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Mark Smith reviews the autobiography of David Hallberg, A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back (Touchstone: New York, 2017)
David Hallberg was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the USA, in 1982. He fell in love with dance at the age of eight after seeing Fred Astaire on television. To emulate his idol, he taped coins to the soles of his shoes and spent hours tapping away on the concrete floor of the laundry room of his parents’ house. His initial exposure to classical ballet, which he experienced as ‘a gravitational force pulling me in deeper and deeper’, came when he was eleven. After training at the Ballet Arizona School, Paris Opera Ballet School, and American Ballet Theatre (ABT) Studio Company, he joined the ABT Corps de Ballet in 2001, was promoted to soloist in 2004, and became a principal dancer there in 2006. In 2011, he became the first American to be invited to join the Bolshoi Ballet as a principal dancer, so began dividing his time between New York and Moscow. His career took him around the world, dancing not only with ABT and the Bolshoi, but as a guest soloist with many other companies as well. A debilitating foot injury prevented him from dancing between 2014 and 2017. Thereafter he resumed his career at ABT, retiring from the stage in 2020. In 2021, he assumed the role of Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet, where he is now in his fourth season. Hallberg’s autobiography, A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back, tells the fascinating story of how he progressed from his parents’ laundry room to the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre and beyond.
Readers will enjoy the numerous anecdotes Hallberg tells about his family, friends, and the dancers, teachers, coaches, and choreographers whom he met along the way, but the focus of the book is very much on his experience of dancing itself: he describes not just the intensive daily routine of classes, practice, and rehearsal, but also how it feels to perform the great male roles of the classical ballet repertoire on stage, and the challenges of partnering some of the leading (in more senses than
one) ballerinas with whom he regularly found himself paired. He writes with particular eloquence about his partnership with Natalia Osipova, with whom he first danced in 2009, and what a revelation it was to him, opening up new horizons and causing him to rethink how far he could extend himself, both artistically and technically.
Considerable space in the book is devoted to Hallberg’s injury and its aftermath. Fulfilling the commitments of a principal dancer with two major ballet companies located on opposite sides of the globe, both with busy touring schedules, as well as frequent guest appearances elsewhere, inevitably took its toll on his body. Early in 2014 he began to feel pain in his left foot. At first, he tried to dance through it, but as it became progressively worse, he was forced to cease performing altogether. After two unsuccessful operations, he sought treatment from the medical team of the
Australian Ballet in Melbourne. Starting in November 2015, he underwent several months of intensive physiotherapy there. Thanks to the skill of the Melbourne specialists, he was able to resume his dancing career in 2017. Professional dancers will no doubt empathise with Hallberg’s sometimes harrowing account of his long and arduous process of rehabilitation, and the impatience and frustration that he felt during it, but the story will also resonate strongly with anyone who has ever had to confront the possibility of having to give up a much-loved physical activity due to injury or illness.
A Body of Work is written in an engaging style, and Hallberg’s personality comes across vividly on every page. He is honest in analysing his own character traits, including ambition (mixed with self-doubt), impatience, perfectionism, and the constant urge to explore new things, and candid in appraising how these have affected his career, whether positively or adversely. My only cavil about the book is that it ends too soon. Published in 2017, it stops with an account of Hallberg’s successful post-injury return to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in May of that year in the role of Albrecht in Giselle. Thus, we hear nothing about his subsequent life and career, including his reconnection with Natalia Osipova and their ensuing artistic collaborations, his decision to retire from the stage, and his tenure as Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet. Let’s hope that Hallberg writes a sequel to A Body of Work to bring us up to date.
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