, “Performing with Rudy, as he came to allow me to call him was unlike dancing with anyone else. He brought magic to the stage, and transformed the entire theatre into the wonderland of the woods that ‘Les Sylphides’ takes place in, just by his presence.
For Ashley, the Russian ballet dancer’s presence is simply enormous—he fills every nook and cranny.
Describing further their roles, Ashley says Sylphs are mythical beings, said to be spirits of virgin girls who crossed over before they are wed and destined to live in the woods like fairies.
To mimic their grace and flying movements on stage is difficult. “The arm movements reflecting their flying abilities are very difficult to learn, and Rudy had bought the Dance Master who trained the original dancers who Michael Fokine the Choreographer had selected. We were taught for eight hours straight one day how to make our arms fluid and floating.”
It’s indeed a memorable experience for Ashley.
She tells Variety, “Partnering with Rudy was an extraordinary experience. When he would lift me over his head I felt light as a feather and believed that I could fly! His strong touch as he held my hand for turns was like gripping iron. And his mere presence on stage transformed every dancer to the very best dancer that they could be. As I said he is just magical and brings out the best in every dancer who had the good fortune to perform with him.”
In all those years she spent learning and dancing ballet, Ashley was asked whom she regards as the ballerina she looks up to. Without batting an eyelash, she replies, “Dame Margo Fonteyn.”
For Ashley, Fonteyn was kind to everyone and she admires her beauty and elegance. She also says Fonteyn managed to keep in fine shape that she danced into her 60s.
She also credits her as instrumental in helping her partner with Nureyev.
Even though she was 50 at the time she played Juliet, Fonteyn was seen as a 16-year-old. “You saw her as being 16, she was spell binding to watch, and her beauty came from her heart.”
Asked on what she considers the greatest performance of her life, Ashley points to those days she spent partnering with Nureyev.
“He elicits the very best performance that you can do regardless of your ability. He pulls the very best from you—you almost can’t perform badly when he is on stage.”
On Saipan, Ashley now finds time sharing with budding ballerinas her rich dance experience.
At the Glushko Academy of the Performing Arts, she sees herself in the little girls, that she once was like them—talents waiting to be nurtured. She sees in them that inexpugnable joy she once had and continues to have when she’s performing.
Ashley has this advice to her students, and those wanting to be a dancer: Dance with joy!
“Take a moment before you take class or begin a rehearsal to find the joy inside yourself and step into that feeling and allow that joy to express itself through your movements,” she says.
