Bacon and ballet on the menu for dedicated Jack
Dancer Jack Furlong may travel the world with his Manhattan-based ballet company, but his family roots are in Drumshambo, writes Emily Hourican
THERE is an endless fascination with what ballet dancers eat. Google it, and you will find everyone from Australian Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar has tracked their daily intake at some point or another.
Well, for the record, the one I’m talking to is tucking into a plate of sausage, bacon, scrambled egg, toast and what might be hash browns. “I’m too old to care about my weight anymore,” says Jack Furlong, dancer with Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo (actually based in Manhattan), better known as the Trocks, an all-male company who do very funny, very clever and daring, homages to classical ballet.
Now 28 (“in my heart I’m forever 19”), Jack was born in Boston but spent many of his formative years in Leitrim. “Everyone is thinking of this Billy Elliot thing, from Leitrim to Manhattan, and it was, but it wasn’t,” he says.
“My dad is American and my mom is from Leitrim, but now she’s very American. She’s very proud of her American dream that she made for herself. But our family stayed very connected to Leitrim, we’re really close with our cousins. When I was 11, I came over by myself. My parents both had government jobs, so I lived here without them. I’m like my aunt and uncle’s fifth child.”
Asking about the logistics of how that worked gets me nowhere. Jack just laughs and says: “In America I’m the baby — I have an older sister — but in Ireland I’m the middle child. But I’m the loudest, and the prettiest. We’re from Drumshambo, and I definitely stick out there, but I’m fine with that. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
Jack was about to start school just outside Drumshambo, when his mother decided to bring him back to the States, to New York where they were then living. “She was like ‘I can’t do it!’ so I came back. I would be there for school, then for my holidays I’d be back in Drumshambo; two totally different experiences.”
Now, he goes back to Leitrim, “every three months, to see my aunt and uncle,” and, he says, “I get away with murder. I think it’s because I left, so I get to do whatever I want when I come back.” Would he say that’s good for him, to be so indulged? “I would say yes, my mother would say no,” he laughs.
Most unusually for a career where many start almost as soon as they can walk, Jack didn’t begin ballet until he was 20 — “it’s kind of unheard of,” he admits. In New York, he studied Irish dancing, then moved to rowing — he was coxswain — because “I was really ambitious as a child. I wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer. My mom is still thinking I could be a lawyer…” he laughs.
“So I did the sport thing on purpose so I could get into Ivy League schools. And I
‘It’s always worth it. Our show is about art and making people laugh and be happy’
got recruited to what is still the number one rowing programme in the States. I was the first recruit.” At the time, he was at university in Seattle, and began to find the pressure of making weight as a coxswain — they have to be seriously small and light — too much.
“So I woke up one day and said, f **k this… I’m just gonna go dance. I was young enough and stupid enough to think, ‘ok, I can actually do this.’ My parents were mortified. It’s only recently that they said, ‘ok, you actually did it’.’’
“Your parents just want security for you,” he adds, “and ballet is not secure. It’s an art form – and super unpredictable; tomorrow I could fall, and that could be that.”
In fact, at one point, that is exactly what happened. “At the time I got the audition for The Trocks, I was injured and hadn’t really been dancing for a year.”
What happened? “I broke my spine ” is the shocking answer. “I had a girl in a lift, and we slipped. Instead of letting her fall, I caught her, and I snapped something in my spine. That was two years of recovery. I carried on taking dance classes but I would only go to a certain part of the barre — I hadn’t done arabesques, I hadn’t jumped, in over a year.”
But he did the audition — “and seven days later I was in Amsterdam doing Swan Lake. I was really scared, but it was kind of like it all worked out, at a time I thought it was all over.” And, he points out, a broken spine “was an anomaly. Normally, it’s the stress things, little things, tendonitis, that get us. The everyday aches and inflammation.”
No surprise, given that the company trainfor around six hours a day, every day, and often give seven shows a week. “Dancing is really hard,” he says, “and our lives are really hard. I wake up and I can barely get to the bathroom every morning,” he laughs.
“We’re all really tired and sore, but at the end of the night, it’s always worth it. It’s about art, and our show is making people laugh and be happy. When you hear people laugh, that’s amazing.”
The company tours almost constantly, which means “I miss out on certain things. My friends are getting married, they’re having babies, I’m travelling the world. The question is, how long can I live in a hotel room? It’s not that I’m jealous, but I don’t want to be this 40-year-old trying to be 19…”
And so, Jack has a plan. “I won’t go past 35/ 37 at this. I’d love to open a school here; come back to Ireland and teach. That would be my goal.
But meantime, I got a brilliant piece of life advice once — ‘if you worry so much, it means you’re not focusing on what you’re doing’.” Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo, October 9 & 10, at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre. bordgaisenergytheatre.ie