Whelan, who first studied under a British ballet teacher, still remembers the shock of switching to NYCB's style. "The English style is very clean, very precise," she says. "Perfection in a box. Coming here, I had to become much more extreme. I had to be faster, to do everything with a stricter musicality, dancing on and off the beat. But I also learned to be more free. Balanchine really liked things to be alive, to have moments of flaw and imperfection that can be truly beautiful." When Whelan graduated into NYCB she was a skinny, feisty teenager from "nowhereland in Kentucky", and while she felt a "sacred calling" for ballet, she had no real sense of her identity as a dancer. Then Robbins singled her out from the corps de ballet. "Robbins could see who we were before we knew it ourselves. He chose me for the scariest, ugliest part ever, in his ballet The Cage, and I loved it. He opened me up to myself and maybe what I am best at - being dramatic, angular, androgynous. I loved being pushed to those psychological and physical extremes."
Choreography
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