I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [176]
National Dance Institute
In the fall of 1982, when I wasn’t squiring Balanchine from one doctor to another, a documentary filmmaker, Emile Ardolino, followed me around as I taught dance to children in public schools. Emile was captivated by the idea that a whole section of my Event of the Year featured a song by Balanchine. Emile and I had met through the PBS series Dance in America, where he and Merrill Brockway were admired for their brilliance in presenting dance on film. Emile came with Judy Kinberg, roped in to be a producer. (In later years, she became a legend for her productions of dance for PBS.) Emile’s film, titled He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, released in the fall of 1983, was a sensation, and immediately won a slew of awards, including an Emmy, a National Education Award, and the 1984 Oscar for best documentary—all thanks to Emile’s brilliant direction. It launched his Hollywood career, and his next film, Dirty Dancing, followed soon after.
In the early spring of 1984, between taking ballet classes, performing, and choreographing the next Event for NDI, I found myself flying to the Academy Awards with forty schoolchildren selected from our New York City program. I had been commissioned to choreograph a dance to Irene Cara’s Oscar-nominated song, “What a Feeling.” The Oscar producer had originally planned to film a group of children dancing in the streets of New York City, but decided that flying us out to Los Angeles to perform live would be cheaper. In the midst of our rehearsing the “What a Feeling” dance in New York, Emile popped in and informed me of a wild coincidence: He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ had been nominated for best feature documentary! He would be going to the Oscars too! Wow, a double whammy that became a pair of home runs.
Emile Ardolino defending his Oscar, 1984 (image credit 19.1)
Our NDI dancers performed beautifully to “What a Feeling” and the song won the Oscar. The stage manager and crewmembers told me, “We’ve never had better-behaved children, in any production of the Academy Awards, than your NDI kids.” I thought, maybe in LA they expected our NYC public school children to be thugs. At the end of the show, the children were scheduled to return for a final pose, so they were stationed in a holding area on stage right. Over the speaker system, the presenter, Jack Palance, rasped, “Now for best feature documentary, the winner is—He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’!” The camera cut to Emile, scrambling from the audience to make his way to the podium. He had no sooner touched the golden statue than a horde of shiny-eyed NDI children burst from their holding area, flooding around him with outstretched hands, trying to seize the Oscar. Pinned against the podium, he clutched the statue, then held it aloft and, laughing, managed to struggle through his thank-you speech. In the Academy Awards’ carefully scripted evening, that moment was the high point. The incident is often shown in highlights from the Oscars.
A few years before He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’ won the Oscar, Carrie remarked, after photographing me in the ballet Movements for Piano and Orchestra, “I can’t seem to snap a good picture of you during performance. Maybe you should get out of dancing that role.” “What do you mean?” I huffed. “Right now, there isn’t anybody in the company who could do it better than me!” Carrie quietly responded, “Yes, that may be true, but