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AAADT performs "Love Stories."
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GP: In the program you talk about your injury. What happened?
DAS: I broke my toe two weeks before City Center. I was rehearsing "Hidden Rites" and I went to do this sliding lunge and my toe just bent over. What's funny is that I'm missing a joint in that toe. ... Had I had a joint there, it would have just bent. It was the second toe on my right foot, my good foot. It was quite devastating, but against the doctors and everything, I decided to dance.
GP: Have you had to work through injuries before?
DAS: No, I've never had an injury that's taken me out to the point of you cannot do anything. I've had back spasms. You ice them for a few days and take some muscle relaxants and you're back on the stage. Not something where they said four to six weeks, x-rays, you can't walk. Crutches.
Some people do certain things to breathe, to live. And I was going through a lot of things that year, a divorce [and] other things. At that point, I felt that all I had was my dancing, and that was the one thing that was in essence being taken away from me. The thing that was pretty much keeping me sane in one sense, I couldn't do. So I said, okay, wait a minute. All right, this is not about to defeat me. ... It wasn't just the toe. The toe was like the end. At that point, I did feel defeated. ... But then after a week and a half of lying around -- well, against the doctor's orders I was still doing Pilates -- I was like, I cannot go out like that. So I decided, I'm going to dance. I pretty much had to talk Chaya into letting me dance. He just looked at me like I was crazy. But he knew I was going to do what I wanted to do. He knows that I know my body and knows also why I needed to dance. ... If I knew that I was really going to hurt myself, I would not have been dancing.
GP: Did you perform with a toe brace on?
DAS: The therapist made up some big toe tape and harness that I would have to paint every day to match my skin. No one saw it. I was icing before the show, after the show, in between shows. They were afraid I was going to get other injuries because I was compensating. The worst that I got was a shin splint, and you just ice it.
Dr. Rose was advising me not to dance: "You could ruin your career. You could ruin everything." I'm like, okay. Once I decided I was going to dance there was no stopping me. ... Now it's totally healed. No soreness, no nothing.
GP: Talk about "Love Stories."
DAS: I think it was a vision of the true sense of just loving dance and its techniques -- where it started, where it's going. It starts out back in the day when dancers would come into the studio and there would always be a competition, just a playful competition. In jeans and whatever you were wearing, you could just dance. Back in the day, it seemed like you could just break out in dance in anything you had on. Nowadays, there's no doing that. I don't know why, maybe we've gotten older. But it starts that way and then it goes into another technique of dance, hip-hop, which the company doesn't do at all. [It] was really exciting to experience and quite funny.
I thought it was comical when we were in there every day with Rennie Harris [co-choreographer with Judith Jamison and Robert Battle of "Love Stories"]. Every day he was going through the steps. We're like, "Okay, so you're going to make up the dance now?" He said, "Nope, we're going over steps." We had to get the style. We had to get the feeling. ... You have to do it like yourself and make it natural and not try to dance the step.
And then of course there's Robert Battle. I just love him. He's such a powerful choreographer who comes in so prepared. He has the whole piece in his head and in five seconds he's like, "Okay, let's do this and let's do that, and now we have a dance," the whole piece. It was wonderful. There was no over and over and over again. His section, I think, is such a release. Everything that can move in your body moves in your body. And afterwards we're like, oh, my god.
It takes a lot of work because that piece takes you from modern to hip-hop to modern again. And then you've got a little ballet in there. There's a little technique and a little African. It's different from having it in three different pieces. ... But in this piece, you have it all in one dance.
Interview by Jennifer Dunning for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online conducted in May 2006. (Photos: Nick Ruechel [banner], courtesy Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Paul Kolnik-Thirteen/WNET [top and middle left].)
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