Lance Hardin is quick to admit he was amused the first few times his girlfriend told people he’s a dancer. “They always think she means I’m a stripper,” he says.
It is true that Hardin spends most of his workday surrounded by taut, toned women in various states of undress. But they’re wearing tights, not fishnet stockings. And they, like Hardin, are classically trained ballet dancers who breathe the rarefied air of the professional dance world.
Hardin, 22, a soloist with the North Carolina Dance Theatre in Charlotte, is a Chicago native who trained at the Ruth Page school with Terence Marling, 22, now a company member of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater. And from their earliest classes together, Hardin says, “It was pretty much me and Terry and 10 teenage girls.”
That gender division is typical, says Gerard Seguin, executive director of the Chicago Dance Coalition. “In ballet, there are many, many more women than men,” he says. “In more modern forms, like jazz and tap, the ratio evens up a little. Then, in partner dance styles like tango or swing, obviously it’s 1 to 1.”
The incredibly favorable boy-girl ratio is a perk of the dancer’s life that Hardin and Marling continue to appreciate.
“There’s absolutely no problem finding women to date,” Marling says happily. “And I find I do date mostly dancers, because if you’re fully into your work and give it all your time and thought, you just find it much easier to be with people who do the same. I would like to socialize with other people outside of dance, but the truth is, dancers mostly hang out with dancers.”
Hardin takes another view, however.
“Among the members of my company,” he says, “when we’ve been apart for awhile, we always ask each other: `Are you dating anyone? Is it a dancer? No? Good!’ Because it’s better not to be around other dancers all the time, and our artistic directors and other `elders’ are the first ones to say that. Of course, they’re all married to dancers themselves!”
Hardin is the exception. His non-dancer girlfriend of two years is a graduate student in psychology. He is exceptional, too, in having escaped the torturous teasing of his non-dancer peers during childhood.
“There were always talented kids around me in the schools I went to,” says the Lane Tech High School graduate. “In particular, there was one other dance student, so he and I were sort of on the same schedule — we would take off early together. And I was a little older when I started — about 11 — which was better for me because . . . I didn’t have the patience before then.”
Still, it wasn’t long before Hardin had to face his first tough decision: whether to continue playing Little League baseball during the summers or to dance instead. Dance won. He liked being on the team, “but you don’t get as much attention in baseball.”
Marling, whose mother teaches at Chicago Ballet Arts, began young but didn’t have as easy a time with his peers as Hardin did. “I certainly remember many a schoolyard lynching,” Marling recalls. “I started dancing when I was almost 7, and I never stopped. It was always a hard time with other kids, and especially it was very, very difficult in my teen years” at New Trier High School.
“But even then, in the community of dancers, you’re insulated,” he adds. “Now, I don’t find that people assume anymore that I’m gay. It became less and less of a subject as I grew older.”
Both men find that despite the abundant opportunities the profession offers, their work leaves little time for dating and other outside activities because their companies perform a wide and demanding variety of works. “We do lots of full-length story ballets, which I love, because you get to do lots of acting as well as the dancing,” Marling says. “We also do some very, very contemporary works, purely modern pieces that have very little to do with classical technique.”
“In Charlotte,” Hardin says, “we do so many different types of dances on a daily basis that it’s really hard on our bodies and our technique. We’ll work on a classical piece first, then on a Paul Taylor, then on something by Balanchine. They’re all totally different and they all demand a different approach. I like dancing everything — although when I go out to a club, I don’t dance. It’s hard to get up (and dance) after a day like the days I have!”
And it never gets any easier. For a dancer, “everything depends on how long we can keep ourselves in shape,” says Hardin, who has been nursing an Achilles-tendon injury for months. “Right now, during the summer, is the time of year when we’re supposed to be healing. But you commit to a few other performances here and there, and pretty soon there’s not a lot of time to rest.”
Hardin and Marling’s summer schedule includes performing at the Ruth Page Foundation’s annual school concerts this weekend. Hardin also will spend the summer with the Chatauqua Dance Company in New York.
Marling looks at his future in dance in terms of building the audience.
“It’s incredibly difficult to make these (classical) stories believable for the audiences of today,” he says. “It’s so much fun for us dancers to enter into this world of fantasy, and if you can bring the audience in with you, it’s great.
“But we have audiences now whose intelligence won’t be satisfied by these stories any more. So we have to consider: Do we become historians, preserving these centuries-old steps and stories? Or do we push the frontier? I hope we can do both — and soon enough, it’ll fall onto my shoulders, and my friends’, to figure it out.”
Marling is confident, though, partly because of his years of training in an art that is notorious for the rigor and discipline underlying the beauty.
“Dance forces you to grow up young,” Marling says. “You have to be pretty tough if you’re a guy, and I certainly feel it made me stronger. Everybody I’ve known who has left dance and gone back to school has gone through with straight As. You’re changed when you’ve been a dancer: You’re driven to do the thing you’re doing, and you know the satisfaction of doing something well.”
