About this item
Inspiring, revealing, and deeply relatable, Being a Ballerina is a firsthand look at the realities of life as a professional ballet dancer. Through episodes from her own career, Gavin Larsen describes the forces that drive a person to study dance; the daily balance that dancers navigate between hardship and joy; and the dancer's continual quest to discover who they are as a person and as an artist. Starting with her arrival as a young beginner at a class too advanced for her, Larsen tells how the embarrassing mistake ended up helping her learn quickly and advance rapidly. In other stories of her early teachers, training, and auditions, she explains how she gradually came to understand and achieve what she and her body were capable of. Larsen then re-creates scenes from her experiences in dance companies, from unglamorous roles to exhilarating performances.
About the Author
Gavin Larsen, born and raised in New York City, received her professional dance training at the School of American Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and the New York School of Ballet. In 1992, Ms. Larsen joined Pacific Northwest Ballet under the direction of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, leaving the company in 1999 to join the Alberta Ballet, directed by Mikko Nissinen. In 2002, she performed with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet as a soloist at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. After briefly working as a freelance artist, in 2003 Ms. Larsen was invited to join Oregon Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer by then artistic director Christopher Stowell. Over the course of her career, Ms. Larsen danced prominent roles in ballets by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, James Kudelka, Christopher Wheeldon, Paul Taylor, Yuri Possokhov, Kent Stowell and Christopher Stowell, among many others, and originated roles in numerous ballets. She retired from full-time performing in 2010 to focus on teaching, coaching and writing about dance, while continuing to pursue unique artistic opportunities. She was a founding member of Incoroporamento, a collaborative trio combining dance, poetry, and music, in 2010, producing several performances to critical acclaim. Ms. Larsen has taught and coached widely across the country and has been a guest teacher for schools in Japan and Canada. Since 2010, she has been a regular contributor for Pointe, Dance Teacher, and Dance Spirit magazines. Her writing has appeared in The Dancing Times, Dance/USA's online journal In the Green Room, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Artslandia as well as the literary journals the Threepenny Review, Maine Review, Sunlight Press, Page & Spine, and KYSO Flash. In 2015 she was honored with a fellowship to the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM, to pursue her work as a writer. She lives in Asheville, NC.
