It is said that smiles are contagious, yet in the case of Robin Preiss Glasser, this phrase does not do the woman justice.
It is not only her pearly whites framed in ruby red that catch one’s attention. For me, it is her vivacity, humor, and laughter that make me eager to sit down in a comfy café club chair opposite her, sharing anecdotes and creative ideas. This would be a grand upgrade to the FaceTime screens we conversed through, although I am grateful to have at least been given that gift.
Perhaps you don’t really know Ms. Glasser (although you’re about to), but it’s quite possible that you are familiar with this dancer-then-illustrator’s most famous, young protagonist – Fancy Nancy.
And now her latest book, Grand Jeté and Me, authored by the most revered Allegra Kent, is about to hit the shelves. In this venture, Glasser gets to delve into the details and union of two of her most prominent talents and loves – ballet and drawing.
Interview with Robin Preiss Glasser
‣ How and when did you discover your talent for illustration?
I loved to draw, as so many children do, but I kept at it as a passionate hobby, all through my years as a dancer – taking drawing classes when I could, and visiting museums in every city I went to while on tour.
Yet I absolutely knew, from about age 10, that I needed to dance. I yearned to be on the stage more than I was conscientious with the daily hard work of classes, though, so I’m still grappling with the feeling that I didn’t live up to my potential as a dancer. Ballet was pretty natural for me, and I enjoyed it as long as it was fun, and that was the theatricality of the performance. I loved the end result.
‣ And how did your dancing career influence your drawing one?
What is very different for me in my second career as an illustrator is I adore the daily work of creating the book. I can sit at my drafting table drawing and redrawing the ideas and characters over and over for hours with rapt interest. I had been captivated by the ability of the great dancers of my generation to project an emotional depth into an audience’s soul.
I saw Fonteyn and Nureyev do Romeo and Juliet when I was about 12 and cried for three days; I was shaken to my core! Carla Fracci in Giselle was so tragically beautiful, I was destroyed. Marcia Haydee in Cranko’s Taming of the Shrew was so hilarious — I’ll never forget her flat-footed clomping around the stage.
I took all of this with me when I retired from dance at age 30 and went back to school to learn to be an illustrator. I wanted to tell stories visually as I had loved to as a dancer. I hoped I could do that through the medium of children’s books, so I went to school with that goal in mind. I took a lot of anatomy and life drawing classes because I thought that if I could draw what I felt in my body, I could express emotion and feeling through my characters, as I did in ballet.
In a way, I've been able to continue dancing on the page, and after 35 years attempting this, I still enjoy the daily challenge.
‣ What does the transition from professional ballet dancer to famous illustrator look like?
Well you can just imagine how twelve hours a day for 35 years sitting at a drafting table has transformed my shoulders and tush! And the only muscle I have left is in my right arm. But I still have my smile muscles. Oh – you said transition, not transformation…
My back and hips were shot by the time I was 30, and that slow breakdown of the body is hard for all of us who depend on our bodies for our livelihood.
I was quite depressed when I could no longer dance – I had never known any other life. If I couldn’t be on the stage, I really needed another outlet to express myself.
Going to Parsons School of Design and getting a BA in Illustration was what helped me transition to a new place. I love to advise anyone going through a change in their life to take a class – learn something new, explore other passions. It revitalizes the soul instead of allowing for that wallowing we all do so well!
After graduation, I immediately got an agent, and had four years of artwork in my portfolio to show publishers. I was READY!
But it took six more years of pounding the pavement before I finally got my first paid assignment. So, altogether it was ten years after I stopped dancing before there was a pay off, but since I loved the doing-of-it, I never gave up.
Once I got published, however, I had steady work, and the discipline and work ethic I learned as a dancer certainly contributed to my success.
I enjoyed illustrating books for many authors, such as Judith Viorst, Garrison Keiller, Sarah Ferguson, Lynne Cheney and Liz Garton Scanlon, before the crazy success of the Fancy Nancy book series happened.
From the first of over 100 titles, it became an entity that, in my fifties, I found I was finally prepared for. Besides the books, there was an extensive licensing business, and two nationally toured musicals, and even Fancy Nancy ballet productions. Then Disney bought the rights, and the animated TV show has been on Disney Junior for the past three years, which has given the brand an international presence.
What a happy surprise that has been! This wholly unexpected career that came late in life has been the cherry on top of a long life of perseverance.
‣ What was the path that led you to Allegra Kent? Did you know her before collaborating on Grand Jeté and Me or has your relationship developed thanks to it?
I was at the School of American Ballet summer course when Allegra was a big star at New York City Ballet. I’ll never forget standing in the doorway in awe watching Allegra in company class.
As the other dancers flew around her, there she was in a turban, in the corner, in a pretzel.
I don’t think anyone else was stretching like her yet. I think she must have started what has become so much a part of the discipline. Now all the dancers can do what she did with her body. And she combined the extreme positions her body could make with a soft lyrical and otherworldly unique style of dancing that made her enigmatic yet compelling.
But I never met her until we were working on this book. We were connected through our mutual agent, Faith Hamlin. My mother knew Faith and was Edward Villella’s manager, so there was always talk of Allegra. I knew her interesting life story as I had read her autobiography, but I never thought I’d do a children’s book with her.
‣ How was it like working on a book with someone you admired so much?!
This book is about a little girl going to New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker with her beloved grandmother (who she calls “Grand Jeté”), so I could focus on the passion and power ballet had over me when I was young – before it became my job.
Working on a book about ballet from that perspective, and with a dancer I had idolized as a child, was a complete thrill. And she’s so funny!
Together, Allegra and I are Mutt and Jeff, as I am big and loud, and she is as delicate as a fairy. But she is as sharp as a steel trap. I love to ask her questions like, “Tell me what Stravinsky was like,” and, “What was it like to travel to Communist Russia in the ’60s?” (Her answer was something crazy about fish.)
She was very interested in all the details I was bringing to the book. Our only disagreement was about the Grandmother character’s swing coat that I designed. She wanted to make sure that wasn’t real fur on collar and cuff. I had to repeatedly assure her I was drawing fake fur!
‣ In our previous conversation, you mentioned how important it is for you to tell “a woman’s story”. Can you explain what that means and how this influenced your approach in illustrating Grand Jeté and Me?
I find I do character-driven stories best as I like to draw people and their emotions. And with my illustrations, as in ballet, I am able to tell stories in movement, not words.
[Fancy] Nancy is a drama queen like me, and multi-dimensional, so there were endless stories to tell from her perspective. She’s like Lucy in I Love Lucy – she tries too hard and messes up. She has big dreams and passions. She needs to be an expert in everything — from French and the universe, to things like apple-picking.
Her curiosity and passion to know things is very empowering for all kids, as is her ability to pick herself up again after she falls or fails.
When I stopped dancing, I felt like I had failed and not given my all to my first career, but I had to move on and find another passion, another direction. And through the more concentrated work I did in my second career, I found deep fulfillment.
With Grand Jéte and Me, what at first looks like a love story between a little girl and her grandmother, for me became the story of a little girl being introduced to the fact that her grandmother is not only hers, but had also been a huge influence on others, and she was beloved in her field.
‣ Is this mission something that you keep in mind for every project you take on?
One of the first books that I did was back in 1998: You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum, which I wrote with my sister, Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman. It’s a wordless book about a grandmother who takes her granddaughter to the Metropolitan Museum to “expose her to art.”
The title of the New York Times review might as well have been “Where’s Grandpa?” as the reviewer dwelled almost exclusively on the question, “…are grandmas being invested with the role of cultural carrier while grandpas are consigned to a television stupor watching a ball game?”
I was not particularly fond of his thesis as this was completely beside the point of the book, and it doesn’t matter who mentors kids. If any adult has a passion and shares it genuinely with a child, the child can be changed for life.
After Disney bought the rights to Fancy Nancy, I did other books, such as Lambslide and Escape Goat, written by the queen of novelists, Ann Patchett, who I adore more than life itself. Those books take place on a farm with animals. I struggled a bit with that. I guess I can’t do “goat” the way I can do “5-year old drama queen.”
So, twenty-three years after the Metropolitan Museum book, I found myself working on a similar story in Grand Jéte and Me. This time, a grandmother takes her granddaughter to the ballet. It’s autobiographical for Allegra, so I wanted to try and capture her feelings as well as the young girl’s. Since I also believe in bringing kids to museums, reading to them, encouraging them to play musical instruments – in short, exposing them to all the arts – this seems to be a theme I am drawn to when I choose book projects.
‣ Being a New Yorker and former ballet dancer myself, I can certainly appreciate your attention to portraying Manhattan and the nods to Allegra throughout the book; these are clearly visual gifts and Easter eggs for the adult reader! Are these types of illustrative nuances something you consider while sketching scenes, or are they details you add in later on?
I love this question.
An illustrator wears many hats to make a 32-page book. Like creating a movie — where there is the director, casting director, costume designer, scenic designer, editor — I get to be all those people for my books. I particularly love designing the clothes the characters wear.
But this particular story is based on real people and places. I knew I was going to draw NYC at Christmastime, Lincoln Center and New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker, so I took a ton of photos to reference.
For instance, it was important to me to portray Karinska’s gorgeous costumes correctly, so Allegra and I went backstage to look at the costumes close up.
For my own entertainment, in the book, I snuck an image of Balanchine backstage in one scene, since he was always lurking around. I couldn’t help it. One still feels his presence in the wings!
I especially wanted to draw the dancers’ positions correctly. As dancers, we spend our careers molding ourselves, and I needed to draw all fingers, feet, heads and necks and dance positions as correctly as I could to pay tribute to that work.
Since I had been truly away from the ballet world for many years, it was fun to watch a lot of YouTube clips and pour over images and the social media of today’s dancers. I had no idea how far technique has progressed!
As for details, before I even draw the first sketch for a new book, I see it all, like a movie, in my head. So I begin gathering reference photos before I even start drawing. Then it’s just a matter of the time it takes to get it from my arm down onto the page.
Each book takes between six months to a year of that process of flowing from head, down arm, to page.
Robin Preiss Glasser working on her next book in collaboration with ABT
‣ Although Grand Jeté and Me is targeted to a younger audience, surely there is a message intended for readers of all ages. What is it that Allegra aimed to convey, and how did you illuminate this in your drawings?
Yes, besides being a picture book for small children, this is also a niche book for dancers of all ages.
But the idea of passing the baton of a passion is universal to most adults, which is also what this story is about. Many of my friends have children and grandchildren and viscerally know the feeling of enjoying something more when you see it through the eyes of a young person you love.
I tried to bring that feeling between the grandmother and child to each page through their body language. Allegra certainly conveyed that in her words. And I love that picture books are a do-si-do between word and picture, sometimes the pictures tell more of the story and the words fill in where needed to keep it all moving along.
But altogether, it is sort of a ballet – where a story is told through a visual medium. And I feel so fortunate to still be able to dance a little — even if it’s just on a page.
Featured Images of Robin Preiss Glasser, illustrator of Allegra Kent’s latest book Grand Jeté and Me provided by the illustrator herself.
