Who is Heather Aagard?  She was the catalyst for the Chosen One Collections, for this ongoing search to find every dancer who stepped into that Circle and danced herself to death.

She was given the opportunity only once by the Joffrey Ballet and it changed her life. But there would be no photo no program no listing.   I have found  these things for almost everyone because of her  but not for her .

Dancer #5 in your companies, nothing but a blurry photo for posterity, unknown in history but you, dear “Firsts”, are eternal.  You are the dancers who actually created The Chosen One.  

The emotional breakdown of being made to dance yourself to your own death did not yet exist.

 The steps, yes.  The concept, yes. But that was all.

And so when you performed you were flying blind.  Each night, with that first jump, you were fleshing out the Sacrificed Virgin.  It is you, the dancers not worth filming, the girls in the chorus who are responsible for creating that crucial element that has solidified Le Sacre du Printemps for all time: the Chosen One’s  desperate struggle.   The theoretical character existed through and was nurtured by Hodson and Archer and generously of course.

But ultimately you, all alone in Roerich’s dark libretto against Stravinsky’s frenetic Rite and Nijinsky’s choreographic “fuck you” to ballet would have to present the torture of the Chosen One and it would have to come from within your own selves. 

Her struggle to survive would have to come from your own struggles. Her fear, anxiety, confusion, resistance and abandon – all within the difficulty of that performance –  would have to be yours.  In the moment, swimming in your own painful experiences on stage before an audience looking for Le Sacre du Printemps,YOU, the under-valued, seldom thought of dancer, were breathing life and death into the Chosen One. 

In the Spanish Inquisition of solos.  

You are the “all-in Ballerinas” – the ones who pushed through the slow shock and growing momentum of that solo,  creating something that would set the pace for the dancers to come and the expectation of audiences forever.  You were creating the most important aspect of the Chosen One through the sacrifice of your own pain.  You were the groundbreakers. And groundbreakers are not likely to be recognized in their own time.  

Just ask Nijinsky.  

You were bearing a mighty responsibility in the silence while those around you carried nothing in the celebrations.   One internal experience, one performance at a time, you  created the great role that the great dancers would not perform.

Those few early clips and photos I have found are a fury of intensity.  And as I have poured over your photos and performances, each time there is something new and something new then something else.  I don’t think anything like this will ever happen again. I don’t.  Do you?

Cristian Maciel wears a haughty expression in the Mystic Circle.  “I will not be intimidated”.  She dies anyway. 

This shot of Anabel Segura…CNB put no names to their company photos –  had to get it from other dancers…is raw with agony and this deep torture that looks like it is tearing through her.

As it tore through Susanna.  Alba. Nina. Katja. 
Renata. One by one, you poured yourself into this great and painful process until at last The Chosen One truly existed.

I get pissed off when I see a company or soloist going through the motions, walking to their marks without any idea of what’s happening and probably not interested in learning (see any Mariinsky Act One performance).

It’s been 30 years and for them it is not a new thing, its impact is lost, it is just another ballet, what time is the party? Soloists stroll through the steps fraught with your emotional experiences with blank faces or feigned suffering.  It’s a ballet. An obligation. There are steps  which exhaust you and then it’s over and let’s take some selfies or whatever. 

But for you…for you,  Le Sacre du Printemps was not an obligation but a deep invitation that only you could hear and would you take that chance?.  It’s your own journey through your own dark night.  With your toes turned in. 

One “forgotten” told me she cried while dancing, overwhelmed by her own past.  Another told me it was an out-of-body experience.  And another said it was so cathartic that she didn’t need a photo, she will always have that moment of her single performance. 

These women have no photos. 

And some of the “firsts and forgottens” don’t care at all which leaves me to conclude they didn’t contribute a thing to the creation of this tragic ballet heroine anyway.  

I look at Elizabeth Lopez at the end of the solo, coming out of those few turns  throwing  her head back, her arms into a sharp punctuating position with an exactness I don’t see anywhere.  And at the point of physical exhaustion in the performance!   It is her signature. Some dancer somewhere has used it but has no idea who Elizabeth is.

Beatriz Rodriguez is still getting 2 feet from the stage in the last leaps as if she’s spring loaded. It is amazing!  And through out her performance – I don’t know what was behind it – but her mouth would be open as if she were crying out in madness which would make sense for the character but in that very first performance?  That was from her own world, her own small space.  And has been mimmicked but seldom felt.

As the center, as the pinnacle, as the point of the thing you were each presenting this EVENT to the world. You suffered Le Sacre du Printemps and it is everlasting even if it is by way of Pavlenko doing Straccamore .

Today they perform the intense role of your emotional sacrifice.  They get the luck of performing something with a blueprint, but not the privilege of creating it.  

Feeling it.

And owning it. 

Today it is not likely that this photo above of would be identified as Ana Lacerda despite her success.

Today, I will have at least one comment on my Youtube channel on the 1987 Joffrey video; people seeing it for the first time, freaking out, asking questions and I can draw a direct line from that comment on Beatriz’ first contribution to Alba Tapia’s last but I can’t show it because of shitty companies who did not understand the historical significance of debuting Le Sacre and the privilege of having dancers who would dare to perform it. 

The students and viewers on YouTube will never see your Firsts, those who should be remembered as the owners of The Chosen One. 

For that dreadful act, YOU should be remembered.

Heather Aagard

I might poke a stick at this for a bit.  You might get what you want out of me then disappear.  You might share something of yourself with us which is Nijinsky.  After all – that’s who we are,


I love you bitches.