While visions of sugar plum fairies dance in their heads, she makes sure all their steps are kosher
Meet Dena Abergel, the Nutcracker’s secret Jewish weapon
A rehearsal led by Dena Abergel, center, for New York City Ballet’s production of “The Nutcracker.” Photo by Erin Baiano
By Stav Ziv December 11, 2024
You could hear the din of young dancers from the bottom of the stairs — and the “Shhhhh too loud!”s of the adults in their midst. It was mid-November and Nutcracker was drawing near. Excitement and energy ran high.
These School of American Ballet students were a week and a half away from the first of 50 performances with the prestigious New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. And they were spending that evening, like so many of their free hours this fall, in rehearsal.
At about 7:15, they rushed down the steps and filtered into the studio. There were more than 30 children in the room — two casts of Hoops, who dance with the lead Candy Cane, and two casts of Polichinelles, who emerge from under Mother Ginger’s comically large skirt, plus alternates.
Children’s Repertory Director Dena Abergel called them to begin. She demonstrated arms, sang counts and rhythms, cued entrances, fixed routes, described what the Prince or Sugar Plum Fairy would be doing here or there, shushed chatter, kept an eye on an injury, approved bathroom requests, answered questions, and saw everything — or so it seemed.
“That’s better. Have some fun!” Abergel called out. Later, she told her charges: “From here on out, every correction is added. Don’t subtract! So you get better and better and better.”
As the kids got in their places to run the finale, Abergel reminded them that in the last stretch before the show opened, the day after Thanksgiving, there’d be a rare added rehearsal on Friday night.
Her deputy, Associate Children’s Repertory Director Arch Higgins, who was seated to her right, typically handles Friday evening and Saturday afternoon performances. Because Abergel, who for a decade and a half has been preparing more than 120 children every year to perform in this beloved Christmas tradition is an observant Jew.
Bat mitzvah at the ballet studio
Abergel, nee Kinstlinger, used to feel as if she were growing up in two worlds. “I’ve always felt like I have these two parallel things happening, and they’re both a tremendous part of who I am,” she said. She was always “Dena the ballerina,” she recalled. “And Dena is Jewish. Everybody who knows me knows both of those things about me.”
She was a kid who loved to move to music, and started lessons in someone’s basement before taking classes at a local school. Then she met Dorit Koppel, an Israeli transplant who was preparing to open a studio right down the street from her home in Englewood, New Jersey.
“Because I’d never been to a ballet, really, it wasn’t the idea of ballet that was enticing to me, the tutus and the crowns and the toe shoes,” she said. “It was the experience of moving to music that was — and still is — so fulfilling for me, and a joy. That’s what I love. The other stuff came later.”
Abergel attended Yavneh Academy, a modern Orthodox day school. “As soon as I came home, I would change into my ballet stuff and I would become the ballerina,” she said. At first she’d go check to see if the studio was finished, with Koppel teaching her in the Kinstlingers’ living room in the meantime. Once Progressive Dance Studio opened its doors in 1981, Abergel was there every day after school.
“As in any small school where you’re like the big fish in a small sea, I was made to feel very special,” she said. There was more to it, though, than her love of movement and obvious talent. “I was with non Jews. I was with people who were not religious. I was just with a whole host of other people. That was exciting to me and eye-opening. It gave me another world.”
Both were core to her identity. “I love structure. I love the structure of the religion. I love the structure of ballet,” said Abergel, who had a bat mitzvah celebration at the studio, opting to perform a dance rather than give a speech.
“I was not influenced so much by outside peer pressures and stuff. I was like, ‘This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what makes me happy.’ And that’s how I lived my life,’” she said. Now a mother and teacher, she’s realized that this kind of focus and determination isn’t necessarily the norm at such a young age. “But that is who I was growing up, and that’s what gave me, I think, the strength to follow what I believed in.”
She’d need that resolve to navigate the obstacles that cropped up at the intersection between her two worlds, especially when it became clear that dance would be not only a childhood hobby, but also a career.
Ballerina in a bigger sea
Shabbat had never been a problem when traveling to the studio meant walking down the street. It became a lot more complicated when Abergel’s training took her into the city.
After finishing eighth grade at Yavneh, she enrolled at the School of American Ballet year-round, transferred to the Professional Children’s School on the Upper West Side, and continued her Jewish education on Sundays through the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Prozdor program. If she wanted to progress with her fellow dancers, she and her family soon learned, she’d have to participate in Friday and Saturday classes.
It was time to get creative. For several months, she stayed in the city on Friday nights with a classmate whose father was a Mormon bishop at the church on 66th Street. “They were the kindest, most generous people,” she says.
At one point, she ran into Rose Landowne at the Lincoln Square Synagogue and again at Prozdor. A quick game of Jewish geography revealed that Landowne’s husband Morton and Abergel’s father knew each other from Yeshiva University. They had a daughter Abergel’s age also named Dena and their other daughter was Shifra, Abergel’s middle name. Plus, they were longtime supporters of New York City Ballet.
“So I spent the next seven years — it’s almost right out of the Torah — seven years at the Landownes’ every Shabbat and holiday, became best friends with their daughter, became part of their family. They became my second family.”
Yom Kippur on tour
By the time she was 18, Abergel had joined New York City Ballet, first as an apprentice and then as a full-fledged member of the corps de ballet. At 21, she got married and moved into the city. She ultimately spent nearly two decades in the company, which is regarded as one of the best in the world. She wasn’t the only Jewish dancer, but she was certainly on the more observant side. She had to make some accommodations.
“When I was performing, there was no choice. I was going to be part of New York City Ballet, I had to be dancing on Friday night and Saturdays,” she said. Dancing didn’t feel like work to Abergel. “I really had no internal problem with that, because dancing was just who I was. I felt deeply that God gave me this gift to share, and that it was my responsibility to use the gift that I had and share with the world,” she explained.
Everything else she could manage. She’d scramble to sew ribbons on enough pointe shoes before sundown. She’d walk back and forth to the theater. She’d wake up early to go to shul at Lincoln Square or at the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. She’d run up and down the stairs at the theater instead of using the elevator. She’d do her makeup in the dark until a colleague flicked on the dressing room lights.
On tour, when so many things were out of her control, it was more challenging. She says she’ll never forget spending Yom Kippur in Taiwan, for instance, “having a tuna fish sandwich in the taxi on my way after the fast to do [Balanchine’s 1970 ballet] Who Cares? in the performance, because I had already missed the night and the afternoon.”
“I don’t want to paint the picture that it’s easy or that it 100% works,” she said. But, she added, it’s been worth it because dancing — and now working with children — feels like what she was meant to do.
Abergel danced long after many of her friends retired, calling herself “one of those really diehard, longtime corps members.” She was in her late 30s, back onstage after the birth of her daughter, when then-head of the company Peter Martins approached her about an opening in children’s repertory and on the faculty at SAB. Though she’d never taught before, she said, “he had this idea that I would be great with the kids.”
It wasn’t an easy decision, but in retrospect Abergel is sure it was the right one. She felt she was dancing better than ever, and it still made her so happy. But she knew her body wouldn’t hold up at that level forever. “I thought it would be great to go out on top, feeling great, and with a new path ahead,” she said.
Party guests and princes
Nutcracker was the very first ballet Abergel performed with New York City Ballet after being named an apprentice one long-ago October. “Even as a very young dancer in the company, you really got to dance,” she said.
Though cramming dozens of shows into a six-week stretch from Thanksgiving to January year after year can wear on dancers, it didn’t feel tedious to Abergel. Especially as she became more senior in the corps and she took on a rotating list of parts including leads in “Arabian Coffee” and “Spanish Hot Chocolate” in Act II’s “Land of the Sweets.” Dancing George Balanchine’s choreography to Tchaikovsky’s score, she says, “is like heaven.”
“Coppélia.” Photo by Paul Kolnik
Abergel never had a chance to perform any of the children’s roles herself. She was still just young enough to audition the first year she joined SAB, but she didn’t get the part. “I was devastated,” she said. It was an early lesson in rejection that she now shares with hopeful kids who need to hear it. “We really care about giving each kid a chance,” she said. But roughly 200 students show up to the annual casting in late September or early October — and there are about 122 roles.
From there, it’s a full calendar of rehearsals every Monday through Thursday evening and all day Sundays to prepare kids to be Party Guests, Angels, Soldiers, Mice, Polichinelles, Hoops, and lead roles like Marie and the Prince. The whirlwind process was captured in the 2020 Disney+ docuseries “On Pointe,” though it’s no longer available to stream. This year, the children are all between the ages of 8 and 13.
“Nutcracker is a training ground for children,” Abergel said. “As I was learning the children’s choreography, I was realizing, again, the genius of Balanchine,” the company’s legendary founder and choreographer who died in 1983, just before Abergel arrived at SAB. She could see how he was teaching the youngest kids about counts and formations, showing the slightly older ones how to act, and giving the oldest a chance to really dance.
It’s a training ground for other skills these kids will need, whether or not they go on to pursue a career in dance. Just as she hopes her son’s soccer coach will teach him and his teammates more than how to kick a ball, Abergel knows her job goes beyond teaching choreography. There are lessons about how to treat one another, how to show up on time and be prepared, how to focus, how to handle feedback and absorb corrections, and how to behave backstage.
Abergel makes sure the kids know that, even though the characters they portray onstage go to a Christmas party, they can imagine it’s any holiday they might celebrate. “I’m not asking you to pretend you’re a Christian walking on stage,” she said she conveys to the kids. “I’m asking you to greet your friends. It’s your best friend who you haven’t seen in so long, and you’re coming to her holiday party.”
New York Times critic Brian Siebert once wrote that “Much of ‘The Nutcracker’ is about children imitating grown-ups, learning how to be adult without losing their imaginations.”
The process Abergel oversees is much the same. It has to be rigorous to prepare them to take the stage with a top company, but she also wants it to be fun, she said. “It’s always walking that fine line of letting them be kids and also teaching them what it is to be professional on stage and offstage.”
Two kinds of rituals
Sitting at the front of the studio for rehearsal that Tuesday night in November, Abergel had a way of lifting her chin and scanning the room. She seemed to take in what each and every child present was doing and what they needed. When the curtains rise, she’s usually in the audience, still watching.
“I want the kids to feel that they can take on their roles and that they have that autonomy and self-reliance and confidence,” she said. “They learned it. They practiced it. They know it. They can do it,” she added. “They’ll make mistakes, and they’ll go in the wrong space, and they’ll crash into someone, and they’ll learn.”
American Ballet students. Photo by Paul Kolnik
Abergel doesn’t hover in the wings, but either she or her deputy are always in the audience at every show, taking notes about things they need to keep practicing and refining. Another lesson for her charges? The work doesn’t end when performances begin.
At the same time, Abergel relishes seeing the kids finally embody their roles. “I want them to be smiling and having the best time of their lives. Because for me, that’s what performing was,” she said. “I want them to experience that, and I love seeing when they do.”
She’s been at it long enough to see the youngest performers become adults, and she said it’s the most rewarding part of the job: “It’s so fulfilling to see them grow in the art form and grow up.”
One of Abergel’s first Maries, Rommie Tomasini, is now a company member she runs into in the hallways. A Prince from the earliest years — who’s since graduated from Yale — was recently in the audience. He told Abergel he still remembers the pantomime.
So much has changed since Abergel taught that Prince those steps: She moved out of the city after two and a half decades, settling in a nearby suburb in search of space and community. She has two teenagers of her own. She can finally spend Shabbat with her parents.
And yet, some things have stayed the same. Abergel still goes to shul every week and immerses herself in The Nutcracker every year. The structure and ritual of both ballet and observance are grounding, she says. “I think anything you’ve done your whole life — whether it’s pliés or tendus or davening — brings you back home.”
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