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Although born in England, Gillian Murphy was raised in a small town in South Carolina, where she continued the ballet training she had begun at age three. Her formative training was at the North Carolina School of the Arts with Melissa Hayden, where she danced the lead in a number of the school's productions. Ms. Murphy joined American Ballet Theatre's corps de ballet in 1996 and became a principal dancer with the company in 2002. She spoke with contributor Elizabeth Kendall about her early immersion in and passion for ballet.
GREAT PERFORMANCES: Anyone who knows your bio has questions about a childhood that's been lived all over the world. How did you come to be born in England and trained in Belgium and Florence, South Carolina?
Gillian Murphy: My father was working overseas. Before that, my two older brothers had been born in the United States. He worked in England for two years, then transferred to Belgium for two years -- the first four years of my life. At that point, he decided, along with my mother, who is English, that they wanted us to grow up in the United States. So they dropped me and my two older brothers off with my grandparents in Virginia and drove up and down the East Coast to find a good place for us to grow up.
GP: Stopping in every small town?
GM: I'm not sure; I was pretty little at the time. They found Florence, South Carolina, a small town, but it has a small arts community, the Florence Little Theater, and good public schools. That's where we grew up. My father decided he wanted to be a computer programmer and self-employed for a few years. It worked out beautifully. It was a wonderful place to grow up.
As I got more serious about ballet, when I was 12, my mother started driving me to Columbia, South Carolina, an hour and a half away from Florence. She knew I needed better training than was available [in Florence]. I'm definitely indebted to my parents for making those sacrifices and letting me follow my dream.
I studied at Columbia City Ballet for a couple of years; then, when I was 14, I moved away from home to North Carolina School of the Arts, where I trained for three years.
GP: What made your mother and your father listen to you and decide you were serious about ballet? What kind of people were they that they could listen to you in the first place?
GM: You should talk to them about it. I know that with each of us, my two older brothers, me, and my little sister, who's now 18, they raised us to be sort of independent, respectful of our elders, but also to question authority.
GP: That's hard to pull off.
GM: But they did raise us to believe that if we were passionate about something (and with a certain amount of practicality about how much talent we [had] in what we're passionate about), we could follow what we believed in. They knew I lived ballet, and my mother's always loved ballet. She knew that for me to continue this in a major way, I had to get better training.
GP: This is not a question I planned, but who gave you the body?
GM: Both of them, I guess. My mother danced growing up. ... She was born in Argentina [and] lived there for the first 10 years of her life, and then her parents moved to Spain, but they sent her to boarding school in England.
GP: When you say you were passionate about ballet, even at age nine, what did that mean? How did you think of it in your nine-year-old mind?
Interview by writer Elizabeth Kendall for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online (photo credits: Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET [top banner] and Rosalie O'Connor [top left]).
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