A young St. Petersburg dancer stands at a crossroads, the Broadway stage on one side, the military on the other. It may all come down to one audition.
By JOHN BARRY
Published February 17, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Someday, Tynell Cromartie hopes to be an antelope or a hyena.
But to be either, Tynell, 17, first must find within himself an answer for Denise Jefferson. The director of the Ailey School in New York had interrupted a four-hour dance audition to ask the kind of soul-searching question Tynell and 100 other young dancers didn't have much time or spare nerves to ponder.
"Are you musical?" Jefferson asked them all, an edge of concern in her voice. "If you're not, you've got a problem."
Jefferson and the school's ballet department chairwoman, Celia Marino, came to St. Petersburg with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which performs tonight and Wednesday at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater. On Friday, they auditioned high school dance students for the Ailey School's eight-week summer program.
Tynell never thought he had a musicality problem. He has danced since he was 12, when he first joined the annual Chocolate Nutcracker production in Clearwater. He is a junior in the dance program at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School. His dream is to land a role in the musical The Lion King ("as antelope or hyena"). He is so musical that he performs a duet with Alicia Keys on his message machine. (She doesn't know about it.) And he has already been to Ailey.
Tynell went to Ailey as a freshman. He was one of only three kids from St. Petersburg at Ailey that summer, he said, and the only boy in his class of 32. It meant a huge sacrifice for his family and his Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, which worked together to pay for eight weeks in New York. Tuition and housing can run up to $6,000. They cut some costs when his mother searched out a long-lost relative in New York, who agreed to put him up, "a great aunt I had never even met."
He tried out again as a sophomore and tanked. Patricia Paige, his dance teacher at Gibbs, said the Ailey experience had gone to his head. She, too, had won a summer at Ailey as a teenager, and "I came back changed." She knew her life from then on would be dance.
Tynell came back changed, but not in altogether positive ways. "He thought he had it made," she said. He began to rest on 15-year-old laurels and "really lost a lot." The surprise Ailey rejection in his second year "gave us a way to say, "Don't you think you need to re-evaluate?' "
Tynell said he didn't return "big-headed" from New York. But he may have come back overconfident. "I had come in (at Gibbs) with no training in ballet and modern," he said. "After Ailey, I thought I had caught up with everyone."
Apparently, he had not. He realized he had a way to go.
"That's where his work ethic came from," Paige said. "And it's why he's pretty much on edge today."
Some pressing long-range decisions hang over dancing juniors like Tynell. He needs to decide what kind of dance to focus on for his senior project next year. Ailey could help, if he got in. Rejection a second time could be a clue that he should think about some other line of work. And he has: If dance isn't his future, he might turn to the military. His dad is a Coast Guard veteran.
Tynell doesn't have a classic dancer's physique. "Physically, I'm puny-looking," he said. "I weigh 135 pounds, I'm 5-6."
He compensates, according to his ballet teacher, Suzanne Pomerantzeff, "with a passion for movement. And he knows how to work. That will take him across many deep valleys."
The work ethic counts most in the first half of an Ailey School audition, when dancers are asked to demonstrate simple ballet positions. This is what Tynell - whose preferences are modern and African - has worked hardest on: the rudimentary, the mundane, the boring, but unfortunately oh-so essential beginner elements of ballet. A dancer goes nowhere without them.
You needn't know much about ballet to know who's done the grunt work, Pomerantzeff said.
"When you begin to look, you see varying levels of technique: the student who pays attention to feet, legs, position and alignment of the body, beautiful presence of the neck and face. When you get them all together, you can see who's paid attention to that rather than just the dance."
Paige calls it "a test of the hidden language."
"If you have the language, you progress. They want to see extension, how high your legs are. Or they want to see you pick your foot up from the floor, then let it wrap around your leg.
"That's how dance companies get rid of the first thousand (applicants). From the next 300, they pull people who know modern and know jazz. Till they finally get to that one fierce dancer. Which is all they want."
At the end of the ballet test, Paige had thought Tynell "looked reserved, but did it all."
"I held back a little," Tynell agreed.
Blame nerves.
Tynell has his own techniques for calming himself at auditions. "I get in my state," he said. "I'm thinking about the weirdest things to keep from being nervous: That ugly girl. That cute girl. What I'm going to eat.
"And I stay away from the freshmen," he said. "They're really nervous."
The second half of the audition, a test of modern dance to a simple 3-4 conga rhythm, posed the obvious question:
"Are you musical?"
Denise Jefferson asked that question after watching several groups of dancers perform as though they were deaf to the conga.
"You may know the steps, but if you're off the beat, everyone in the audience will know," she told them.
Was Tynell musical?
He had spent a year trying to prove that he is, that the Ailey rejection last summer was just a stumble. Finally, as judges Jefferson and Marino scratched notes with their pencils, he took his turn, performing a complicated, 14-part set of falls, soutes (jumps) and contractions.
Paige had told her students that this audition was only "the opinion of two people on one day of your life." Jefferson had further told them that those she selected would not necessarily be the most talented, "only the ones who seem right for Ailey right now."
A few minutes later, she called the lucky names. Tynell found out that Friendship Missionary Baptist Church needs to warm up its fundraising machine again (the church welcomes sponsors). And he should call his great aunt and look for a hyena costume. He had made the cut.
After the audition, Jefferson was asked what was special about Tynell.
She had to think a minute to remember him among the hundred. Glasses. Skinny kid.
"Oh, yes, the one with braids," she said. "He was very focused, serious, had a good leap."
