Teleflora and The School of American Ballet both mark their 75th birthday this year. And so they're pairing up as they both take a bow.
The School of American Ballet, the pre-eminent academy for classical dance in the U.S., is shaped by the artistic principles of founder George Balanchine, who developed a uniquely American way of dancing, emphasizing speed, musicality and expansiveness.
For the month of January, we'll be featuring blog posts from various people affiliated with The School.
Today's guest post is from Jock Soto. Jock began training at the School of American Ballet in 1977. He joined New York City Ballet in 1981, was promoted to Soloist in 1984 and to Principal dancer in 1985.
After an acclaimed 20-year career with NYCB, Jock Soto retired from dancing in 2005. He has been a member of SAB's faculty since 1996. In this post he recounts the special part flowers paid in his retirement from New York City Ballet.
Jock Soto welcomes flowers to mark his retirement
I love flowers—ranunculus are my favorite variety—so I always enjoyed receiving flowers from well-wishers before or after a performance during my career. It was always a nice surprise to find flowers waiting for me at the stage door or in my dressing room either on a special occasion or simply to signal that a friend would be watching in the audience that night.
Flowers are especially front and center in the swirl of memories surrounding my final days at New York City Ballet. They were everywhere.
As I arrived at the theater each day in the week prior to my final scheduled performance on June 19, 2005, I found armloads of bouquets waiting for me. They were from my partner, my family, friends, board members and patrons of NYCB, and some were even from people I had never met.
I collected such an abundance of flowers that week that I simply could not take them all home. I gave away some of the bouquets to ballerinas in the company and even to fans who were waiting outside the stage door after each night’s performance. I had so many flowers in my apartment that it looked like a funeral home.
Most nights at New York City Ballet, flowers are nowhere to be seen when the curtain comes down on a performance. My fellow dancers and I only received flowers onstage when a new ballet premiered (and usually it was just the women who got the bouquets), and unlike some other companies, at NYCB it is not the custom for audiences to throw flowers onto the stage at the end of the performance. The night of my final performance, however, was a whole different story.
I danced in five ballets that night, and at the end of the first four, my female partners were all presented with bouquets. My partner in the fourth ballet, After the Rain, was Wendy Whelan and she took her bouquet of roses and laid it at my feet.
The last ballet I performed was the “Royal Navy” section of George Balanchine’s high-spirited Union Jack. It ends to the sound of canon fire as the orchestra plays “Rule, Britannia!”.
As I stood alone on the stage taking my final bow after the ballet’s rousing finale, I was showered with roses that floated down from high above the stage. All of NYCB’s ballerinas then took the stage one by one and offered me gorgeous bouquets.
I accepted each one until I finally was so overloaded that I had to put them down on the stage floor alongside other flowers that had been thrown from the audience. Just when I thought the flower offerings were over, my fellow male dancers from NYCB presented me with an enormous basket full of blooms.
I was truly overwhelmed by the amount of flowers given to me that day. I even received flowers from someone I had not seen or been in contact with since I was ten years old. She was a fellow dancer at my ballet school when I was growing up and had flown from California to see my final performance.
In the end, since there were practically enough flowers to open my own Teleflora franchise, NYCB helped me to donate most of the flowers from that special night to the patients at a local hospital.
While it wasn’t possible to physically keep them for long, I will always hold on to what they so beautifully represented--the love, friendship and mutual respect I shared with my friends and fans throughout my career.
