Hermes bags, hugs and the occasional stalker: When ballet fans go overboard

By Sarah L. Kaufman

The Washington Post

Isabella Boylston, a principal ballerina with American Ballet Theatre, eats a lot of pasta. Her pasta love has even inspired a New York restaurant to create a noodle dish in her honor. But the ultimate pasta tribute came from one of Boylston’s fans, who was waiting at the Metropolitan Opera House stage door after a performance one night to present her with a silver necklace, strung with a sterling farfalle.

“I opened it and just started laughing, because I thought it was so creative,” Boylston said recently by phone from her dressing room, where she was preparing to rehearse the ballet “Harlequinade.” “It’s a nice lucky charm.”

Receiving gifts from fans is another kind of performance for many dancers, particularly ballet dancers. Ballet incites a specific kind of response from its audience, a drive for a direct, personal connection. You see this during the bows at the end of a show, when the fondest fans might toss flowers to the stage to honor a great star. This tradition started in the early 19th century, when ballerina Marie Taglioni inspired bombardments of roses.

Ballerinas ever since have braced themselves for these fragrant missiles, and the occasional wild pitch.

Such are the perils of public excitement for the dancer, who must gracefully navigate between the pros and cons of fame. Occasionally the cons can have more troubling consequences. A stalker once sent Boylston threatening messages on social media and began waiting for her outside the theater. The police eventually intervened.

“It’s wonderful to see the fans at the stage door, but you can be in a vulnerable position,” she said. “People feel like they know you. And we don’t have the level of security that Beyoncé has.”

In one case in which a ballerina faced a death threat, her fans came to the rescue. “You will die while dancing ‘Giselle’ in New York in the next few weeks,” read a note to famed ballerina Natalia Makarova in 1976, according to the ballerina’s longtime assistant, Dina Makarova (no relation). Police and the FBI were alerted, and word spread among Makarova devotees, who knew the letter-writer to be a passionate follower of another Russian dancer, the great Rudolf Nureyev.

Dina Makarova said that during intermission of Makarova’s final “Giselle” of the season, her fans spotted the presumed assailant and trapped her in the ladies’ room. Police arrested the woman, who had a bottle of acid in her purse and a ticket on the aisle near the stage.

For most dancers, contact with fans is far less dramatic, although many with whom I spoke marveled at some fans’ inclination to get too close. ABT principal dancer Daniil Simkin said he has had to fend off hugs and kisses, when he’d much rather receive a simple compliment. Alessandra Ferri, the Italian ballerina and international star who performs with ABT and the Royal Ballet, wonders why some ballet fans seek physical contact.

More often, public admiration has its rewards, and some of them are magnificent. One longtime fan in Paris presented Ferri with an Hermes “Kelly” bag, that totem of prestige and patience, with a famous waiting list. Another in Milan gave her an antique gold brooch. She has received paintings of herself; teddy bears dressed to match her costumes; and acres of flowers, particularly on big nights, such as her last “Romeo and Juliet” with ABT, when she temporarily retired in 2007, and when she returned to the stage a few years later at Teatro Alla Scala.

“I was covered with flowers,” Ferri said. “You feel like some kind of goddess. They wouldn’t even fit in the dressing room; it was like a flower shop.”

All of the ballerinas I spoke with really, really appreciate flowers.

They’re “a live gift,” Ferri said. They’re “a symbol of that connection between you and the audience, a symbol of that love,” said former ABT star Michele Wiles. And for San Francisco Ballet principal Sasha De Sola, flowers symbolize the performance itself: Their beauty is “momentary. They don’t last forever,” she said.

In the end, that’s what stays with the dancers: gratitude for those who have been with them in darkness, for those to whom the theater is a place of worship, who take the art seriously and who wait patiently, late into the night, simply for the chance to make their bond known.