small talk professionally for a short period of time before coming to Yale and gave her the artistic freedom to choreograph her own routines. Dancing alongside Julliard-trained ballerinas like principal dancer Laura Careless, White developed her dance technique working on a foundation of the skills she’d learned in circus. Careless recognized White’s technical disadvantages, but marveled at her willingness to push herself to explore the unfamiliar art. White had a “level of comfort with the body and [was] very available to try anything,” Careless said. “There’s just a level of fear that’s not present.” A circus performance community did not exist at Yale when White arrived. She remembered feeling at a loss without a big top at her disposal, thinking, “How can I still move my muscles in a way that I find enjoyable?” Eventually, she realized that the next best thing to silks and trapeze was already at her fingertips. “It’s definitely dance. It’s noncompetitive, it’s creative, you can just feel your body,” she says, extending her arms a little and rotating her wrists, a reminder of her delicate but powerful muscles. In both circus and dance, intimacy with one’s own body is important. “What you do is so based on the inner workings of little tiny muscles that most people don’t know exist,” Gracie says. So she auditioned for Yale Dancers, hopeful, but aware of her technical shortcomings. She remembers feeling lost through the audition process and wonders how she made it through. Even after a semester, she still feels a little out of sync. “They’re all incredible, incredible dancers with amazing technique, and I’m still doing the ballet warm-ups [thinking], ‘Where is my foot supposed to go, I have no idea,’” she says, syncopating her words with random hand movements to imitate her misguided footwork. Gracie knew that her contribution to the company would be of a different vein, so she proposed a freshman duet,
asking Probst to be her partner. He agreed, not entirely aware of the nature of the project he had committed to. On their first day of rehearsal, White began by showing him videos of the circus routines she wanted to use as inspiration. Stunned, Probst remembers telling her, “Gracie, you have the wrong person.” Even in his retelling, he comes off as assertive and scared. “You picked the wrong person; I’ve never done this before. This looks ridiculous and crazy. I’m not going to be able to do this.” White proved to be even more stubborn than he. She refused to accept his refusal, promising to guide him through the new techniques. They rehearsed for four hours every week starting the second week of school, building up a strong friendship alongside an intensely athletic dance composition. Aside from a spotter, no one had seen “Never Say Goodbye” until the group’s dress rehearsal. YD CoPresident Scott Simpson ’13 was taken aback. “I saw a confidence in her that I hadn’t seen before in rehearsals,” he remembered, in hindsight surprised by his surprise. “She was in her element, she was in control of the choreography, she was in control of her body.” This confidence and power caught the eye of Charlie Polinger ’13, director of “Abyss,” a composite theater and dance piece conceived, as he describes it, as a fantastical epic journey through surreal worlds. Polinger was impressed with Gracie’s ability to create compelling images through movement. He recruited her for the production, casting her in a lead role as well as employing her talents in both choreography and art direction. Circus adds an exciting but unanticipated element to “Abyss.” “It’s a poetic, abstracted version of real life,” Polinger says. “It allows you to do pretty much anything in a heightened way, and it’s visceral, and it’s powerful to watch.” As much as White has welcomed the
experience to place circus in a range of new contexts, she longs to fly again. At last, Yale Risk Management has approved her proposal to include aerial silks and a lyra (a dangling aerial hoop) in “Abyss.” For her part, Gracie has never doubted her own safety. “The ground is what can hurt you,” she says. “The air can’t.”
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