“I did not want to be seen as the homeless ballet dancer.”
He was in a homeless shelter when he first started ballet ... Now the artistic director of the New York Theater Ballet, Steven Melendez tells his story, and that of the program that taught him to dance, in the film “LIFT” ... #tribeca2022
He was in a homeless shelter when he first started ballet ... Now the artistic director of the New York Theater Ballet, Steven Melendez tells his story, and that of the program that taught him to dance, in the film “LIFT” ... #tribeca2022
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CreativityTranscript
00:00You hear a lot of stories from dancers that say that they grew up from when they were a child and they just knew they had to dance.
00:06Or they were always dancing around the living room. That wasn't me at all. It was totally an accident that I became a dancer. A happy accident.
00:19When I was first introduced to ballet, I was seven. I was a boy. I was living in the South Bronx.
00:26It was so far from anything that I ever thought would be in my future.
00:30The Lift Program at that time was a program that New York Theatre Ballet had in New York City homeless shelters.
00:36And I was homeless for three years when I was a child.
00:40And Diana came in and she invited all of the children who wanted to dance to come with her.
00:46And my mother forced me to go with her and take some ballet classes.
00:51And at the end of the program, I was offered a scholarship.
00:56I liked that at the end of the class, after me and all of the other students were taught a new step,
01:04the next day, in the next class, if I did the step without falling over, and the person next to me did fall over,
01:12then that meant that I practiced more than they did.
01:15And it doesn't matter that I was going home to a homeless shelter,
01:19and the student next to me was going home to wherever they lived. I don't know.
01:23It didn't matter if their family had money or not. Nothing mattered. It just mattered how much you worked.
01:30♪
01:40When I went out to bow at the end of the show,
01:44it was so remarkable to me that all of the audience was applauding for something I had done.
01:51And it really fed me in a way that I don't think I'd ever been fed before that.
01:57And that was the beginning of a very long career as a dancer.
02:01♪
02:19I came out of this place because I joined ballet, and I've come back here today to continue that program.
02:26I have spent a lot, really a lot of my life running away from that story.
02:31As a dancer, I did not want to be seen as the homeless ballet dancer.
02:37I just wanted to be seen as a ballet dancer, and as a choreographer the same, and now as a director the same.
02:44So finding a way to take ownership of that story has been really challenging for me.
02:51I am redefining my own identity. I think that's hard for anybody to do.
02:59♪
03:12When I was a dancer, I really had a hard time when people would think of me as the homeless ballet dancer.
03:23But now as a director, I think that my thinking about that has changed.
03:30Because as a dancer, me being homeless when I was younger didn't affect the choreography or the musicality
03:38or the athleticism of what I was doing on the stage.
03:41And so it seemed irrelevant to me.
03:44But as a director, my background, I think, will affect the kind of new choreography that the company does
03:53and the kind of commissions that I look for, and the kind of old choreography,
03:58the kind of choreographers that I want to work with.
04:01The New York Theatre Ballet going forward, I think, will lean strongly into the idea
04:09that we should be making dances about people that people need to hear now.
04:15That is different, I think, than a lot of other dance companies are doing.