The Ballet Dancer - a Short Story
Willem Kenton was a ballet dancer. He was also a rugby player. It is an unusual combination. I was about to say ‘unlikely combination’, but I’m not so sure. For both pursuits require the utmost physical fitness, an awareness of the agility and strength of the human body, team work, and, for excellence, a sense of rhythm and timing that is usually both innate and cultivated. So perhaps Willem’s interests were more logically complementary than most people would realise.
There is, of course, some history of ballet trainers having been of assistance to first league soccer clubs in Britain for fitness training and for promoting high leaping for heading the ball. And Phyllis Spira of CAPAB Ballet is on record as being a rugby devotee. Lucky old Willem!
But Willem had to put up with a great deal. Not only were there continual problems concerning the times available for his two ‘sports’, but from both ends he endured all manner of unsympathetic reaction, snide and overt, subtle and slap-in-the-face. Neither the rugby fans nor the balletomanes could understand his ‘other’ loyalty. Our century is a long way from the Renaissance ideal of the rounded man, the world of Sir Philip Sidney, the swordsman sonneteer.
It wasn’t long before the press latched on to this unusual Kenton fellow. A rugby-playing ballet dancer must be worth a story. Out flocked the interviewers and photographers. ‘What do your team-mates say about it?’ ‘Do you ever get confused, mix up the lineout and the line-up?’ ‘Surely rugby and ballet appeal to entirely different types of people?’ And some more prying, less savoury enquiries.
Willem Kenton fielded all this inquisitiveness with just sufficient wit and goodwill to keep the journalists guessing but satisfied that they had enough non-committal material to string out into a story. The pictures were always a big feature. It was amazing how every photographer had the same original idea: to have him pose in a ballet position while wearing rugby clothes, and then as an encore to clutch a rugby ball whilst wearing a leotard. It was as if they were desperately trying to convince everyone that it was actually the same guy, as if they were sure his personality had split wide open and they had a mission to gum it back together. Willem found it a bit tiresome.
Moreover, both sports writers and ballet critics could never resist referring to the ‘other sport’ in their reports. The ballet writers adored to talk about ‘Kenton scrumming his way through the finale’, or ‘Kenton’s entrechat would have pleased his lineout coach’ – not very funny after the first time. And the rugby scribes loved to describe Willem ‘pirouetting across for another try’, and clumsily dubbed him Dying Swan, Nutcracker or Nijinsky. They quickly ran dry of allusions. Once again Willem found it all a bit tiresome.
To be fair, there were also certain pay-offs. Willem was able to show his fellow-forwards techniques of both exercise and jumping that made his pack a formidable force in the lineouts. Willem was a lock.
In return, a festival production by Willem’s ballet company featured an hilarious rugby sequence, in which the characteristic gaits and mannerisms of several of the leading local players were imitated most faithfully, with Willem playing himself. His rugby team mates, to do them credit, sat in the second row of the stalls roaring with unfeigned merriment. Mutual respect grew enormously after that.
All the time, however, the deepest tension, near to genuine unpleasantness, came from Willem’s ballet company director on account of the risk of injury represented by his rugby. His rugby coaches resented his occasional unavailability because of his ballet commitments. The trouble was that he was too good a rugby player to issue Either-Or ultimatums to; while he was too valuable a member of the ballet company to risk losing by forbidding him his rugby. So the ballet master sat on tenterhooks (that’s a good mixed metaphor for discomfort) like the MCC management watching Ian Botham play soccer for Scunthorpe before their cricket tour of Australia.
The situation became particularly acute when Willem was selected to represent his province in the Currie Cup. It was a big important match – they all are – and his lineout work was thought to be the answer to the threat from the visiting side.
With his heart in his mouth his ballet director read the headlines: WILLEM’S ELEVATION: KENTON IN PROVINCIAL CORPS DE RUGBY. Paper in hand, he stormed into the dressing room (of the theatre), smacking the report with the backs of his elegant fingers: ‘The end this is. You must but choose. I can’t have your bones risking themselves anymore with those wild beasts. It’s not very good enough!’
Kenton managed to calm him down. ‘You’ve been saying that for years and I’ve not had a serious injury yet. I’ll bet my luck lasts.’
Anyone with a milligram of superstition would have shuddered at that. Fate had been tempted, too openly, too defiantly.
So Fate struck. That morning in rehearsal Willem strained his back picking up his 46kg ballerina partner and could not lock the provincial scrum on Saturday. The selectors were furious.
By John Gardener
