Some people spend their whole lives trying to find themselves.
Kerry Cox decided at age 9 that she would be a ballerina.
“I just liked the movement,” said Kerry, 30, a member of the New Jersey Ballet who will be dancing in The Nutcracker at Morristown’s Community Theatre tonight. The show runs for 10 performances through Dec. 26.
Performing so close to home–she lives a few blocks from the theater with her Shih-poo, a Shih Tzu-Poodle mix–is a treat for someone who left her family at 13 to hone her dance skills.
Kerry said goodbye to her native Warren County and moved in with a host family in Pittsburgh, where she attended a magnet school that arranged her academic schedule so she could devote six hours a day to ballet.
She graduated in three years and landed a dancing job at 18 with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. After a decade with the St. Louis Ballet, she wanted to come back east. She joined the New Jersey Ballet in 2008 and settled in Morristown last January.
“Kerry is a standout” whose regal bearing made her an ideal princess in last year’s Three Riddles of Turandot, said Nancy Hartmann, spokesperson for the New Jersey Ballet. “Ballet is a visual art. We typecast. We wouldn’t make her a fairy angel. That’s not her type. She commands the stage.”
The Nutcracker usually is staged at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, home base for the New Jersey Ballet. But the production moved to Morristown this year to accommodate Les Misérables at Paper Mill.
Kerry appears in the Sugar Plum, Snow Queen, Flowers and Arabian scenes in Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s luscious score prevents her from growing bored with this holiday classic.
“The music is very inspiring. You never really get tired of it,” Kerry said during a break in a 10-hour rehearsal day. “And we have a live orchestra. There’s something about dancing to live music that is really inspiring. It gives more feeling to it.”
Kerry started dance lessons at age 5. She has the youthful look of a college student; in fact, she is in the prime years of a profession where careers tend to end around the mid-30s. The reasons for that aren’t purely physical.
“It’s very mentally demanding, as well as physically,” said Kerry, who also teaches at Dance Innovations in Chatham. “You’re constantly being analyzed and critiqued. Dealing with that kind of stress, as much as it can be rewarding, it can take its toll.”
Like all her ballerina friends, Kerry said, she was “shocked” last month when a New York Times critic suggested that Jennifer Ringer, the Sugar Plum Fairy in a New York City Ballet production of Nutcracker, looked like she had “eaten one sugarplum too many.”
“I’ve seen this dancer, and that’s the last thing I would ever think to comment about,” Kerry said. “She’s a beautiful performer.”
Kerry acknowledged that “we’re athletes in an art form where we’re looked at for our bodies,” but said she feels no compulsion to hit the gym.
The New Jersey Ballet’s 26-week season, teaching duties, swimming and a smart diet keep her 5 foot-6 1/2 frame at a lean 122 pounds.
On the eve of a show, she chills out and enjoys a protein-rich dinner–fish and lots of vegetables. Eight hours of sleep are essential.
On show days she snacks on nuts and fruit and sips drinks with electrolytes. She allows at least two hours for digestion, saving her big meal for after the show.
This weekend the ballet company has scheduled two performances for Saturday and two more on Sunday. Kerry will rely on “power naps” and natural adrenaline, she said.
She dates a dancer in the troupe. Other frequent companions are foot blisters. Friday usually is physical therapy- and massage day for the company.
Kerry’s favorite ballet is Swan Lake. And no, she has not yet seen the movie Black Swan, a dark thriller about rival ballerinas. From what she has read, “they dramatize it a little bit.”
In the real world of ballet, she said, rivalry is not so scary.
“That’s what drives you to improve. It’s a healthy competition, most of the time.”
MORE ABOUT ‘NUTCRACKER’ IN MORRISTOWN:
Morristown High sophomore Diandra Marks has plum role in New Jersey Ballet’s ‘Nutcracker’
