Poetry and motion as ballerina turns 90
Vollmar, U. S.’ first Snow Queen in 1944, recalls storied career
“Peace is not complicated,” says Jocelyn Vollmar with a sigh, as we sink into the couch in the comfortable Richmond District apartment where she has lived for some 50 years. She’s been watching the news and thinking about poetry she wrote about peace. “Look at what’s going on in the world.”
Vollmar, who turns 90 next week, has published eight volumes of her own poetry, but she is far better known as one of San Francisco Ballet’s reigning ballerinas, a brilliant and warmhearted dancer whose history with the company spanned some three decades from the 1940s to 1972.
Born on Nov. 25, 1925, Vollmar is a San Francisco native through and through. She recalls being chosen from her school, West Portal Elementary School, at age 11 to be part of the dedication ceremonies in May 1937 for the Golden Gate Bridge. “Now I can see the bridge from where I live.”
Vollmar joined San Francisco Ballet at the age of
17, right after graduating from high school — her counselors at Lowell High School were appalled that the studious youngster wanted to go into something as impractical as dance. Nevertheless, she had fallen in love with ballet from the age of 12, when her mother, “who was an actress, but who really wanted to dance,” enrolled her in the newly minted San Francisco Ballet School.
“My father used to say I’d rather dance than eat — and I always had a good appetite!” she says, gesturing with longfingered hands that still have echoes of that ballerina elegance.
At the time, the then-San Francisco Opera Ballet was better known for providing dance interludes in productions of “Daughter of the Regiment,” “Carmen” or “Aida.”
“In those days ...” she pauses and laughs. “I keep saying that more and more now, but in those days, ballet wasn’t so popular. We always got good notices in the operas, although one time we did a show on a program with a talking mynah bird. No one wanted to see the ballet — they just wanted to see the bird.”
She was still a student in the school when she danced in the Ballet’s production of “Swan Lake” in 1940. By 1944, when company director Willam Christensen was choreographing his “Nutcracker” — the first U. S. version of what is now a holiday staple across the country — Vollmar had risen to principal level and took on the role of America’s first Snow Queen.
The arc of Vollmar’s career as an international ballerina took her from the Ballet to stints at home and abroad — New York City Ballet’s first season in 1948 under George Balanchine, performances with American Ballet Theatre, a few years with the Grands Ballets du Marquis de Cuevas in Europe and two years with the Borovansky Ballet, which would become the Australian Ballet, before rejoining San Francisco Ballet and touring the world from Bogota, Colombia, to Rangoon, Burma.
“People ask me sometimes what it was like when I was onstage,” she says. “But it’s when I was waiting in the wings ready for my entrance, those are the moments I really remember. You think about how lucky you were that you got to be right there with so much in front of you.”
Vollmar was 47 “when I graduated,” she says in a charming slip of the tongue. She is not one to cling to the past, though, and while her scrapbook holds a few treasured mementos, she also recalls advice she got from her good friend Russell Hartley, a former SFB dancer who also costumed the 1944 “Nutcracker” production and later founded the San Francisco Dance Archives, now the Museum of Performing Arts and Design.
“After my last performance, he said, ‘ Well, Joss, you’ve had a good career, but now it’s over and you can’t live in the past. You have to keep going,’ ” she says. “And I thought, you know, he’s right. It’s not what you were, or what you did, or what you had, but what you are, what you do, what you have.”
So she threw away a lot of old pictures and programs — “I don’t know if I’m happy about that or not,” she says ruefully.
What really matters, though, is locked in her memories and the experience she’s passed on to her students and other dancers. Indeed, after Vollmar left her international career as a ballerina, she became a much- beloved mentor at the San Francisco Ballet School and taught there until her retirement in 2005. Her ethic was always rooted in one thing.
“W- O- R- K,” she says, with emphasis. “I was always the first one in the studio. There were many very talented people in my class and could have gone right to the top, but they easily coasted along on their talent. That was not me. Anything I accomplished, I did by working hard. So I tell students, if you really want something, you’ll work like crazy. People see that and say, ‘ Well, she’s always going to keep improving and going to be a person you can count on.’ ”
Nowadays, Vollmar continues to write poetry — she plans to publish another book of 82 poems — and still goes to performances whenever she can. And once a year she hosts a party with dance friends and former colleagues from the ballet world to make sure she stays in touch.
“I was so fortunate, I seemed always to be in the right place at the right time with the right people,” she says. “My life couldn’t have been better in terms of getting to do what I wanted to do — not what someone else thought I was going to do, like that high school counselor!”
“It’s when I was waiting in the wings ready for my entrance, those are the moments I really remember.”