When Jenifer Ringer, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet, gave birth to her first child in 2008, she chose not to receive treatment for the pain because “being a dancer, I wanted to be able to feel what my body was doing and to experience it all, even the discomfort.” Not surprisingly, professional dancers pay more attention to their bodies than most people do—how they feel, how they look—since they use them to make art that makes their living. Critics, in turn, are paid to judge those bodies within a particular context—onstage, during a performance. Central to Ringer’s memoir, Dancing Through It, is how she drew on her maturing Christian faith as her body and mind went awry, and how that healing was threatened when the most influential dance critic in America pronounced her fat.
Ringer wondered why she was cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy on opening night of the company’s 2010 run of The Nutcracker, the only performance that typically draws reviewers. She was a principal dancer—the highest rank—but she was not an obvious choice for the role, at least in her mind. Nevertheless, she and her “Cavalier,” Jared Angle, felt they danced well, and the next morning she hurried through Alastair Macaulay’s review in The New York Times, searching for her name. Near the end of the lengthy article, she found it: “Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many.” The assessment embarrassed but did not devastate her, as it might have 15 years earlier when she was cycling through periods of uncontrollable eating and self-disgust. Moreover, readers of the Times began lambasting Macaulay online, and the contretemps led to Ringer’s defending her womanly shape and discussing eating disorders on Today and Oprah. In retrospect, she discerned God’s hand in all of it—her suffering, the casting, and the opportunity to reach others with similar problems.
The chapter entitled “Sugar Plumgate,” however, proves the least satisfying part of Ringer’s book. Curiously, she quotes only the first half of Macaulay’s controversial sentence, which in full reads: “Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” Macaulay’s sharper rebuke of the male dancer drew hardly a peep from Times readers, which raises a broader array of questions concerning the boundaries of dance criticism than Ringer chooses to address. Moreover, she dismisses rather than engages with a well-reasoned apologia that Macaulay later published, and instead spends a giddy five pages recounting her trip to appear on Oprah.
But she is, after all, a ballerina, not a philosopher, and her memoir expresses the soul of a servant-artist. The perfectionism that led to compulsive overeating also created a lovely performer who strove to please audiences and choreographers alike. She is generous to family and colleagues and even casts a warm glow over the notoriously nasty Jerome Robbins as she describes one rehearsal of Dances at a Gathering, a work of his that she loves. She explains that since his pas de deux usually concern “some relationship or dialogue or experience shared between the two people onstage,” he insisted that she and her partner maintain eye contact constantly, to the point where they could not dance the steps correctly. Only then was Robbins satisfied. “It dawned on me that this was a lesson,” Ringer recalls. “Jerry didn’t expect us to actually dance the pas de deux this way. We were dramatically distorting the choreography in order to look into each other’s eyes. But he wanted the feeling that we would never take our eyes off of each other.”
Ringer’s portrait of the powerful and moody Peter Martins, artistic director of the New York City Ballet, is mixed, for he in a sense personified all that is good and bad about professional ballet at its highest level. Ringer surmises that at one point she was about 50 pounds overweight and concedes she was “unusable” in the company. After a probationary period, Martins fired her, and her heartbreak (even in recollection) is palpable: “I had failed at everything that had been important to me in my entire life.” While she does not blame Martins for her downfall, she does not credit him with her recovery either, even though he later takes her back. Rather, new habits and supportive friends helped her rekindle her love for dancing and her Christian faith, and she began seeing herself the way God sees her—as his beautiful and redeemed daughter. Transformed, she returned to the New York City Ballet, but it no longer wielded the same power over her that it once did.
Her re-ordered priorities—plus marriage and motherhood—brought a welcome sense of normalcy back to her life. The quiet pleasure of Ringer’s memoir, in fact, lies in the mundane rather than extraordinary experiences. She mentions praying with her mother as a teenager on long drives to ballet lessons, for example, and details her two hours of preparation for each performance, including 30 minutes devoted to make-up alone (applied, in order: concealer stick, stage base, loose powder, two colors of blush, eyebrow pencil, eye shadow, more pencil, more shadow, false eyelashes, lipstick, done!).
It is a ritual, alas, that she no longer undertakes. She retired from the New York City Ballet on February 9, performing in her beloved Dances at a Gathering for the final time. Tributes from colleagues and the audience made clear just how much she will be missed.
Sharon Skeel is a ballet historian currently at work on a biography of 20th-century American choreographer Catherine Littlefield.
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