100 Interviews

#65. STERLING KING - “A ballerina.”

Sterling King is incredibly mature for a 19 year old. She looks more together than I’ve probably ever looked in my life, with fashionably cut bright blond hair, rock star bangs and fingers adorned with gold rings — nothing expensive, but one with a crown I assume is an homage to her last name.

She looks miles cooler than me and I’m supposedly an adult. Sterling is the little sister of a dorm neighbor of mine from college. We meet up at Grey Dog’s in Union Square and even our menu choices reflect the contrast. Sterling gets a cup of coffee with cinnamon delicately sprinkled on top. I get a PB&J, specifically asking - and then rejoicing - when the cashier confirms it comes with potato chips.

Sterling started dancing ballet when she was four years old as an after-school hobby, like many young girls do. Even I gracelessly spent time at a dance studio as a toddler and elementary school-er before a vomiting incident ended a recital early.

“For dance, it’s something that you have to enjoy the work because it doesn’t give you a lot else back,” she says.

And for Sterling, ballet was more than a girlhood pastime. In third grade, she auditioned for the competitive North Carolina School of the Arts ballet after-school program and was accepted. She auditioned for the actual school in the 7th grade and attended through high school.

“What could they possibly judge you on when you’re in third grade?” I ask.

“Right?” she laughs, “Yeah, they were just looking for little things in the audition — How quickly we picked up sequences and basic exercises and they were judging body types. If you were a little chub, they weren’t going to take you.”

Sterling is a tall girl, without the frail physique of a dancer, but she is lanky though most of it is covered in fashionable black sweaters and gold necklaces when I talk to her. The arts school she attended was a boarding school where students studied music and ballet on top of their academics. Because her family lived in nearby Winston-Salem, Sterling chose not to live at the school because boarding students weren’t allowed to have their own cars.

“It felt like I lived there, though,” she says. “I was there from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. some nights, with school and then rehearsal, especially when a performance was coming up.”

The program Sterling was in stressed very technical ballet technique and naturally, competition was fierce.

“A lot of ballerinas are perfectionists because ballet is about perfection,” she says. “But I got to create strong bonds in high school because most of my friends were in the same boat. It’s hard to convey to someone who isn’t a dancer, which I know sounds so pretentious but no one else really knows what goes on in those studios.”

“What was the best part of being a ballerina?” I ask.

“A lot people would say performing and I did love performing but I think more than that, I loved working so hard until the point where I felt I couldn’t give any more,” she says. “I loved that feeling where you felt like you were really giving everything you had.”

In high school, she practiced for two hours a day, getting to the studio at 8 a.m. to warm up.

“Were the instructors really strict?”

Sterling laughs, “There was this little old Russian lady who was the scariest person in class and the nicest, most maternal lady out of class. If you didn’t know the combo, she’d kick you out. Two people cried like, every day. When you heard her coming behind you, your body just went limp because you knew she was going to move you into a million positions.”

I laugh and make a face. Sterling catches my drift.

“It’s crazy looking back on how stressful everything was,” she says. “I had a friend who would cry in almost every class for a whole year. I always think, ‘I can’t believe I wanted something badly enough to endure that.’”

After high school, Sterling decided to forgo college and audition for the Alonzo King Lines Ballet in San Francisco. She’d done their summer program and enjoyed how the focus was on more contemporary, modern dance.

“The emphasis was more on diction than on ballet technique,” she says. “It was more about expression and movement. It actually required more mastery because technique wasn’t the only thing you had to think about. You only had it to rely on as a back bone.”

“Was it an easy decision to audition instead of going to college?”

“By senior year, I had some…” she pauses, “bitterness at the institution I was at.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think with ballet, there’s a certain amount of self-loathing that goes into it,” she says after a moment. “Sure, the teachers put pressure on you but you’re the one who puts the most pressure on yourself.”

Sterling gave up dancing last year to go to school for visual arts and fashion design in New York. She says she was worried about living her entire career colored by rejections. One friend, for example, had auditioned for thirteen companies after high school before getting in to one.

Luckily, Sterling was accepted to the first place she auditioned, but that didn’t mean the trials stopped. Every show brought new competitions and soloist positions. In high school, dancers auditioned for level placements, freaking out over where they were placed.

“It was such a huge deal,” she says. “It defined your life.”

Sterling tells me she remembers anxiously waiting outside for a list of placements to be posted at 5 p.m. on a Friday then being told it’d actually be 8 p.m. and then finally, it was posted the next morning.

“I didn’t want to submit to rejection all the time,” she says. “Even if you’re the best, it still happens. And I think I wanted to be bitter, but I still had love for it. I’d put my whole life into it and I thought I had to, at least, give it a chance [after high school].”

At Alonzo Lines, Sterling liked that rather than having principles, soloists and the core like at a classic ballet company, every one of the 15 dancers was given the chance to be a soloist. Competition was still on though and standards were high.

“Choreographers from all over the Bay Area would come do shows for us and they’d teach these long phrases and then sit down and no one would ever know it,” she laughs.

“Was there a lot of gossip or back-stabbing in the company?”

“Sure, if someone got a part they didn’t deserve,” she says. “Some people were naturally gifted and never worked for it and other people would work hard but they were less gifted so we’d want the people who worked harder to get the parts. If they didn’t, we’d say, ‘Oh that’s bullshit.’”

“It was competitive?”

“Oh yeah, I’d have really close friends but the friendship was constantly under the tone of competition,” she says. “You want them to do well but you don’t want them to do better than you.”

During the interview, Sterling constantly rephrases or clarifies when she speaks in ballet jargon. One word she casually uses makes me laugh really hard: “bunhead.”

“What the hell is a bunhead?” I ask, stopping her.

Sterling smiles wide and laughs, “Natalie Portman in ‘Black Swan’ before she went cray-cray was a bunhead. They’re outside of class like wearing their legwarmers,” she says. “For me, I mean, when I was little, I’d definitely wear sweaters with ballet shoes on them but when I got older, I didn’t want to be defined by being a dancer,” she pauses, tilting her head back and forth. “But, you know, if we’d all go out to a club and meet people and say that we’re dancers, there was a certain pride in that.”

“What made you quit?”

She hesitates, “All year I thought I’d stay with it for a year because this is what I wanted to do, but it’s difficult to make a living at dance. It’s an unstable life. There’s so much competition and most companies can’t afford to pay you well. A lot of dancers are working their asses off and are still supported by their parents or a side job. Some of the best dancers are still broke.”

“But if it’s what you loved…” I start to say. Sterling looks a bit pained.

“It was fear,” she says. “Fear of putting yourself out there. Like, what if I did a huge audition tour and got rejected by every place?”

We talk for a bit about rejection. Sterling mentions her height, saying certain companies won’t accept ballerinas over 5’7.

“They say it’s not personal, but it is,” she says. “It’s harsher to be rejected that way than having someone not respond to my resume. It’s like they’re rejecting your whole self.”

“What was it like the day you decided you weren’t going back to the company?” I ask.

“It was rough,” she says. “It was not good. I’d gone back and forth for several weeks and I thought, well, I might not get back into college if I don’t go now but I also thought, I can’t stop dancing. I re-fell in love with it and it felt so wrong to quit,” she pauses, “God, I hate the word ‘quit.’”

She was too scared of getting emotional to tell her director she wasn’t coming back in person so she sent an e-mail, which she says her director understood.

“On my last night, it really hit me,” she says. “It’s what I dreamt of for so long and then to just stop? It was the death of a dream.”

“How long before you got used to it?” I ask. “I imagine you were on a diet and a work out schedule?”

“I always felt my best when I was eating healthy,” she says. “Then, I’d do a day of dancing and go to the gym right after. Maybe some people feel better eating a Triscuit a day but I couldn’t.”

Sterling says once, in her dorm, she saw herself in the mirror and wondered if she could still do splits. She dropped to the floor right there in her jeans and pushed through the pain to be able to do it.

“I miss having sore muscles,” she says.

“I hate to do it,” I say, “but I have to ask about eating disorders…”

Sterling nods, “I was thinking you’d ask that,” she says. “When I was much younger, I was really thin and at the time, I wasn’t eating but I thought that was normal. Of course, I’d always get accused of anorexia in 7th grade because I was a dancer.”

“Was there pressure to be thin?”

“We’d get graded on our ‘maintenance of acceptable body condition’ on our ballet report cards,” she says.

I gape at her, appalled, “What?!”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “We’d have health screenings and get graded from ‘needs improvement’ to ‘excellent.’ It was not fun. They had good intentions, I think. They were trying to detect eating disorders but most of the time it was just relatively humiliating.”

Sterling recalls one friend who was sent away to a mental health facility for three weeks for bulimia and another male ballet dancer who developed an eating disorder and left the school for good.

“Ballet is really about aesthetic,” she says. “They try to act like it’s not, but it’s so much about the body. It was traumatic enough to be in pink tights and a black leotard in front of mirrors for hours a day as a teenage girl but then to be graded on how your body was changing?”

“That sounds awful.”

Sterling nods, “Someone could be good but they wouldn’t be top level because of their body type. And they’d tell them that. They told my friend they didn’t like her body and that’s why they weren’t casting her.”

“You do have to watch what you eat. If one day I was eating carrots for lunch, my friends would ask me, ‘Why aren’t you eating?’” she laughs softly, “I couldn’t tell if they really cared or if they thinking, ‘Fuck! She’s gonna get skinny. Maybe I should eat carrots!’”

I tell her that I was surprised she referenced ‘Black Swan,’ the dark 2010 film about a paranoid ballerina. I wasn’t sure if ballet dancers would be too enthused about being portrayed yet again as psychopathic, but Sterling says she liked the movie expect for small inaccuracies like one dancer’s big, show-y tattoo or that Portman’s character was allowed on stage despite showing up late to the final performance.

“It did a good job of portraying the mental destruction and hard work,” she says. “But it missed the joy that would make someone do all of those things. The main point though was captured really well which was that in dance, the biggest thing holding you back is yourself.”

Nine months before I started 100 Interviews, I had given up journalism. Like I mentioned in Tony’s interview, I started working as a professional reporter when I was 14 years old through an internship at my local newspaper. By the time I was a college co-op for The Boston Globe, I’d been in the field for 7 years. Usually, a 21-year-old isn’t in the market to “retire” from any career path, but there I was; burnt out and stressed out on the very thing I loved most.

Throughout our interview, Sterling’s voice takes on a wistful quality. Ballet colored most every aspect of her life and identity before last year and in a follow-up Facebook message, she stresses that though she spoke a lot about the hardships of being a ballerina, she really felt the nostalgia I thought I’d been picking up from her.

“I said that I don’t plan on returning to dance (and I don’t) but it’s not because I truly don’t want to- more so that I feel like I can’t look back,” she wrote to me. “It was such a difficult decision to make, as I feared that I would never be fulfilled by something as much as I was by dance, and sometimes I still fear this, but I make a conscious effort to be without regret. I suppose I wanted to clarify that dance is something I miss and think of every day, despite all of the tough, and occasionally traumatic, experiences.”

Back at Grey Dog’s, I tell Sterling, possibly projecting the love of writing and reporting that made me create this project, that it seems like she really misses dancing.

“Sometimes I can think of a million reasons why I stopped,” she says, sighing, “and other times I can’t even think of one.”