On the day of my last ABT performance, New York City was hot and volatile. The air felt greasy, the pavement molten. Clouds rolled above skyscrapers, and the streets grew oddly quiet. The atmosphere seemed charged: Something big was about to happen.
Come showtime, the tension broke. Not because I stepped onstage to face, for the last time, the crowded darkness beyond the footlights. Not because I had arrived at the moment I had been edging toward since childhood. It broke because a massive storm thrashed the city. The Met’s roof sprang leaks, including one that irrigated the linoleum of downstage right—precisely where I had to pirouette at the end of my third act solo. Cell phones buzzed flash flood warnings. A backstage stairwell resembled a cabin on the RMS Titanic, pooling fast with water. But by the time the performance was over, the storm had passed. The city’s slate had been washed clean. The air was fresh and, above the wet trees and concrete, a cloudless sky opened up like a vast blank canvas.
The show itself went well. I had the pleasure of dancing with a wonderful technician and actress, a friend and frequent partner. As always, she was fun and spontaneous, effervescent even. And gracious: During the bows, she offered me her bouquet of roses. I felt great onstage, staying within that elusive realm known as “the moment.” I had been laid up two weeks before due to a bizarre and untimely attack of gout, a condition I thought exclusive to crusty sea captains and portly English monarchs. But during the performance, adrenaline dissolved any lingering weakness.
Besides, on this evening, I felt as if nothing could go wrong. My family, friends, and colleagues filled the backstage wings and the house. The audience cheered from my first entrance and chanted my name during curtain calls. The support and goodwill in that theater buoyed me as I danced and overwhelmed me afterward. When asked how I felt, most often my answer was grateful. Speeches and a mild roast followed the show, at a bar-restaurant where the cocktail du nuit was a vodka-laced killer called the Rad Rumbler. My wife had gathered most of the important people in my life into one room, a feat not achieved since our wedding. My face actually began to ache from grinning, and the next morning, I woke up with Joker-esque creases in my cheeks.
Midway through the celebration, my colleagues presented me with something invaluable: My trusty Tybalt sword, beautifully mounted by ABT’s prop department on a black-and-red-decorated shipping crate panel. Below the scarred steel blade, a brass plaque quotes the Bard:
“Now, by the stock and honor of my kin,
To strike him dead I hold it not a sin.”
Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s version of Romeo and Juliet is my favorite full-length ballet, Sergei Prokofiev’s breathtaking score a favorite composition of music. As a student of martial arts, I loved drawing my sword in defense of my Capulet kin. I recall wild, desperate duels (with equally zealous adversaries) during which épées broke and blood flowed. If I didn’t exit the theater battered and bruised after portraying Tybalt, I felt I had failed. There was a kind of magic in offering every fiber of my being to movement, character, and music, in endeavoring to honor a brilliant work of art by letting it seize the marrow in my bones. Now the sword hangs in our apartment, a trophy from the old days, and an inspiration for whatever role’s to come.
Sascha Radetsky joined American Ballet Theatre’s corps de ballet in 1996 and later became a soloist with the company. He has been a principal or guest principal with the Dutch National Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Staatsballett Berlin, Ballet San Jose, Ballet do Theatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro, and the Mongolian State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Radetsky also starred in the film Center Stage.
The post Final Bow: An American Ballet Theatre Soloist on His Last Performance appeared first on Vogue.