There is nothing so rapt as the mother of a dancer watching her daughter dance.
So it was with Bernadette Bostos of Miami on a recent night, as she watched her daughter Stephanie perform as a member of the illustrious Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
As her daughter performed, Bostos asked a visitor in the audience, “How do you like it?” Receiving an appreciative response, she said, “Yes, it is very beautiful.” But she was talking about more than the choreography.
A year ago Feb. 19, Stephanie was in a serious automobile accident in Miami. Her upper right leg was smashed, requiring the implantation of a steel rod and screws in her hip and knee to enable her to use her limb.
More catastrophic, her right foot had to be amputated.
Yet there she was, dancing as she has been since age 5, dancing on one of the premier stages of America.
How could this be? The answer is best expressed in the words of 19-year-old Stephanie herself:
“Dancing–it’s me,” she said in an interview before the performance. “It’s like eating food. You can’t go without eating food, or breathing. Dancing is like breathing to me.”
A cruel irony, a dancer losing a foot–rather like a painter losing vision, or a composer going deaf.
“Dancing is the most difficult thing for a person missing a leg or a foot to do,” said Alicia Adams, special assistant to the chairman of the Kennedy Center.
But an artist’s spirit is not easily overwhelmed. When painter Edgar Degas began to lose his vision, he turned to sculpture. The loss of hearing prompted Ludwig van Beethoven not to give up, but to cut the legs off his pianos and place them directly on the floor so he could “hear” his music by sensing the vibrations it made. He persevered, and went on to write his greatest symphony.
Stephanie’s perseverance began within a few days of the accident. She began dancing again even before she’d been fitted with a prosthesis.
Her parents came from Brazil, but she was born and raised an American in Miami. She began lessons in classical ballet at age 5, pursuing that discipline until she was 12, when she was introduced to modern dance.
“That’s when I knew that I had a passion for dance,” she said.
She was one of the original members of the Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble when it was formed in Miami in 1990, with Andrea Mantell-Seidel as director.
Mantell-Seidel had toured the world performing the once-revolutionary Duncan style of dance and organized Stephanie’s group as a means to keep the Duncan movement alive in future generations.
Duncan, born in San Francisco in 1878, made her professional debut in Chicago in 1899. Inspired by the free form dancing of the classical Greeks, she shocked the arts establishment of her time by abandoning the toe-shoes, corsets and ankle length dresses then mandatory for ballet and performing instead barefoot in diaphanous scarves and tunics, her hair flying long and loose.
Abandoning also the formal positions and other disciplines of traditional ballet, Duncan and her followers turned to an intensely expressive and liberated form of dance that emulated the motions of waves and creatures of the wild.
Duncan’s two adopted daughters, Anna and Irma, continued her dance movement, training younger dancers to carry it on. Among them was Julia Levien, who now serves as artistic adviser to Stephanie’s ensemble.
Stephanie has little memory of her accident.
“My friend and I were coming back a long distance,” she said. “She was driving, and as soon as I got in the car I fell asleep because I was tired. I woke up to a crash and a lot of rubbish all over. I had never been in an accident.
“I was like, `Wow, I’m in a serious thing.’ I could tell what happened to my leg because I had fractured my femur and the leg was out of place, but I couldn’t really tell about my foot. I don’t think that my body had time to feel pain, because my foot was hanging by a thread. I was bleeding a lot and everything but I was very calm because I’m not a panicky person. I said, `I know I’m injured and this is really serious. Just calm down and take deep breaths.’
“When they took me out of the car, that’s when I felt the pain, and I went unconscious.”
Before they operated on her in the hospital emergency room, they told her they’d have to amputate her foot.
“I had had a lot of medication,” she said. “I was very sedated and thought, `OK, whatever, just to get me fine. Just go ahead, do what you’ve got to do.’ “
She awakened in her hospital room the next day, having gone through an eight-hour operation.
“I felt life just let me down,” she said. “This woman walked in and she said, `Oh, hi, Stephanie. You’re the dancer.’ I said, `No, I’m not a dancer anymore,’ and that really triggered my mother. She said, `Don’t ever say that again.’ I didn’t respond to her but I was like, `Come on, mom. This is reality. I don’t have a foot. How are you supposed to dance?’ “
That night, her room filled with friends, dancers from her troupe, teachers, people she hadn’t seen in years. Their advice to her was, “Whatever you want to do, you can do it.”
“That night, I guess when I slept, I think heaven came down to me, because I woke up the next day, saying, `I’m going to dance. Whichever way it is, I don’t care. I’ll get a prosthesis, whatever it is, and I’ll work with it, but I’m going to dance.’ “
Once she got onto crutches, she wanted out of the hospital and was released two weeks and a day after her accident. Four days after that, she was back at school, a Miami high school specializing in the arts. During the dance periods, she sat in the school office. Then, one day, still without a prosthesis, she decided to attend dance class.
“I got up there on the barre without a foot and I was doing whatever I could,” she said. “It felt good, to finally move my body to music and be in a class with all the other dancers, doing whatever I could.”
Her eight-member Duncan ensemble had had its first big out-of-town performance in Germany the previous year and last summer was scheduled to appear at the Lincoln Center in New York. Her colleagues told her “of course you’re going,” but she had no certainty.
Then a dancer friend, Dara Berman, who planned to become a choreographer, told Stephanie she wanted to work with her and devise a choreography that would allow Stephanie to perform within her limitations.
“She came up with this beautiful duet,” Stephanie said. “I spin, I jump, everything.”
Once she was fitted with and had mastered a prosthesis, she made great progress, but in her first official performance, she did the duet without it.
“I put it on when I went into the wings and then I came out and walked across the stage, like I made a statement.”
For the New York presentation, she wore the prosthesis in a two-part dance inspired by the Russian Revolution and Duncan’s firsthand look at it: the first part evoking the grinding labor and oppression of the Russian masses, and the second portraying the violent struggle this provoked.
It was this that Stephanie performed at the Kennedy Center, the first presentation of a five-year series of commemoratory dance productions called “America Dancing.”
“We chose the Isadora Duncan Ensemble because it was so fresh and new and expressed so well the theme of the series,” said Adams. “Stephanie was just great. She was splendid.”
Washington Post critic Sarah Kaufman agreed, praising the troupe as “a winsome, fresh-faced lot with a notable expansiveness of the upper body” and “buoyancy and velvety use of their shoulders and arms.” She noted only that Stephanie was “aided by a near undetectable prosthesis.”
Stephanie said she can’t “go up on tippy toes” or point her foot, but otherwise, “it works out almost perfect.”
She acknowledged that Duncan’s free-form style was more amenable to her situation than more highly structured traditional ballet.
“It’s not just physical dances, not just limbs moving through space,” she said. “It’s infinite gestures, our souls are being totally exposed. If you have that gut, that soul, that expressing out, that’s really what somebody’s going to understand and see.”
Stephanie credits Duncan’s own spirit in helping her prevail in her ordeal.
“We think of Isadora amongst us, her spirit with us, and how she’s watching us.”
She plans to go to New York and earn a master of fine arts degree at New York University, and then one day to have her own dance company.
“That’s going to work with time,” she said. “I just progress so fast every day. Who knows what I’ll be able to do in three years?”
