BIG LEAP TO THE BOLSHOI
A ballerina’s remarkable journey: Pete Mcmartin.
Sometime in 1998, Johanna Harte of Vancouver watched a BBC documentary called The Dying Rooms. It showed scenes of unwanted baby girls being left to die in Chinese orphanages.
Johanna felt compelled to act. She decided she would adopt one of those Chinese baby girls. It took two years of wrestling with the bureaucrats of the B. C. Ministry for Children — an exercise in frustration that led an angry Johanna to knock on Premier Glen Clark’s door — but in 2001, an 18- month- old baby girl from an orphanage in Nanjing was placed in her arms. Her name was Shan.
“I didn’t get to choose Shan,” Johanna said. “They selected her for me, but it was an awesome day when they put her in my arms. We looked at each other and we were hooked.”
Within a year, Johanna and her husband separated, and she was left to raise Shan on her own. She threw Shan into lots of activities — gymnastics, piano, swimming — and Shan proved to be a quick study at all of them.
“My mom let me try a lot of different things,” Shan said, “but she put me into ballet because I was always dancing around the house.”
Shan started ballet when she was four. She is now 15. Those years of dance culminated in an audition in Seattle earlier this year for the chance to study with the famed Russian Bolshoi Ballet Academy. Each year, the academy holds a six- week visiting summer school program in Manhattan, and an elite few are selected to be taught by the Bolshoi’s demanding Russian staff.
“It was the last night of auditions in Seattle,” Shan said, “and a lot of people were cancelling because there was a big snowstorm. And I had hurt my knee three days before so I didn’t think I had much of a chance. But I just tried my best, and I guess they saw something in me.”
She won a spot, and went to New York. From June to August, she danced six to seven hours a day. “They were Russian teachers, so there was a lot of shouting and screaming. They were tough but they gave good criticism.”
At the school, Shan was something of an oddity. She was one of only two Canadians. She was one of the few kids of Asian descent. And then there was her height.
“I’m 5- foot- 2. I was one of the shortest people in my class.”
Ballet is a cruel discipline, and body- conscious. Companies prefer their ballerinas tall and willowy. Earlier in the year, Shan had auditioned for a spot at the National Ballet School of Canada in Toronto, and while she danced well, she was told thanks but no thanks.
“They told me they were looking for a certain body type.
“It’s a problem, but I’m determined. I just keep thinking about the prize, which for me is to be principal dancer.”
While the National saw a height problem, the Bolshoi saw talent. Several times in New York, Shan was asked to demonstrate in front of the class.
“I don’t try to be that kind of person who pushes their way to the front, because I think it’s mean. But this is ballet: you have to do that in dance if you want to be noticed.”
She was noticed. At the end of the six- week program, she was among a handful of students offered a contract to study fulltime with the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow for a year. The acceptance letter from the Bolshoi cited her “considerable talent, strong training and dedication.”
“I just love the feeling when I’m dancing,” Shan said. “I don’t know if it sounds cheesy, but I just get lost in the music. Everyone vanishes and it’s just me. It’s a nice feeling.”
All of this would be remarkable enough in itself, except there is more to Johanna’s and Shan’s story than ballet.
In 2008, Johanna’s liver failed. She did not know it at the time but she had contracted hepatitis C — how, she has no idea.
“They gave me two months to live,” Johanna said, “and the doctor said, ‘ Get your life in order as quickly as you can.’ And I said, ‘ Uh, uh, no way. I’ve got a baby girl to take care of and I’m not going anywhere.’”
At one point, she weighed 75 pounds. She became disoriented and fell into periodic comas. Once, Shan had to lift Johanna off the floor because she had passed out, then she had to phone an ambulance. “There were days when I cried,” Shan said, “at night, at the gym. It was really hard, but it taught me to be more tough, I think.”
Johanna was in and out of hospital for two years. During that time, three different couples asked her if they could have Shan if she died.
“But I said ‘ I’m not dying,’ I was pretty adamant I wasn’t going there. Because of Shan.”
Meanwhile, when Johanna was in the hospital and not at home, Shan was being shunted around to live with Johanna’s family and friends, in Chilliwack, Kamloops, Williams Lake, New Westminster and Vancouver.
Finally, in 2010, the ordeal came to an end when Johanna received a liver transplant. She is now, she says, in perfect health.
Shan leaves for Moscow in October. Johanna will go with her, then fly back home after she is settled in. Money is problematic: Johanna is a freelance bookkeeper who works out of her home, and it’s going to be tough finding the $ 22,000 needed for tuition and airfare.
“But with Shan and I,” Johanna said, “it kinda works out, anyway. We just stay really positive. I won’t let something like money stop Shan’s dream.”