Stephen Manes’ nonfiction work in recent years focused on computers, including a definitive biography of Bill Gates, and numerous columns on personal technology in Forbes, PC World, and others.
He’s also an accomplished novelist and the screenwriter for the 1970s comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed.
But his most recent project may be his longest: a 900-page account of a yearlong odyssey into the “Land of Ballet.”
With the cooperation of Pacific Northwest Ballet, this Seattle author sat in classes, rehearsals, production meetings, and business meetings as well as interviewing dancers, company employees, directors, and others.
The resulting Where Snowflakes Swear And Dance: Inside The Land of Ballet takes its readers into a world of dance that is largely unseen from the audience’s perspective. And Manes made more than a few discoveries in his exploration of how ballet actually arrives on the stage, as he discusses in this interview.
You're quick to call yourself a ballet outsider, but you've also been in the PNB audience for many years. What is the continuing appeal of ballet for you?
I could go on and on, but I think what I like best about ballet is that it mixes an amazing body of existing work with the utterly new. That keeps it exciting and alive.
Where Snowflakes Dance And Swear is as detailed an account of a ballet company as any I've seen, with many verbatim accounts of company meetings, in-depth interviews with dancers, and detailed accounts of productions all adding up to a whopping big tome. Why made you decide to go for this format rather than a more conventional nonfiction approach and length?
The hardest thing for authors, or at least for this one, can be figuring out the narrative voice of a book. It took me awhile to realize that the most important voices were those of the highly articulate people I was writing about, who rarely get quoted at length and in depth. And it turned out that those voices, with all their journeys back to the past, offered a way to give the narrative flow more variety by stepping away from the strict chronology of the year.
What do you hope your readers will take away from this book?
Every ballet performance (like other works of art) is the outcome of a million decisions that the audience never knows about. I think readers will discover (as I did) just how much it takes—from money to sheer grit and talent—to put dance on the stage.
I loved the connection you make between baseball and ballet (being a fan of both): that to create a paying career in these fields takes phenomenal talent and hard physical work. Which do you think takes more work? A career in ballet or a career in baseball?
I can hear the arguments on sports talk radio now (if anybody on those channels had any interest in ballet): "You think ballplayers have it tough? You should see what dancers go through!" "You tellin' me dancers got a tough job? Gimme an effin' break!" My guess, from taking with physical therapists and having lived in an era where baseball players spent their winters getting out of shape, is that ballet is the tougher career, particularly when it comes to injury. And when it comes to financial compensation, dancers aren't in the same league.
From missing high school proms to delaying college degrees, ballet dancers often don't have what we have come to consider “normal” childhoods and young adulthood. Your book really brings out these stories.
Many of the teens juggled insanely difficult hours in the studio with positions on their high school honor rolls. Many dancers go back for college degrees when their dancing days are over. I suspect proms are highly overrated; besides, these kids could outdance anybody on any prom floor anywhere.
After talking with all the dancers, how much impact do you think their families (parents, siblings, spouses) have on their careers?
I heard again and again about the sacrifices of time and finances that ballet parents made for their talented children. Siblings I didn't hear much about, except for the dancing Orza family, though it's true that a lot of dancers, particularly guys, began their careers by watching or waiting for their sisters at dance studios. Spouses often come from the ranks of dancers; the ballet life is a tough one for outsiders to understand.
Much of the book is devoted to the “behind the scenes” details of the business of dance: what did you find most fascinating about the work done by executive director D. David Brown and the other administrators of PNB?
Most people (including me before I wrote the book) have no idea how much business teamwork goes into the day-to-day management of an arts organization. It starts like any other business—pay the rent, make the payroll—but because so many different elements come up constantly, it requires a particular blend of savvy and flexibility.
One of my favorite quotes in the book comes from artistic director Peter Boal was "Budgets breed creativity." Prior to writing this book, did you know how tight the PNB budgets were?
In this country, arts budgets are always tight, and performing arts institutions rely on generous donations to stay alive. Unlike a lot of other companies, PNB has largely managed to stay within its means by presenting high-quality programs and avoiding the temptation to resort to second-rate would-be crowd-pleasers.
Toward the end of the book, you refer to “principles of generosity” that you found at PNB and elsewhere in the ballet world. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Again and again, I watched dancers do the kinds of touching things that never seem to get into the movies: Helping other dancers learn new pieces, coaching young dancers in performances, staying beyond their allotted union time to understand what a choreographer or stager really wanted, handing down their experience from the previous generation to the next one.
So not the world that fictional movies like Black Swan or Red Shoes portray?
Instead of the "you must give me MORE!" cliche that the movies assign to choreographers and artistic directors, I saw mostly nothing but calm or energetic encouragement. Jean-Christophe Maillot, a choreographer with a reputation as a tough guy, kept using the gallant locution "I think it would be nicer if" before asking dancers to try things a different way. I saw a thousand times more of that sort of thing than the tyrannical stuff.
Now that you've come back from a yearlong voyage through the Land of Ballet, what will you miss the most?
I miss the daily sense of excitement of wondering what will happen next in the dance studio or on the stage. When I'm at my screen and keyboard, I've got to create that excitement myself.
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