The motherhood dance
Houston Ballet principals fill dual roles, balancing their craft with recovering from pregnancy and raising children
At 4 p.m. on weekdays, the WebbBardo household in the Willowbrook area pulses with youthful energy. The kids are home from montessori school, and they’re hungry.
Ten-year old Joshua, a tall and freckled athlete, musician and Cub Scout, had the munchies for wrapped caramels and dry Frosted Mini Wheats on Thursday. Seven-year old Lillian, a piano-playing tomboy with soulful eyes and a gorgeous mop of brown curls, poked her tongue in a small container of yogurt.
Fidgety 2-year old Luciana, a sweet-as-an-angel blonde, cried through a wardrobe malfunction then sat content for a few minutes at the kitchen table watching “Daniel Tiger” before deciding she needed to don a knitted cat hat and gloves. She wrapped her arms around her mama’s belly — intent more on her own needs than embracing her young brother-to-be, Benjamin.
Sara Webb, who is eight months’ pregnant, seemed to be relishing every moment with her kids and her husband, Ryan Bardo. She looked utterly relaxed in a flowing linen skirt and flip-flops.
Most people know Webb in an entirely different role, as a prima ballerina with a rapturous sense of grace and musicality.
Ballet dancers have a woefully short window for building their careers in an intense — and intensely competitive — environment, with their bodies as their instruments. Because their prime performance time
dovetails with their childbearing years, pregnancy brings a special kind of jeopardy, throwing their bodies out of balance even before they experience the demands and joys of child rearing.
Yet three of Houston Ballet’s five principal ballerinas juggle both lives, and appear to be doing it well. So much for that notion that there’s no such thing as a super mom.
Webb, 39, is expecting her fourth child in a few weeks. Melody Mennite, 34, has a 14year old son. Motherhood is still new for Karina González, 31, who gave birth to a girl eight weeks ago.
González and her husband, former Houston Ballet dancer Rupert Edwards, are still adjusting but aglow as they cradle beautiful, black-haired Julia Corina Edwards, who slept peacefully through an interview last week in her mother’s arms.
Julia had slept well the night before, too, between 11:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m. González is usually up for good by 7 a.m. She feeds the baby again, or pumps milk to leave for her, before heading out at 8:30. Her workday begins with body conditioning to strengthen her core muscles and pelvic floor — more athletic, cross-training work than she’s ever done — before she takes company class at Houston Ballet’s Center for Dance. (Edwards is up and out earlier; he attends classes at the University of Houston, where he’s earning a degree in kinesiology, and scrambles to teach at three locations in the afternoons and evenings.)
González, a dynamic performer beloved for her fresh but fiery speed and bravura technique, could return to the stage as soon as next month in one of the solo princess roles of Stanton Welch’s “Swan Lake.” She last danced, at nearly six months pregnant, in “The Nutcracker,” although she continued taking class until 15 days before she went into labor. González proudly documented her growing belly during her pregnancy and with the baby, posting the photos on Facebook. She had a natural childbirth.
“I wanted to experience everything. Everything!” she said. She still gets goosebumps thinking about the birth, able to feel again what her body went through.
The whole thing was planned, but it’s never a perfect time for a dancer, she acknowledged. “I was in the thick of my career and age. I knew I was going to lose some ballets I wanted to do, and that in my position I needed to do.”
Weighing potential opportunities, she chose to miss much of the 2017-18 season because the schedule allowed her to perform in the company premiere of “Mayerling” in September (when she was three months’ pregnant); and gave her plenty of time to recover before next season’s premiere of “Sylvia.”
That meant she wouldn’t dance in “Don Quixote” this spring, even though she’s a natural for the role of Kitri and was featured in Houston Ballet’s ads for the production. González also knew she would be opening a door for someone else.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “I remember being the young dancer and taking that opportunity when a principal dancer got pregnant or was injured. I was the one there to take the role. That’s life. Now it’s my turn to take time off, and new dancers come.”
Up-and-comer Mónica Gómez starred on opening night.
“That’s great,” González said. “It’s all new for me. I had so many years dancing and have been blessed not to be off with big injuries. This is the most I’ve been off since I started.”
Although she became pregnant before Hurricane Harvey derailed Houston Ballet’s season, the disaster’s timing relieved some pressure as there were fewer performances to miss. Now she’s focused on returning with what feels like a whole new body, still regaining strength in her legs and rediscovering her balance.
“The first time I tried a pirouette I could not find myself,” she said. “For so many years, it just came naturally. Now I have to focus on what I’m doing with every step. I’m hoping it will help me to be a stronger dancer, especially with all this extra training … I’m excited to go back onstage and see the new Karina.”
She expects her attitude will be different, too. “I used to spend 24 hours there in my mind; ballet was everything. You have a bad show, and you come home, and you talk about it for hours.”
Mennite and Webb say motherhood has made them better dancers.
“My dancing was almost immediately different, more mature,” said Mennite, a brilliant actress who can break an audience’s heart with her poignant characterizations and lyricality. She said she was still “pretty immature, closer to narcissistic,” before she had her son, Isaac. “What has grown most is my capacity for compassion and how I show up in the world, at work and onstage, with an awareness that there’s so much more than me.”
She was 20, a promising graduate of Houston Ballet Academy who was just getting started in the corps de ballet, when she became pregnant. She took nine months off, not sure if she’d return. “Women in my family, when they have kids, they stop working,” she said. “What brought me back in the beginning was necessity. Part of me didn’t want to leave this little butterball and be a working mom. But part of me is also a dancer.”
Mennite decided early on that if she was going to miss landmark moments of her child’s life, such as when he lost his first tooth, she needed to make it worthwhile. She felt driven to do more; even after she and Isaac’s biological father, a former Houston Ballet principal, divorced when Isaac was 4.
Mennite also knew the extreme challenge of being a single mother, with no family in town, before she married Rick Walsh five years ago. She needed nannies, day care and “night-schedule people,” she said. That gave her a tenacity she didn’t have before. “I became a mama bear. I would do anything it takes to have a good life for Isaac, and that carried into dancing and served me well.”
Now that Isaac is a teenager, the dynamic has changed. Finishing up his last year at Lanier Middle School, he’s into break dancing, drums and piano. Mennite can’t imagine being herself without him. “He reenergizes me,” she said. Being a mother has made time go faster, she added. “It seems like I was just having him a few months ago.”
Not that it isn’t tiring. All any dancer wants to do at the end of a long workday is “flop on the floor and decompress,” Mennite said. “But that is not an option anymore. I go home, and my most important role begins. You have to have enough stores of energy to do both.”
Days are a blur for Webb, too.
The ballet’s workdays end at 7 p.m., except on performance days. After shows, Webb sometimes doesn’t get home until nearly midnight. And there’s no sleeping in the next morning, or any morning, for that matter. Webb typically gets up at 6 to prepare the kids for their days, which are as busy as hers — full of music lessons, sports and other activities after school. Her husband, Ryan — an attorney for BHP who works from home — picks the kids up from school and chauffeurs them around when his job doesn’t require him to be in Australia.
The Bardo clan, like Isaac, has also grown up backstage. And when the ballet goes on tour, even to places as far-flung as Australia, Webb’s kids and husband always come along, often turning the trip into a vacation.
“Being a mom is 10 times harder than being a dancer,” she said. “Ballet is a little bit of a self-absorbed profession. At home, you don’t get timed breaks, and you’re managing people.”
She doesn’t regret a second. “Most girls plan their weddings. I was planning nurseries,” she said.
Her co-workers are in awe of Webb. “Sara is a unique dancer and mom,” González said. “Especially now that I have one, I’m like, ‘How can you have four?’ Watching her come back from being pregnant inspired me so much. If she did it, I can do it.”
Webb acknowledges the importance of a willing, supportive husband. “Ryan is the only way I’ve been able to handle it all,” she said.
Each of her pregnancies has been different. She’s taken more time off for the current one, partly because she’s older. She last performed in November. But she has the comeback routine down to a science now. She spends the first week after giving birth just walking. The second week, she starts going to the gym. Then she returns to company class, until she’s strong enough again to perform.
She doesn’t want to commit to a comeback date this time. Few dancers perform into their 40s.
Webb, like González, remembers watching American Ballet Theatre’s Julie Kent with her first pregnancy and thinking, “If she can do it, I can, too.” And she has never forgotten the advice of another dancer who told her about her career, “You never know when it’s going to end, so enjoy it and take every show to heart.”
González feels lucky to have both Rupert and her mother, Corina González, who is visiting from Venezuela to help with Julia. That has also thrust her back into a very old role as a daughter.
Sunday will be the first Mother’s Day in 12 years that she’s been able to share with Corina. She plans to wake up early and cook breakfast for her mother “like we did when we were kids,” then open presents, attend Mother’s Day services in Spanish at Lakewood Church and head to Miller Outdoor Theatre to see the last performance of “Don Quixote.”
“I have not seen Ben Stevenson’s production yet,” she said. “What better way to finish the day than supporting the company — but this time, from the audience, with my baby girl.”