TURNING POINT
A Star Ballerina Is Now Teaching Others To Dance
By Robert Johnson

Star Ledger, May 12, 2004: Life has come full circle for ballerina Susan Jaffe. After she gave her last performance as a principal with American Ballet Theatre in June 2002, Jaffe suddenly found her calendar empty.

Her career over at age 40, she didn’t know where to direct her restless energy. Then she was reunited with Risa Kaplowitz, another dancer who had been her childhood friend.

Together they founded the Princeton Dance and Theater Studio, a small school with a nurturing atmosphere. Jaffe and Kaplowitz now practice their art in a quiet corner of Forrestal Village in Plainsboro.

Far removed from the excitement of the Metropolitan Opera House, they are readying another generation to dance on stage. On Saturday, their kids will present a recital called “Movin’ Up!” in Lawrenceville, performing excerpts from the celebrated ballet “Raymonda,” which Jaffe has restaged after Marius Petipa’s original choreography, plus a host of other works.

When Jaffe left ABT, where she had danced since 1980, the world seemed a cold and unfamiliar place. “I retired not knowing where I was going, what I was going to do or where I was going to get my next paycheck,” Jaffe says.

Yet in a strange twist, near the end of her career the ballerina returned to where it all began. Jaffe studied dancing at the Maryland School of Ballet, directed by Hortensia Fonseca, in Jaffe’s hometown of Bethesda. Three months before Jaffe’s farewell to the stage, the school hosted a party to celebrate Fonseca’s 80th birthday. Jaffe decided to attend.

Her mind flashed back to the little classroom with wooden floors where she first dreamed of becoming a ballerina. Her childhood was filled with slumber parties, visits to the National Zoo in Washington, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. There, she and her girlfriends used to ogle ABT stars Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland.

During the 1970’s, the girls whitened their lips with makeup and stained their eyelids purple, trying to achieve a look of exotic glamour. Just before they graduated from ballet school, they spraypainted their names in hugh letters on the fence around a construction site that abutted the highway. They were aching to be famous.

The memories came rushing back. After Fonseca’s birthday party, “I went home that night and I cried my eyes out,” Jaffe recalls. “I cried and cried, because I was just overwhelmed with the sense of going home.

“That’s where I met up with Risa again.”

Kaplowitz had enjoyed her own career, dancing for Dayton Ballet, Houston Ballet and Manhattan Ballet, a small touring group. She retired about 10 years before Jaffe and went to work in business. “I was a ballerina turned postage-machine saleswoman,” Kaplowitz says with a chuckle, recalling her first job in the “real” world.

Kaplowitz stopped working to raise a family in Princeton. Eventually, though, the beauty of dance seduced her again. When Kaplowitz’s daughter became old enough to take lessons, she grew nostalgic for her own experience at the Maryland School of Ballet.

“It was intense, but it was so nurturing.” Kaplowitz recalls of the classes at Fonseca’s studio. “It was a family. Everybody was going through really junky stuff, being an adolescent. But there was never a moment when I did not feel that I could go to any one of my teachers and confide in them.

Then Kaplowitz, Fonseca, and some of Jaffe’s other old school chums attended the party that followed her last “Giselle.” They were all there,” Jaffe recalls, “and Risa was telling me how her dream was to have a school like the one that we had when we were growing up. So very nonchalantly, I put my arm around her shoulders, and I said, ‘You know, Risa, maybe one day you and I will open a ballet school together.’ “

Kaplowitz didn’t say anything in response, but within days she had drafted a business plan. The Princeton Dance and Theater Studio opened in September 2003, and expanded into the space next door the following summer. In addition to classical ballet, the school offers modern dance, jazz and tap for kids, plus classes for adults.

As a teacher, Jaffe can share with her young charges some of the extraordinary learning experiences that she had while performing with American Ballet Theatre.

From Kirov ballerina and ABT coach Irina Kolpakova, Jaffe says she learned a new way to carry herself, conserving energy and refining her body’s line. Kolpakova also gave her a new approach to musicality. From exercise guru Juliu Horvath, the founder of a system called Gyrotonics, Jaffe says she gained new flexibility in her joints and a theory about projecting her energy into space. She also worked with dramaturg Byam Stevens, delving profoundly into the dramatic construction of her roles.

“She pout not only a lot of emotion, but also a lot of thought into what she did,” says Ethan Stiefel, one of Jaffe’s frequent partners at ABT. “She explored so many different ways of working. She also had a very calm, collected upper body and pots de bras, so that no matter what happened below the waist, whether it was rigorous or dynamic, she always maintained a mellow sensation.

Stiefel says this approach explains the seamless quality of Jaffe’s dancing.

Yet Jaffe says it wasn’t easy for her to become a teacher. Every dancer must focus on her body, sculpting it into an artist’s tool. A star has special responsibilities: An evening-length classic like “Swan Lake” is only as good as the ballerina who plays the Swan Queen. Naturally, this kind of pressure creates a mind-set.

“Everything I did was for me – for my art,” Jaffe says. Helping others learn felt alien to her. “I thought that I was very self-centered.”

She was about to have a revelation. “After I quit dancing.” She says, “it didn’t have to be all about me anymore. And I actually started to enjoy working with young people and seeing them grow.”

“You get really close to them. You know all their little quirks and what they need to work on. And then you start seeing them ‘get’ things, and their faces light up when they do. . .I really became very joyful, teaching these kids.