Holley goes lightly

Who was your teacher? What is her background?
Her name was Hae Shik Kim. She was a professional dancer with Stuttgart Ballet and with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Her husband, who was Korean, saw her performing in New York—she was doing a ballet of Tommy and was playing the Acid Queen. Her husband basically proposed very quickly. He was a mushroom specialist; we have two things in Fresno, California: agriculture and football. He was at the top of his field for the mushroom professorship and so he took her to Fresno and she retired. There she was, working with the same kind of professional vigor she always had and finding students. She created quite a few professional dancers just by having a very rigorous class and being and exceptional example of discipline and beauty. She was an extremely inspiring dancer.

How was she a generous teacher?
She really enjoyed seeing other dancers develop. I loved the fact that she made her own leotards, that she always had five scarves on and beautiful makeup and that her only cure for Achilles tendonitis was to wear high heels when she taught at barre. [Laughs] I mean, we wanted to be like her. So there was an element of Hae Shik performing at the same time she was teaching. When she saw something in someone, she had a way of almost digging into your body with her little fingers and saying, “This is what needs to happen.” She taught very, very hard classes that were at least two hours long. And she would find a way to teach us variations even though we didn’t know we were learning variations. Her own choreography was very exciting. So the location for all of this training happened in the now-defunct studios at Fresno State, and that’s why she was able to give me those keys and the security guard would make sure I was okay.

How did you find her?
She was associated with Fig Garden Dance Studio, which was where I had my first class. Once I had her as a teacher, I realized that I just needed to be wherever she was. Before college, I had a good two-and-a-half years of training, plus summers, with her. She let me set my own pace. The day I learned how to pirouette was the day I learned how to do fouetté turns. [Laughs] She let me go en pointe in six months. I always laugh at that because my girlfriends talk about their first pair of pointe shoes and I’m like, “I can still kind of wear my first pair of pointe shoes.” I was full grown! My skin never did well, but I could handle it. My alignment was okay for it.

One day she called me and said, “There is a dance company from Canada, and I used to work with the ballet mistress.” My teacher had performed with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and she said, “You should get your pointe shoes and come to the stage right now.” I grabbed my pointe shoes, drove over and took company class. The artistic director was not traveling with them, but the next day they said if I wanted to, I could go to Ottawa and be seen by him. I, again, didn’t have money to do that, so I ended up writing letters to people in Fresno who were in the dance community and basically authored my own scholarship. I got together $500 or so and bought a one-way ticket to Ottawa, Canada, and packed enough dance clothes for a week, but not a winter coat. [Laughs] And then I was in the company. It was small company and it no longer exists, but it was such an amazing training ground. It was a chamber ballet company.

What was it called?
Theatre Ballet of Canada. Lawrence Gradus was the artistic director. We had Antony Tudor’s Continuo, and we had some things that Lawrence had choreographed himself, which were quite nice, and we had stuff from emerging modern Canadian choreographers who were curious to work with ballet dancers. At that point, I had never done more than two hours of pointe a day in my life, and it was literally a seven-hour rehearsal day, every day. In two months I basically had to rebuild myself physically. I had been broken down and rebuilt. It was such a different lifestyle for me. I toured with them for the year. We did 60 performances—we went to Amsterdam and the Hague and all over Canada and Buffalo, New York. I came back and there was an audition for Phantom of the Opera. I went with a friend of mine to keep her company, and I got hired for that.

This was in Canada?
In Toronto. I moved from Ottawa to Toronto and did Phantom for two years. I was such a fiend for performing. I knew I had no right to be in a ballet company. I felt I was learning how to do things at the same time as I was doing them. I didn’t have a classical mind-set. It was arbitrary to me: Why is this first arabesque and why is this second? That kind of deep breeding of starting when you’re really young—I was literally learning choreography and the classical system at the same time. During Phantom, I got to the point where I felt like I would not be a good dancer if I stayed there because we were doing the same choreography every night. It did teach me a lot about how to maintain my health and consistency. We performed eight shows a week, and there was only one week off a year. It was hard work.

I wanted to go back to California to be with my family. I auditioned for Oakland Ballet and, very casually, was accepted. I worked there for about two months and then I realized that this nagging pain I’d had when I first got in the company was not going away, and I had to get an MRI. They found out that I had stress fractures in my fifth lumbar vertebra. It was not stable, so I had to quit; it wasn’t really quitting, though. It was more like a series of physical therapies and trying to get back, but it just did not improve. So, I decided to finish my degree at that point.

When had you started your degree?
In order to be in Hae Shik’s classes at Fresno State, I was a real student as well. My core requirements were completed by the time I left. I was not a priority-one student at Fresno State, but I had enough units so that when I went to Cornish College, I basically did two years of work in one year. I was funded through workers compensation because of my injury, and I only had funding one year so I just packed it all in.

What did you study?
I did a B.F.A. in dance [at Cornish College of the Arts] and then went directly into the M.F.A. program at the University of Washington. I had taken so much kinesiology that I felt healthier and healthier. There was a chamber-dance company that I was able to do some work with as part of the grad school stipend—we worked at the company and as teachers in the department—and after two years I felt very strong. During my last week of grad school, Merce had a residency at the University of Washington and I took three days of that class. Meg Harper, who was in the company for many years, approached me and said, “You are the type of dancer that Merce is looking for right now. It’s anybody’s guess what happens when you get there, but have you been to New York lately? Are you interested in going there?”

Were you?
I had just turned 30 and I thought, Well, if I have not been there yet as a working dancer, now’s the time. I was married at the time and my husband agreed to come with me. I flew over and he drove a truck, and I started classes the next day. Merce and the company were on tour at the time and when he came back he saw me and hired me for the understudy position. I worked with the understudy group for ten months, and when a woman left the company, Merce hired me then.

What did Meg mean? What kind of dancer was Cunningham after?
I’m not sure. But Meg has a very spiritual side to her and she looked very deeply into my eyes when she said it. I know now that I could trust her implicitly. I don’t know why I trusted her then, but the way that she taught and the way class felt for me, there was something that I could call a discovery. I have never had to sustain movement like that before and, for me, having 120 percent of my concentration required for a given movement felt almost like a quiet ecstasy. I felt like a Tibetan bell was ringing and that I was free in some way. All she had to do was say that to me and I was like, “Okay.” I wanted more.