Delivering Dancing Dreams

In the pursuit of a dream, Attila Mosolygo came first to America, then to New York, and finally to Grand Rapids. An aspiring ballet dancer, he had trained and struggled for years, enduring a series of crowded, nerve-wracking auditions, before finally getting the call in 1996: There was a spot open with the Grand Rapids Ballet Company…and they wanted him.

“There are many dancers in New York,” says Mosolygo, originally of Budapest, Hungary, where he studied at the National Ballet Institute. “You go for all these big auditions. Two hundred people show up for 10 jobs and every year, you just keep going and going and one day they say, ‘All right, we have a position for a guy in Grand Rapids.’ I had no idea, anything, about Grand Rapids.”

Mosolygo drove to Grand Rapids with a friend from New York and got an apartment within walking distance of the ballet company. He didn’t even know where Grand Rapids was initially, but since then, he has been a proud witness to not only the growth of the company, but the city itself. He has seen the troupe change directors and the program expand each year with new and challenging works. Last year, he helped christen the new 300-seat Peter Martin Wege Theatre, part of a $6.2 million expansion.

Four years ago, he married a fellow Grand Rapids dancer, Mindy Mosolygo.

“I like what I do here, and I like the people I do it with,” says Attila. “They put up a theater recently and as far as I’m concerned, a stage is a stage. Once the curtain goes up, you just have to do the best you can with what you’re given. The audience is going to appreciate it just as much here as anywhere else.”

Mosolygo is not the only member of the ballet who crossed the world in pursuit of a dream. Kateryna Derechyna emigrated from Ukraine via New York, first arriving as a competitor in the 2000 Youth American Grand Prix. There she accepted a scholarship to the Harid Conservatory Program in Boca Raton, Fla., where she trained for two years before moving first to South Carolina (to join a larger company), than to Philadelphia, where she taught and would take a train each weekend to New York for auditions.

“You saw the same people every weekend,” Derechyna said. “Some people flew from other states, because some days you can take two or three auditions. There were no contracts and it was hard to get a job. You’d pay for it, they’d take your measurements, and then say, ‘Sorry, everybody, we have no openings.’”

Eventually, luck broke for Derechnya. She was offered a position in Grand Rapids, where she soon moved up to the bigger company spot she had dreamed of...as the company grew around her and her fellow dancers. And so did the city.

“Even two years ago, there was hardly anything down here,” says Mosolygo of the company’s Heartside neighborhood headquarters. “Ballet was the first thing, then the bus station and the Hopson Flats and Founders just across the street. The whole downtown keeps expanding.”

The development of Grand Rapids and its ballet company has helped keep talent such as Mosolygo and Derechnya in West Michigan, satisfied with their environment and careers. There are many professional ballet companies in the United States, but few companies offer such a long season or the challenge of as many different performances a season. “It’s exciting to always be rehearsing for new shows,” says Mosolygo.

Homegrown success stories, individual and otherwise
Husband and wife Nicholas and Laura Schultz both grew up in West Michigan, studying with the company as children. Now in their sixth season with the company, the development of the GRBC has been both an integral part of their professional lives and their growth into adulthood.

Nicholas began dancing when he was seven years old for a simple reason: it was free.

“When I was young, I (participated in a lot of activities) and ballet was free for boys, so my mom signed me up,” he says. “After my second or third year, I started performing The Nutcracker. Performing was fun and there were a lot of girls, so I stuck with it.”

Following Nicholas’s apprenticeship, he graduated high school and immediately scored a job with the GRBC as a professional dancer. Although he was spared the cattle-call auditions many of his fellow dancers endured, his path to the stage was not an easy one.

“Any guy that sticks with ballet is achieving the dream,” Nicholas says. “Other boys find out you’re in ballet in middle school and bash and name-call you every day. You don’t want to keep with it, but if you do it’s worth it as long as you love doing it. Every once in a while, the school here will get a crop of boys and we’ll lose two thirds of them, but if we keep one or two, that’s a feat. I always said to the kids, ‘I’ll dance with pretty girls in leotards and you can go wrestle with sweaty guys.’”

Laura, once a little girl that dreamed of growing up to be a ballerina, took a different path. She also apprenticed with the ballet company in high school, but unlike her husband sought out the big city. She spent a year studying at the National Ballet School in Toronto, then two years with the St. Louis Ballet.

“It was sort of like the grass not always being greener on the other side,” she says. “St. Louis Ballet wasn’t really that big. They were very involved with the Rams and sports there. When I decided to come back, I realized how much I’d actually grown in the three years since I’d left.”

Driven by generous donors, the steady growth of a supportive audience and the guidance of Director Gordon Pierce Schmidt and Associate Artistic Director Laura Berman, now in their ninth season, the company has grown dramatically in both size and stature. It has performed over 50 new works since the new directorship came on board in 1999.

“I was a kid when (GRBC) first became professional and they were really small, with only three or five professionals at a time,” Nicholas explains. “They had three big shows a year and now we do over 70 performances, so it’s astronomical growth. When Laura and I started, we were at the old Masonic Temple basement with one bathroom for all the girls and one bathroom for all the boys. So… it’s come a long way.

A Heartside family
This season will be the first with the company for 20-year-old Florida native Yarinet Restrepo. In fact, this will be a year of many firsts for Restrepo: Her first season as a professional dancer. Her first year living in Grand Rapids. Her first winter.

Restrepo attended the New World School of Arts High School in Miami. After graduating, she attended Florida International University, but realized immediately how much she missed dancing. “I realized I had to dance,” she says, “that I got depressed from not dancing because it was a part of me.”

In February, she went to an audition and received a callback from the GRBC. Restrepo plans to stay in Grand Rapids with the ballet company while continuing her schooling online toward a degree in finance.

She joins a group that, although small in number, has become a distinctly visible part of the community, an intimidate family in a rapidly redeveloping quadrant of downtown Grand Rapids.

“We’re pretty close-knit; we all get together outside of the studios,” says Nicholas Schultz. “Dancers are so similar. We don’t have to understand each other to know what we’re thinking. You have feelings about how things are going, what you need and what you don’t want, how your body feels. We all feel the same way.” He laughs. “Achy.”

No matter the path taken to achieve their dreams, the dancers of Grand Rapids have expressed the necessity of commitment. They’ve endured painstaking auditions, adversity and sore muscles in the pursuit of their art, and they’ve witnessed the evolution of a city as well as an arts community. This weekend, see the fruits of their efforts as the Grand Rapids Ballet Company opens its 2008/2009 season with a production of Gordon Pierce Schmidt’s Aladdin at the DeVos Performance Hall. For more information, visit them online at www.grballet.com.