Letting Go and Hoping for More

At 16, Michele Wiles, willowy, blond and physically gifted, won a gold medal. But no endorsement deals for cereal or athletic gear followed because Wiles was competing in the world of ballet, where leaping higher, faster and stronger is best appreciated when it can be harnessed in the service of art, not commerce. Nevertheless, her win, in Varna, Bulgaria, made her someone to watch. It’s hard not to watch a dancer who starts with Wiles’ basic ingredients--long limbs that seem to float into high realms (she’s 5 foot 8), impressive turns and a gift for balancing that often elicits gasps.

But technical prowess, sometimes dismissed as an ability to do tricks, doesn’t impress everyone. A critic in Toronto, where the 22-year-old Wiles, now an American Ballet Theatre soloist, recently won the Erik Bruhn Prize, called her “a technical monster,” and she wasn’t being complimentary. The New York Times’ Jennifer Dunning offered a kinder appraisal after Wiles’ debut as Medora, the main maiden-in-distress in ABT’s “Le Corsaire” last month at the Met. Wiles appears as Medora in the company’s upcoming engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “There is no one quite like Michele Wiles,” Dunning wrote, “for big, easy dancing that is inherently classical but has the freedom and intensity of a horse bolting onto the course.”

Dunning noted that Wiles started the ballet tentatively before “coming into her own” in the third act, an assessment with which Wiles agrees. “I was a little timid at first,” she says by phone from a Lincoln Center office between rehearsals. “It was my first big thing onstage, and I was freaking out. But by the next time I did it, I felt more relaxed, and I could let go more.”

“Letting go” is one of the major themes surfacing in Wiles’ life these days, as her career suddenly shifts into high gear. Having joined ABT’s second-unit Studio Company in 1997, she became a member of the main company’s corps the next year, then was promoted to soloist in 2000. ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie says “letting go,” or sinking into roles with dramatic effusion, is one of the keys to taking competition-winning skills to the next level in principal roles. “When I first saw Michele in the Studio Company and then in the corps,” McKenzie says from his offices at ABT, “it was easy to see she had a wonderful facility, wonderful proportions, a lovely training. But she had to grow into it--it was all in there, but it was hard for her to open up at first. And you can’t force someone to grow up; you have to see that the time is right and provide them with the right experiences.”

Wiles had competed before, at events in Japan and in Paris, in 1996, but McKenzie says he didn’t know that when he chose her to represent ABT for the Bruhn competition. Such experience, he says, guarantees only that you have nerves of steel, not that you’ll be the best dancer. But McKenzie had already started to trust Wiles with a few principal roles--in Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations” and “Prodigal Son”--and he suspected that working on an emotionally demanding pas de deux like the one from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” for the Toronto competition would be just the thing to push her to “the next step.” He wasn’t disappointed. After wowing the audience with regal exactitude in the demanding pas de deux “Grand Pas Classique,” with partner David Hallberg, Wiles impressed the judges enough in “Manon” to win the competition (the male winner was Friedemann Vogel of the Stuttgart Ballet).

“I felt so proud, my God,” McKenzie says with enthusiasm. “It was like watching a flower blossom. I saw things that I hadn’t seen before, a little more of who Michele was and a glimmer of who she’s going to be--a really open, strong, feminine presence.”

“It was very cool,” is the way Wiles puts it, after winning the small Bruhn Prize sculpture and about $5,000.

Like her dancing, Wiles voice is very youthful, appealingly assured yet somewhat reserved, as if she wants each word to be correctly placed. She has to be coaxed to talk about what has changed since that moment. For one thing, she’s danced the star turn Rose Adagio from “Sleeping Beauty” on a mixed ABT program, and got the “Corsaire” lead, both opportunities having come up when principal dancer Irina Dvorovenko was injured. When replacing a principal, Wiles has the option to move into a star dressing room, but so far has felt comfortable at her usual place in the soloists’ room, “where all my stuff is,” she says. The support of everyone in the company--and her family and boyfriend, who attended her debut performance as Medora--makes her feel grounded. And there have been exciting perks she didn’t expect, like her photo next to a “Pick of the Week” recommendation in New York’s Time Out magazine.

Is this a “star is born” scenario? Not exactly, her silence and a laugh seem to say, but she admits she’s started to get autograph requests and she gets invited to more company parties, where patrons suddenly want to know all about her. “I guess people are noticing me a lot more,” she says. “They’re taking another look, maybe.”

The truth is, Wiles has always been singled out, almost from her first days in dance class, at age 3, in Baltimore. Her mother took jazz, so that’s what Wiles started with, and for a while, the goal was to become a Rockette. Wiles took ballet only to improve her jazz dancing and soon got into the regional dance competition circuit, winning some prizes right away.

But after seeing the Royal Ballet’s “Swan Lake” when she was 10, everything became secondary to ballet.

She studied for six years at the Kirov Academy, a Russian-run outpost in Washington, D.C., where her technical facility and regal line were nurtured and rewarded. Her parents at first had concerns about the academy--it is funded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and isn’t formally affiliated with its namesake company in St. Petersburg--but Wiles says no Moonie overtones were evident when she was there.

“I feel like Russian training is the best in the world,” Wiles says. “It really made me strong, but it wasn’t until I did Balanchine at ABT that I worked on petit allegro”--small-scale, rapid footwork--”which I needed. The tempos are only half as fast in Russia.” Her teachers at the Kirov Academy suggested the competition route. Although Wiles calls her experience at most of them “extremely stressful,” she enjoyed the less-pressured atmosphere of the Bruhn gathering, where five young couples from prominent ballet companies competed on only one evening. “We were all in companies already,” she says. “There weren’t any parents or coaches hovering. It was more like a gala performance, and we enjoyed getting to talk to each other.”

Like most ballet dancers, who are promoted and cast at the will of an artistic director, Wiles doesn’t know how quickly the next promotion will come or what principal roles she’ll get to dance. McKenzie says it all depends on timing--the opportunities that arise and how quickly an individual artist develops. “The route from corps to principal could take just a year for someone, or seven years for another person,” he says. “There’s no standard amount of time.”

In addition to performing Medora in “Corsaire,” Wiles is rehearsing Myrta, Queen of the Wilis, in “Giselle,” a prominent but secondary role she’s done in the past; and, as far as she knows, she’ll continue to dance soloist roles in “Swan Lake” (in the pas de trois and as one of the Big Swans). But she has her eyes on the prize--the coveted dual role of Odette and Odile in that ballet, which she considers the height of ballerina ambition. Is she the kind of dancer who would lobby for a part?

“Some people might do that, but I wasn’t raised that way,” she says. “At the Kirov Academy, no one went to the office and asked for parts; we just waited for the director to notice us or think we were talented enough.”

Not that that’s all she did. From the time she started dancing, she would spend hours in the studio by herself, after the day’s schoolwork and ballet classes were over. “No one ever had to tell me to practice,” she says. “I’d do a floor barre by myself or stretch, and run through my dances, or whatever we’d learned in class that day. That was my favorite time, in the studio alone.”

Now she spends less energy honing technical skills and more time thinking about her next frontier--interpretation. She has just started spending an hour before each performance visualizing a role in her head and imagining the details of steps and dramatic nuance. She returns to the idea of “letting go” and “falling into a role,” when she talks about some important advice she received from ABT and Bolshoi star Nina Ananiashvili.

“She was so generous with her comments,” Wiles says. “She told me that in Russia, there is a saying, that you have to have a cold mind and a warm heart. Which is true, I think. When you dance, you have to be calm and collected in your head, but you have to give your whole heart.”

Is she impatient for fame and fortune? “Not really,” she says slowly. “For now, I think it’s going just perfectly.”

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“LE CORSAIRE,” American Ballet Theatre, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Dates: Thursday- Sunday, 8 p.m.; Also, Saturday, 2 p.m. (Wiles as Medora, with Maxim Belotserkovsky), and Sunday, 2 p.m. Prices: $20-$90. Phone: (213) 365-3500; (714) 740-7878.

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Jennifer Fisher is a regular contributor to Calendar.