On the cusp of age 50, he decided to hang up his ballet shoes. It was 1984, Balanchine had been dead a year, and D’Amboise was waiting in the wings to perform with Farrell. “I didn’t want to go onstage — the first time since I was 8,” he recalled. “So I said, ‘Mr. B., this is for you.’ Afterwards we bowed, I went upstairs and threw my shoes in the wastebasket.”
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.
