Seattle Raises the Barre for Tall Dancers

Too tall.

That’s why Jeff Stanton, 6 feet 2 inches, felt he was stuck in the corps for five years by the San Francisco Ballet, despite a powerful, fluid style and elegant sensitivity to music.

That’s why 5-foot-11-inch Ariana Lallone was written off as a teenager, despite a magnetic intensity, versatility, smoothness of motion and chiseled, dark features.

Finding the barre too low elsewhere, both have seen their height used to advantage at Pacific Northwest Ballet.

“We are all individuals,” Lallone said. “We are not cookie-cutout dancers.”

As the librarian in Mark Dendy’s “Les Biches” (“The Darlings”) last spring, a leather-clad, whip-wielding Lallone emerged from behind a revolving bookcase to seduce Seth Belliston--acquiescent, blond and shorter by nearly half a foot.

Partnering with Belliston took some getting used to.

“There were some blunders,” Lallone said. “My partner was very eager and so it was great. Sometimes I was more hesitant because I was worried about hurting him more than anything else, but he’s very strong and very reliable.”

Stanton came north in 1994 after two years as a student and apprentice in San Francisco and five years in the corps.

“I think they certainly appreciated me and felt I was an asset to the company at that time,” he said. “I did my job, I worked hard, but there wasn’t any special interest to push me.

“That was a shorter company down there. The corps was mostly medium height or shorter. I didn’t get to do a lot of things that I wanted to do because of that.”

He made soloist a year after arriving at PNB, became one of the company’s 10 principals in 1996 and has won over critics from London, New York, Washington and Sydney, Australia.

“The style of my dancing changed when I came here,” Stanton said. “They tried to get me not to work as hard, the muscles not as strenuous, the more relaxed the better . . . to move easier, not so muscle-y.”

Stanton, 26, and Lallone, 30, say they both benefited from early instruction in jazz dance. Stanton made the switch at age 12 after his jazz and tap dance instructor advised him to take ballet if he really wanted a Broadway career.

The main drawback, teasing from other boys, was more than offset by the enthusiasm of instructors and auditioners.

“When you’re a guy and you show promise, and you’re the only guy, they grab you,” Stanton said.

A gymnastics dropout, Lallone began learning plies and jetes at age 7. Jazz came later. Between 12 and 14, she shot up from 5 foot 2 inches to 5 foot 10, too tall for some summer ballet classes with height limits for girls.

In 1984, glancing at an American Ballet Theater summer auditioner’s clipboard, she saw beside her name the notation, “Way too tall!!!”

“I felt very awkward and ugly and all those things that happen when you’re 17,” she said. “It was becoming more serious: How much farther I was going to continue in ballet?”

Talks with her mother helped her regain her emotional balance. She won a scholarship at the PNB school the next year, became an apprentice in 1987 and joined the corps in 1988.

At the outset, artistic directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell told her, “You have to be a soloist. Otherwise it’s not going to work,” she recalled.

That took five years.

“There’s a lot of experience that you get from performing that the girls in the corps were getting to do a lot,” she said. “Some things I just simply couldn’t be in. It just didn’t look right.”

Others were perfect. As the Queen of Hearts in “Alice,” she contrived facial contortions so “angry and ugly . . . I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.”

A year after making soloist, she was promoted to principal in 1994.

Featured on the cover of Dance Magazine in January, she no longer frets over roles she’ll never get.

“You know, I’m not going to be Alice in Wonderland, I’m not going to be Cinderella, a Juliet. It’s nice, the challenge of a full-length ballet is really important when you’re a principal,” she said. “But I also understand that I’m not suited for that.”