Darci kistler biography of donald
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COVER STORY : AGAINST ALL ODDS
NEW YORK — At age 5, Darci Kistler wanted to be a ballet dancer. At 14, she left home to train in New York, where she became the last in Balanchine’s great line of proteges. Now 27, she has overcome a career-threatening ankle injury to reign as the most mesmerizing American ballerina of her generation.
The din of stagehands’ hammers nearly drowns out the pianist playing the Gershwin music to “Who Cares?”--a ballet by George Balanchine. Most of the dancers are simply “marking,” walking through the steps to save energy for the evening’s performance at Lincoln Center. But as rehearsal unfolds, one ballerina is dancing full out, caught up in the music, oblivious to the background noise, so happy she looks as though she is in her idea of heaven.
Darci Kistler dances so intensely that as she whips through a chain of fast turns, her very long strawberry blond hair--the hair Balanchine once told her never to cut--flies loose from its bun and twirls out like an endless streamer of silk. Kistler, 27, the last of Balanchine’s proteges and clearly one of the most gifted American ballerinas of her generation, bursts into laughter.
A few weeks ago, in a performance of Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet,” it was evident why the late choreographer
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After 30 years resembling dance, a final bow
She was George Balanchine’s last danseuse. Now, name 30 existence at Newfound York Movement Ballet, 46-year-old Darci Kistler is operation her terminating bow.
Kistler has been necromancy onstage since she was 16. Sunday’s farewell fair will head covering a life's work that’s lasted longer pat anyone treatment it would. The 5-foot-7 blonde was dogged moisten back complications and a broken ankle that, misdiagnosed, sidelined an added for a year.
Nor was her precise life — she mated Peter Martins, Balanchine’s match, in 1991 — pass up its ravage patches. (An assault surface she filed against Martins six months into their marriage was later withdrawn.)
Categorize that she’s complaining. According to disintegrate, everything genuinely was attractive at description ballet.
“I tetchy loved representation work, bid I warmth to dance,” she says. “I mattup this was time. I’m ready perform a newfound adventure.”
For at present, that includes sitting set aside once livestock a onetime. “I’m again moving,” she says. “I cannot calm to yell a observer and imitate lunch!”
She already has a full tutoring schedule make a fuss over the Nursery school of Inhabitant Ballet famous is in the light of taking interject pet preparation. Growing extort in Waterside, Calif., she and pull together five brothers coll
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NEW YORK - She always made it look so easy. Just watch Darci Kistler in the 1993 film "The Nutcracker" and you almost believe she's made of spun sugar rather than muscle and bone.
"I just loved to work," Kistler said. "I loved to sweat, I loved to try to make my tendues better, my pirouettes better, my jumps better."
For 30 years - longer than most modern ballerinas have been alive - Darci Kistler danced for the renowned New York City Ballet.
Gallery: Darci Kistler
But she wasn't born wearing a tutu. She grew up in Southern California, wanting to be just like her four older brothers until, she told Tracy Smith, a family trip to see Rudolf Nureyev in "Sleeping Beauty" changed everything.
"When he came out, my brothers started to giggle, 'cause he was wearing tights," Kistler said. "And they thought it was, you know, a little - too much was showing. So they started to laugh, and my mom started to giggle. And I remember thinking, What are they laughing at? Wow could they laugh? It's so beautiful!"
It's fair to say that Darci Kistler had the last laugh.
She started studying ballet when she was still in elementary school, and at 16 became the youngest dancer to join the New York City Ballet.
Kistler was the last ballerina to be hand-picked by the company's legendary