After injury, a ballet star leaps back into the spotlight
WHAT happens when you can no longer do what you love? Ballet’s David Hallberg found out three years ago, when a torn ligament and surgical complications sidelined him for 2 ½ years.
“One week dragged into the next,” the American Ballet Theatre star writes in “A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back” (Touchstone). “I’d wake up . . . stare blankly at the gray walls in my bedroom, and find barely any impetus to continue the fighting.”
But fight he did, finally embarking on an intensive 14-month rehab program in 2015 that let him dance again. Until then, the now-35-year-old tells The Post, “I was mired in Depression 101, drinking too much and smoking [and] totally broken.”
Dance, Hallberg says, was both his vocation and his salvation. Slightly built and sportsaverse, he was bullied as a child: Only in dance class did he feel accepted. Talent, work and drive propelled him to the top of the dance world. He was the first American to join Russia’s famed Bolshoi Ballet — only to confront his “worst nightmare” in 2014, when his injuries threatened to keep him from dancing.
After a miserable year or so in New York, the Chelsea resident bought a one-way ticket to Australia. He’d danced with its ballet and knew that the company had a terrific physical-therapy team. It was there, while rebuilding his body, that he finished this memoir.
“I feel like a different human being now,” says Hallberg, who’ll present the Clive Barnes Foundation’s dance award in January before heading off on ABT’s national tour. “I’m a stronger dancer and a better person — more grateful and patient, more aware of my surroundings instead of being deep in my own world.”