The origin stories of so many male ballet dancers involve an older sister and a dance mom bringing her younger son along to the studio.
Ben Rudisin, the newest male principal dancer at the National Ballet of Canada, does not have such an origin story. Instead, he has a backflip story.
When he was six, teachers from a new dance studio in Alexandria, Va., began offering classes at the child care centre he attended as part of an outreach program. He begged his parents to sign up.
“I really wanted to learn how to do a backflip,” he recalled, relaxing at his apartment near the Toronto waterfront recently, his dog Buffy – as in the Vampire Slayer – hanging out nearby. At 27, Rudisin is polite and serene. It’s hard to imagine him as that wannabe child acrobat.
But one of his early teachers, Melissa Dobbs, immediately saw his potential. “I just said to myself, ‘Who is this child?’” she said. “I knew right away he was going to be amazing.”
Soon Rudisin’s parents were carting their son to classes all over the U.S. capital region. Those initial classes became ones at Dobbs’ Metropolitan School for the Arts, and then specialist classes at other schools. On Wednesdays, he would take the subway from his school in Virginia to his mother’s office in downtown Washington, and from there she’d drive him to Knock on Wood Tap Studio in Maryland.
“I loved it so much,” he said. “I kept adding more and more classes.”
When Rudisin was in eighth grade, Dobbs sat his parents down for a talk. Their son had learned his backflips and everything else she could teach him, but if he kept training, he could “do anything he wanted as a professional dancer,” she said. She recommended University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a boarding school that offered comprehensive high school and undergraduate dance degrees. With some reluctance, the Rudisin family packed up their car and drove five hours south to Winston-Salem.
“It was definitely the right choice even though it was hard,” Rudisin said. “I cried for the first two weeks I was away.”
Because UNCSA also offered theatre and design programs, he emerged from high school understanding “everything that goes into making a production: the costumes, the design, the crew, everything.” That comprehensive understanding serves him well in Angels’ Atlas, one of three works on the program when National Ballet returns to the Toronto Four Seasons Centre stage on Nov. 11, after nearly 20 months away.
As with many of her other works, Angels’ Atlas demonstrates Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s penchant for collaborating with sound, lighting and projection designers to create an unearthly world inhabited by superhuman dancers.
This new ballet, which enjoyed a brief pre-pandemic run in February 2020, is about “what happens after life,” Rudisin said. “There’s no specific answers, but [Pite’s] able to communicate those sorts of questions with the lights. There are all these shadows, and you don’t quite know what they are, but they’re beautiful and inspiring.”
Two other works on the program highlight Rudisin’s enviable skills as a partner for both male and female dancers. After graduating from UNCSA, he joined the trainee program at Houston Ballet. It was in Texas that he began intense pas de deux training, and emerged on a path to becoming an in-demand partner at National Ballet.
“That was a huge, huge bonus of going to Houston,” Rudisin said. The company has a reputation for turning out male dancers who are both strong jumpers and skilled partners. Toward the end of his two-year contract, Houston Ballet helped Rudisin arrange auditions. “National Ballet of Canada was one of the first stops on my tour,” he said. A week later, he was hired.
Would other companies also have offered him contracts? Quite likely. At 6-foot-2 and able to partner any company’s tallest women, Rudisin rocketed through the ranks at National Ballet, from apprentice to principal in less than eight years. All his strengths, from partnering to collaborating, will be on display in the season-opening program. In addition to dancing lead roles in Angels’ Atlas and Serenade, Rudisin will appear in a 10-minute film called Soul, alongside his life partner, principal dancer Harrison James. Jera Wolfe’s film opens with the two men entwining limbs to create the infinity symbol. Arm muscles ripple in sync before they embrace and fade into the shadows. Like Pite and George Balanchine, the two other choreographers on the program, Wolfe is meditating on life, death and the human connections that make time on earth meaningful.
Rudisin takes the role of Elegy Man in Serenade, Balanchine’s 1934 ballet. Joysanne Sidimus, a retired National Ballet dancer and who has been staging Serenade since 1968, said Rudisin makes “a wonderful Elegy Man,” ready to carry his mysterious partner, the Dark Angel, into the wings as Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings fades.
In the weeks leading up to the company’s return to the stage, Rudisin said he’s thought quite a bit about the three ballets’ common life-and-death themes.
“Serenade is such an iconic ballet that so many audiences around the world have seen,” he said. “They recognize how amazing and iconic it is. Angels’ Atlas is still pretty new, but I do think it has that potential; it’s a higher echelon of work. It’s like we’re giving audiences a chance to see an iconic ballet from the past, and from the future.”
Add the emotional heft of performing after so many months of isolation, and National Ballet is returning to the stage with the perfect ballets not only for contemplating mortality, but for celebrating the joy of living.
“It’s going to be a special show,” Rudisin said. “I’m getting teary eyed thinking about it.”
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Newly promoted principal dancer Ben Rudisin on how backflips led him to the National Ballet of Canada - The Globe and Mail
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