Partnering Skills - a Kingdon Ballet AU snippet
I just... I don't know what has come over me. Sorry to anyone who actually knows more than surface level about the ballet world, but this baby had to be born:
It is Robby who brings up the new girl, as they’re standing around wondering what the fuck they’re gonna do now that Yo has broken her foot.
“It’s not my foot, Romeo,” Yo hisses, after Dana calls them into the studio to go over their contingency plan. “It’s a distal shaft fracture of the fifth metatarsal.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is, Yolanda,” Frank snarks. “You’re not gonna make the premiere, are you?”
There is no denying it: Yolanda's foot is now encased in a clunky walking boot instead of her brown pointe shoes.
“You need rest,” Baran tells Yolanda, putting what might have been a soothing hand on someone else’s shoulder. If it had been anyone other than the first female Principal Dancer of color the Royal Ballet has ever had, it might have worked. But Yo has a bigger temper than Abby even.
Probably why they work so well, as a duo on stage. Fire and all that.
“And I need an understudy,” Frank says, ignoring Yolanda’s death glare. “Someone who can hold a candle to Miss Prima here.”
Despite the fact that he and Yo communicate mostly in insults, he hasn't had a partner he jibes with this well since… he’d like to say Abby, but there the old adage had been true: people who like to fuck don’t dance well together.
He doesn’t know anyone who works as hard, who he has more fun with, in rehearsal, than Yolanda Garcia.
“We need someone who doesn’t have a full load already,” Dana chimes in, always practical. She is already scrolling through all the cast lists and rehearsal schedules. “Most of our other principals and first soloists are busy with other roles. Plus,” she says, eyeing Frank’s lanky form. “We need a girl tall enough. Trinity is too small and she’s already taking on more than she should, rehearsing Kitri, Samira would work, but she’s gonna be in Warsaw until middle of next week, choreographing that modern piece with Abbott.”
“What about that girl we just hired? From Pittsburgh? Melanie or something?” Robby suggests and Dana pulls a face.
“I know, I know,” Robby says. “But desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Melissa,” Baran says helpfully. “I taught her at White Lodge. She has a lot of promise. And Pittsburgh Ballet did the McMillan Romeo and Juliet. She’s familiar with the production.”
In the massive mirror, Frank can see his own hair sticking up in protest and Yolanda’s beautiful face, pulled into a grimace. This is her fucking dream.
He knows how bitter it can make a person to have their dream ruined. It’s why he goes to couple’s counseling once a week. Sorry, babe. So sorry, for knocking you up just as you were coming to the peak of your career, all to the tune of £150 a session.
"She's not Yolanda,” Dana says, sighing. “Nobody's Yolanda. But she can get us through opening week."
Frank grimaces.
He has a distinct memory, from company class a few weeks ago, when the new company members were introduced: Santos, a brash new dancer from San Francisco Ballet who was the first Asian-American to train at the Bolshoi. Whittaker, a kid with a thick Welsh accent who everyone’s known since he was a baby at the Royal Ballet School, performing in the Nutcracker with the company every Christmas. And then Mel King. Her straw-colored hair plaited into a neat braid, pinned up into a twist. Standing at the barre in front of him, pale skinned and freckled, the sun backlighting her, outlining the long lines of her limbs in her lavender leotard. A t-shirt tied with a knot above her waist that said “April: Autism Awareness Month”. Very pink cheeks. The kind of back he knows would show a red hand-imprint because the skin was so light.
The epitome of an English rose.
Her feet, he decided, were lovely.
Her voice, though, had been a surprise: a deep timbre and a Midwestern accent.
“Hi, I’m Melissa King,” she’d said, when Robby had asked her to introduce herself, hands folded tightly in front of her. “I’m a transfer from Pittsburgh Ballet, but I went to White Lodge til I was sixteen. I’m so excited to be here!”
*eeeek*
More to come during Kingdon week....
