The art of making your partner shine

Published 10:00 am Wednesday, December 14, 2005

David Harvey has his sights set on a professional ballet career.

Down on one knee, David Harvey supports Roxanne Foster’s torso as she arabesques on pointe and leans into him.

When she whips around in a turn on one leg, he quickly switches grips and comes around to be there when she completes her turn.

The pair discuss the mundane details of how to switch hand grips when Foster spins around.

Then they turn on the sensuous, hypnotic music of Tchaikovsky’s Arabian Dance from “Nutcracker” and an Arabian princess comes alive in the airy lifts and languid leg extensions.

For Harvey, teaming with Foster is “all about making her look good.”

“Partnering is being comfortable with the person, that he won’t drop you, but also sharing a connection that comes across on stage,” Foster said.

The pair have danced as partners since they were 12 and now islander Harvey, at 18, is preparing to make the leap to professional dancing.

But for a knee injury requiring surgery and six month’s rest, he would be dancing professionally now, having received a contract from a professional ballet company last spring.

The setback was “devastating,” but after a summer back home on Bainbridge and teaching with his former instructors at Liberty Bay Danceworks, he will make the audition rounds again in January.

But first he will appear in the “Nutcracker,” Dec. 16-18, in the Arabian dance with Foster, 17, and as the Sugarplum Fairy’s Cavalier with the Dance Ensemble Northwest headed by Michael Falotico. Just a month ago, Harvey was still focusing on walking. His knee will not allow him to practice some steps until the dress rehearsal.

Harvey then plans a serious training and rehabilitation regimen following the show — as company auditions begin in January — to get back in three weeks what he lost in six months.

It has been a long road.

As a young boy of 5, Harvey watched his sister’s ballet class because his mother brought him. He tagged along for six years, and soon was able to see which girls were “good” and “really good.”

He finally joined a class when he was 11 with another boy his age, Billy Miglino, and they became good friends.

“I would never have admited it, but I knew pretty quickly,” he said, that he wanted to pursue dance seriously.

Harvey worked hard, speeding through the first two beginner classes and into Ballet 3/4 in just three months. Then at age 12, he took his first summer dance intensive in Walla Walla.

The athletic part of dancing and discovering that he was good at it made ballet appealing, but also “performing, that’s such a rush to go on stage and not know if you can do the steps and lifts and then being able to do them,” Harvey said.

He’d work out doing situps and pushups to get strong enough to do lifts.

Harvey recalls practicing splits “day and night” to be able to do them in less than two months.

“I wanted to get to that advanced level and show you guys I can do this,” he said.

As his dancing matured, Harvey says, he discovered the artistic side of ballet.

“There’s an art, a finesse. It’s not how many pirouettes you can do, but if you walk on stage and people clap… having that power and energy on stage is hard to get,” Harvey said. “I loved that part as much or more than the dancing part.”

Real steps

Harvey’s first choreographed piece was created jointly with a friend when he was 14 or 15.

“(Choreography) is very hard to do. You know the steps, but trying to string them together in a way people will be interested was very difficult, but I loved it,” he said.

Falotico, Harvey’s former teacher at Liberty Bay Danceworks, sees talent in his former pupil.

“He has a natural flair for it,” Falotico said. “You look at a ballet and you know it when you see it. (A good piece) just works as a whole. He’s got that kind of feeling for a dance.”

A turning point was when he attended six-hour-a-day classes led by “scary Ukranian masters” at a summer session at the Universal Ballet Academy in Washington, D.C. His instructor was Anatoli Kucheruk.

“It was very, very intense,” Harvey said. Teachers yelled in class and told him he was ‘no good.’”

Still, he returned the following summer and was astonished at how much the students who stayed during the year had improved.

“It was obviously the best training I can get,” he thought to himself.

So after his junior year at Bainbridge High School, he enrolled at UBA as a junior to get in two years at the academy.

“You have to make serious sacrifices (to be a dancer). The motivation was definitely trying to prove (the ballet master) wrong. He was weeding out people who don’t want to be there 200 percent. I worked 200 percent, six hours a day for two years,” Harvey said. “Now I look back and I have tremendous respect for my coach.

“I think that really solidified my chance of being able to dance professionally.”

Since Harvey returned from UBA, Foster says, “he’s stronger in his dancing, more confident and bolder in his choices as a dancer.”

Harvey plans to dance with a company for a few years and then start his own company in Seattle doing contemporary dances.

When asked what is most challenging about being a professional dancer, Harvey doesn’t talk about the physical demands nor the difficulty of gaining a position in a company.

“One of the hardest things is not only proving myself to other dancers, but also to adults and other guys my age,” Harvey said. “I want to reach kids my age and make them realize that dancing is tremendously difficult. It takes tremendous concentration and power.

“I guess that’s my biggest problem and motivation.”

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The right moves

Bainbridge Island native David Harvey appears in “Nutcracker” with Dance Ensemble Northwest at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 16 and 17 and at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 18 at North Kitsap Community Auditorium, 1881 NE Hostmark in Poulsbo.

Tickets, $12 adults, $8 seniors/students, are available at Liberty Bay Danceworks, 1223 Finn Hill Road in Poulsbo and Liberty Bay Books, 18881-D Front St. in Poulsbo. For more information, call (360) 779-7090.