Going Toe-to-Toe

Parish worked on Webre's suggestions, and in her second season she was rewarded with a starring role. For two performances of the company's full-length production of "Giselle" last October, Parish was cast as Myrta, queen of the vengeful ghosts. Of the female parts in "Giselle," it is second only to the title role in importance, coveted by ballerinas for its grand dramatic dimension and the high technical demands of the solo that starts off the ballet's second act.

To augment her dancer's salary of around $750 per week (paid only during the nine-month season), Parish tended bar on weekends if she wasn't performing. Come the next week, Webre would notice the strain, she says.

"He would say, 'You seem tired. You seem overworked.' I'm thinking, 'Duh,' " she says with a laugh. "He said I should quit my second job. But I wouldn't be able to make ends meet. I have school loans to pay off."

Then came the injuries: a pulled hamstring, an aggravated disc in her spine, a sprained ankle, tendinitis in her left knee. Last fall, her right knee began to ache during rehearsal. Her doctor told her she had damaged the cartilage and should stay off it. But Webre was preparing his "Nutcracker" for its world premiere at the Warner Theatre, the company's first new production of the holiday chestnut in 42 years, and Parish didn't want to drop out.

She completed the 2 1/2 -week "Nutcracker" run, performing several different roles. For her efforts, she says, she acquired a new injury: swelling around the second metatarsal of her left foot, causing piercing pain if she put weight on it. She had to pull out of the company's February program at the Kennedy Center.

Parish wasn't the only injured dancer. Three company members needed surgery and could not perform dancing roles in "The Nutcracker," according to AGMA.

One of those was principal dancer Jason Hartley, who underwent his second knee surgery in three years. "With some dancers, Septime can give you leniency because we've been with him a lot," he says. "With the younger dancers, he wants to see them full-out, more so than is necessary, in my opinion. We dance six hours a day. . . . His ballets are quite vigorous, jumping nonstop."

Some dancers had talked over the years about joining a union, Hartley says, but it was during last year's Christmastime rush that they united around the idea.

"Septime was scrambling to get his pieces together -- ['Nutcracker'] was a big production with new scenery and new costumes -- and that's when the dancers threw up their hands," Hartley recalls. The dancers, he adds, were frustrated with working overtime and missing breaks without compensation.

In interviews with several dancers, a common issue was frustration with being unable to influence working conditions on the most intimate level: how their bodies were being used. "Someone once said ballet is not a democracy, it's like communism: You do what you're told and you don't ask why," Hartley says. "But if you're telling me what to do, you're not using me to my potential."

The company was achieving things that few believed it could -- but there was a cost. "We never thought that we could do a full-length 'Giselle,' a full-length 'Romeo and Juliet,' a full-length 'Coppelia,' " says Du, who has danced with the company for 15 years. "The company wasn't large enough, the skill wasn't large enough, the belief wasn't large enough." The result, Du says, was what audiences might expect "of a company twice the size, in terms of type of ballets and quality. There's the problem. I think the dancers are tired, physically tired."

The Washington Ballet, he says, "obviously needs better organization to make this run smoothly. There's a lot of work concentrated on a little group of dancers."