The work life of any dancer, especially a classical ballerina, is very short. While exceptional artists who’ve been able to dance in middle age do come to mind–Margot Fonteyn, Natalia Makarova–ballet is a young person’s profession. So when Glenview teenager Amy Rose knew that she wanted to pursue a dance career, she figured she’d better do it while she was still young. Her family was supportive–after all, they had started her in dance classes when she was four years old. But the powers at Niles North High School were not, she says.
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So at 16 Rose picked up and headed to New York. She finished her schoolwork in correspondence studies with Indiana University–“the toughest correspondence school we could find,” says her mother Loretta–while studying dance and waiting to audition for American Ballet Theatre. She’d studied under the superb teacher Larry Long at Chicago’s Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance since she was 11, and had danced lead roles in Page’s annual Nutcracker at the Arie Crown; she knew what she wanted, and unlike many in the competitive and highly emotional world of dance, she got it.
Rose joined ABT in 1979 at age 16, “by luck and by chance,” she says, with the nervous giggle that punctuates much of her conversation. “The company was just coming off tour, and they needed people. After a long tour people leave–they get injured, or tired, or whatever–and I happened to be right there at the time. Lucky for me, [ABT’s late director] Lucia Chase didn’t know I was just 16 at the time. She had hired a 15-year-old a year before me who had had a complete nervous breakdown, so Lucia said, ‘Never again.’ But they never asked me how old I was, and I didn’t tell them.”
As she approaches 30, an age many dancers see as a turning point, Rose is necessarily considering how much longer she’ll dance. “I really don’t know,” she says. “That changes every day, as to how I feel about things. This is a much better year for me in terms of roles: The Informer, and Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, and we’re supposed to be doing Fancy Free in San Francisco later this season. And the Rancher’s Daughter is a lot of fun for me.” She’s in good condition, she says: “I pulled my calf two years ago and still have a few problems occasionally, but that’s pretty much it. You try and warm up well, eat well, and be careful on slippery stages.” And when she hangs up her toe shoes, then what?
