Revealing the Unpolished Light: In Conversation with Stephen Manes

Lesley Rausch, Rachel Foster, and Maria Chapman in Jerome Robbins' The Concert;photo © Angela Sterling

In the summer of 2007, writer Stephen Manes, known for his best-selling Bill Gates biography, over thirty books for young adults and children, and for his work as a technology columnist, proposed a new endeavor. He wished to spend an entire season at Pacific Northwest Ballet to observe like a fly on the wall and capture in written word a world that most people will never catch a glimpse of. From long rehearsal days, injuries, and casting drama, to the hidden work of stagehands, lighting designers, costume crew, administration, and musicians, Manes reveals what it takes to operate a world-renowned ballet company. 

In diligent recordings, observations, and interviews, Manes brings Pacific Northwest Ballet circa 2007/2008 back to life, and today, fourteen years after the publication of “Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear”, it is still in a realm of its own, untouched in the scope, content, and detail of what it acknowledges and uncovers.  There really is no other book that honors these artists in such a way and highlights the incredible work that they do.

When I stumbled upon this treasure trove of a book at the Seattle Public Library, I knew that I had to speak with the person who had devoted over a year to capturing the inner workings of Pacific Northwest Ballet so diligently. Some nine months later, I had the honor of sitting down with Stephen Manes to discuss his process and experience.

“Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear” is a world away from your other work as a writer, what drew you to attempt this ambitious project?

My wife was a native New Yorker and when I dragged her out here many years ago, she was the one who said “let’s go to the ballet”. But being a native New Yorker she had the view that it probably wasn’t any good because it’s not New York City Ballet. And it was surprisingly good, and we became season ticket holders. At the time, they had a special program for season ticket holders which was backstage at the ballet to get to see all kinds of stuff you usually wouldn’t. You got to see the stage hands and how it works, you got to see the conductor talking about how he works with the ballet, and I became so interested that I thought ‘gee, I’m going to go find a book that tells me more about how all of this works’, and there really wasn’t any such book. And I was taking a hiatus from what I was doing at the time, which was writing about technology for Forbes Magazine and other magazines, and decided this would be a fun project. And I pitched it to them, and they said ‘go for it’, and so I did, and I spent a year there.

When you were starting, could you imagine the scope of what you were going to cover, could you have envisioned it becoming a 900 page book?

If you’re doing it right, you don’t pre-decide what the book is before you write it. I mean you could, but it’s a bad way to write a book because then you’re not open to what’s happening around you. I mean at one point it was a 1,500 page book. But I don’t think there’s another book that talks about rehearsal pianists, or you know, music rights, or front of the house, or lighting design.

Lighting design was a revelation. You see a ballet before it’s lit and it’s kind of flat and then all of a sudden, the lighting designer shows up and it’s just amazing. Nobody gets to see that because you only see the finished product, you don’t get to see the process. And the process is what’s so fascinating about it, both in rehearsal and all these other things that come together to make the ballet.

In the book you mention that when you first brought up the idea, Doug Fullington said that such a book already existed (Dance is a Contact Sport by Joseph H. Mazo), but you felt that what would put your book aside was all the things covered besides just the dancers, and the fact that it was a different company many decades later?

The other book was 30 years old. Times were really different, people were making no money, the unions weren’t as strong, even from the dancers perspective, things were different. And it was much more top down with Balanchine running the show the way he wanted to, it’s a completely different story now. It was a really different time, and it also didn’t go into much of anything but the dancers.

What was the reaction like from people at PNB when they learned you wished to spend a year there?

Everybody was so generous to me, I was just the fly on the wall. I think the deal was that people were surprised that somebody would actually be interested in what they do all day. I think that was what the attitude was. You know, they saw me there all the time. Bruce Wells, who had famously been around forever, said when he first met me, which I think was the second or third day I was there, he said, “I'm going to tell you what I told that guy from ‘Dance is a  Contact Sport’, which is you have to, you know, show up when we show up and leave when we leave”, which I did a lot of the time.

I'd love to hear more about what this process looked like on a day-to-day basis. In the book it seems like you were there to capture nearly everything.

I had a little notebook computer, which back then was kind of odd, very small, and I just sat there and watched and took notes. And the tricky part was I realized pretty early on that you had to pick a place because you've got basically, a lot of the time, three different things going on. You have class, everybody's in the same place, now you move out to rehearsals, and there's three rehearsals going on, plus other stuff. And you had to kind of pick where you're going to be. And the question was, did I guess right? Did I go to the right thing? There were some narratives developing, like the whole Roméo et Juliette thing. And even that was sometimes being rehearsed in separate studios. And so you would have to pick, do I go here or there? Where's the story? And that was always just by your gut figuring out which place was going to have the real interesting thing that day. But I think I guessed right most of the time.

I would love to hear more about the logistics of gathering the raw material. One of the best parts of “Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear” is getting to see the reality of how these works come together in rehearsal, day by day. You were just listening and typing all of those conversations? 

It was just sitting in the rooms, typing on my notebook, trying to keep up. I was looking and typing. There are a lot of interviews with people, and the interviews usually went well. The biggest problem with interviews was just finding time when somebody's schedule wasn't working, and figuring out how to get into places.

Your interviews shed a light on a world and history far larger than PNB.  Did you expect to go so deep into personal stories and for those personal stories to reflect so much of ballet history on a national level?

I didn't know what to expect. I mean I tried not to let whatever my prejudices were, rule, and as things developed, I learned. I didn't know anything about Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, and so people started talking to me about it. It's like, well, obviously, I've got to go there to find out what that's like. And School of American Ballet was, of course with Peter Boal's history and everybody who came through SAB either in the summer or some other way, I had to go see what that was about.

A lot of research went into crafting this book. Were you doing your research at the same time as you were collecting all of this or did that come afterwards? 

Some of that was while I was working on it. Some of it was later because it took me a couple of years to actually write the book after I finished dealing with them. Some of it I did during, but a lot of it afterwards, you know, looking for Peter Boal’s old reviews, things like that. That came later. There was a lot of spackling, fill-in material that I realized would make the book better, and so there was a lot of research after. 

So once you were done gathering this year's worth of in-person information, how did you start chiseling down? That seems like an overwhelming bulk of raw material.

Well, I made a couple mistakes early. I had the interviews recorded digitally, and I thought, because the last big book I did was a biography of Bill Gates that I co-wrote with Paul Anderson, and we had all our interviews on tape. And I thought, well, since these are digital, I'm going to be able to jump around and I'll be able to transcribe them. Turns out, no. That was a bad, bad decision. And so it took me a while to realize I've got to get these transcribed, and I ended up using one of the online services. There was a guy in Australia who did some of my transcriptions. There was a woman in Rhode Island, and having the transcriptions really was important, it turns out, because otherwise you just can't jump around. You know, I've done a lot of books, so I have an idea about how you set up the structure, and you just kind of work through it. Clearly, it was going to be mostly chronological, but because the dancer interviews talk about their histories, we're going to go back and forth in history on a personal level. I think it came out great. I'm happy. 

There are so many people behind the scenes who don't get applause, and in “Snowflakes”, you've really highlighted their work.

I mean, it's interesting too. There are things that I would never have guessed like: everybody that you're facing, with the exception of the conductor, is a union member. You know, the dancers, the musicians, the stage hands, the dressers, who would have thought that there was a dresser's union? So to me that was fascinating too. And then, with the Nutcracker, when they’re picking the kids...I just found it fascinating. You've got early rehearsals and the kids are getting whipped into lines, and dancers have done it a million times but some of them haven't.

You know, Nutcracker is a through line for the first half of the book, and then the Roméo et Juliette was a great through line for the book too. That was a wonderful production. It's funny because Alastair Macaulay just hates that production. Because somehow it's not, I think maybe because he's British, he's offended because it's different from the play. Peter Boal loved it and that was clear when they put it on. It was great, but they barely got it on in that first year. But, you know, that was drama, that was a gift to the writer.

Speaking of drama, how did you decide how much to share? Because like you just said, there's a lot of very sensitive and honest things that you captured in your book.

When I do interviews, I always tell people up front, if there's anything that you don't want to tell the world, that's fine. Just say it's off the record. There were a couple of interviews where people realized they might not want the whole thing. And there's really nothing I can think of that was so awful that deserved to be in the book.

How much material did you gather that didn’t make it into the book?

Every person that I interviewed was probably ten times the interview. You may have five minutes if you distilled it down, and the interviews were all probably an hour long. There were a few things that were off the record. I had a ton of material. I had way more material than I needed. And, again, some people think I should have whacked more than I did. I mean, go look at the reviews online, and you'll see.

Well, there are also a lot of books that just gloss over, that are too short in my opinion, that don't share any of the details, and that's what I love about your book. 

I really tried to give people multiple perspectives on what goes on without overly selling them, and the reader can kind of make those distinctions as you go along.

You mentioned near the end of the book that Peter Boal really encouraged you to go to New York and things like that. I'd love to hear more about how he supported your vision.

I think mainly by making himself available a lot. You know, we would have meetings once a month, once every six weeks or so, but not on a routine schedule because he was always so busy. But we'd sit down and talk about what was going on there. Some of it was, we're trying to figure out what we have next year, but we don't have the budget for what I want to do. Some of it was just, I'm in the middle of figuring out who gets promoted and who doesn’t. It was fascinating to see what he was up to in any given period. The generosity with his time was really useful because he didn't have a lot. And he made time for me.

Do you think that as a writer you were able to capture the goings-on with more intimacy than film or recordings of rehearsal can?

One of the reasons we have few good documentaries is the issue of music rights. And, of course, part of the problem is you bring a camera. I think at some point I was sitting there, and I was like a fly by that time. I didn't have lights. I didn't have cameras. I didn't have anything that got in their way. Somebody did a documentary on them while I was there, and I don't know what happened. I saw it, and it was shown once at the Seattle Film Festival, and there was supposed to be a second showing, and that never happened.

I never heard why, but I would bet you it was music rights or choreography rights, and that's another whole issue, choreography rights. I think the Balanchine Trust was pretty strict about that. So I think that this was a great thing. Strangely, this art of words, which shouldn't be particularly good at conveying ballet, it may be the best you get.

Can you talk a little bit about the response you received, both from people at PNB and broader? 

PNB was kind of quiet about it. It just kind of came and went. I really didn't hear a lot of it, strangely enough. And locally, there was kind of radio silence. The Seattle Times ignored it. KUOW ignored it. I think nobody wanted to read 900 pages. I think that's part of the problem.

Peter Boal gave me a blurb, which was nice, so that was okay. But nationally, it was interesting. I got interviewed by the National Endowment for the Arts. And some people at SiriusXM radio book group. It was almost all positive, but the traditional people, like Macaulay and the dance critic community, which is very tiny and very incestuous, just ignored it.

Their view was, well, who the hell are you to be writing this? I mean, it was like I was stepping on their turf, and they were offended. And I never got that sense from the younger writers. I got some criticism here and there, but mostly everybody seemed to get it. But the older writers just didn't want to know about it because I wasn't part of their group. 

Frankly, I expected people were going to figure out that it ought to be taught in our arts administration classes. There's nothing else that takes you into an arts organization. I mean, with money issues, and ‘how long is it going to take to do X’, and logistics, and can we do this within our budget? I mean, all that stuff, that's just not in other books, and it's to their credit that they let me sit in on all those meetings. The board meetings and also just the meetings where the staff is getting together with Rico Chiarelli, who's no longer with us, but he would talk about how ‘we can't do this, or we need such and such, and we may not want to rent that particular set because the last time we had it it was falling apart and falling off the rods’. So, that was fascinating stuff in terms of how an organization works.

It opened up a whole new world that I think a lot of people have no idea about at all. There's this whole enterprise behind the dancers, and without the enterprise we wouldn't have a business.

Did the way that you view dance change after getting to see so much of the rehearsal process, like the reality? 

Oh, sure, I mean, it couldn't help it. A lot of that was a real education in terms of seeing how things work. And there was a lot of stuff that, because you were closer to it and because it was juxtaposed with other things in ways that it wouldn't be on the stage, you got a sense of how the people actually make a huge difference.

There really is no other book that honors those people in such a way and highlights the incredible work that they do.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the rehearsal pianists, for example, they're just there every day, and it's remarkable. And the stagehands are incredible. They can do anything. They figure out how to do it. But I have to say, they were the least forthcoming. They don't like talking about themselves. I think there's a great book to be done about stagehands. I don't think one exists and I'd love to see that.

Was there an aspect of going behind the scenes that you most enjoyed recording or witnessing? 

I think seeing the differences between the stagers was an eye opener. Everybody had a different method. No two were exactly alike in how they decided to get this thing on the stage. Some were better than others in communicating. Partially because they knew the work better. I think that was the key. And some were just not great with their time and the dancers' time.

18 years later, what stands out to you most about the entire experience? 

To write a book and spend the time, you really have to enjoy the process of what you're seeing. And I don't think there was a day that I didn't learn something. It was just a wonderful project. You know, the writing took me longer than it should have, but I learned from that. It was a wonderful project. I learned an immense amount from it. 

I just want to end by stressing how invaluable this book has been to me as a writer. It has been such a treasure on my bookshelf. I was in second grade during that season, so I have lovely memories of that era of dancers, but to actually be able to witness the reality of all the fairy tales I was seeing, to get to see these pieces come together, to be a fly on the wall, it is a tremendous gift.

It was just great. Every morning I'd get up, and it's like, let's see what we're going to find out today. There's always something interesting going on. There's a tendency, I think, to feel like you're one of them, but you're not. You're on the outside. And so, to an extent, you do your best to bring what they're bringing to it, but it's imperfect. Well, and like you said, to show all the people who don't get to take a bow at the end of a performance…that was rewarding in itself.