AGXStarseed
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(Not written by me)
He was told his autism meant he could never have an independent life – but the non-verbal world of dance changed everything
Philip Martin-Nielson as alter ego Nadia Doumiafeyva (foreground) with his fellow dancers in Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
“My favourite role is definitely Odette. I grew up obsessing with it. I knew every detail.” At 21, Philip Martin-Nielson is fulfilling his childhood fantasy of dancing with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the all-male New York company who have turned ballerina transvestism into a sublimely stylish and funny art.
Born in Middletown, New York, Martin-Nielson was four years old when he first knew he wanted to learn ballet, and 12 when he discovered the “Trocks”. Yet if the story of his career sounds like Billy Elliot with a tutu, what’s truly remarkable about it is that the first time he told his mother he wanted to dance was one of the first, halting verbal communications he’d been able to make.
At the age of three, Martin-Neilson was diagnosed as profoundly autistic – unable to speak, make eye contact with others or focus on the simplest task. He was so severely withdrawn that doctors and therapists warned his mother that there was little chance of him ever leading an independent life.
Now, as Martin-Nielson chats with me on Skype, that terrible early diagnosis seems impossible to believe. Charming, smiling and candid, it’s only the occasional hesitancy over an expression or a choice of word that betrays any sense that language was ever a problem.
Yet, from what he can remember of his early childhood, he was almost entirely locked away in a private world. “I didn’t speak or communicate, so I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was maybe only when I was six or seven that I knew I was different from anyone else.” Now he’s absolutely convinced that the key to his recovery was ballet.
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‘My autism is not an issue any more’... Philip Martin-Nielson. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
“I don’t exactly know what triggered it, maybe the TV, but from the time I was about four, anything dance-related or involving music was something I loved. For two years I tortured my mother to put me in ballet class.” His mother was unwilling at first. She feared he might be bullied for wanting to dance, and she had no idea how her uncommunicative child would cope with the demands. When she finally gave in, she was astonished to see how readily the six-year-old Philip was able to focus on his teacher’s instructions: “In ballet class I didn’t have to speak, I could just use my body, and that was easy for me.”
Something about the structure of a ballet class – the repetition, the rhythm, the sequencing of the exercise – made deep internal sense to him. By the time Martin-Nielson was 10, he was taking private classes, and was determined to become a professional dancer when he grew up. But it was not just his rapid progress in the ballet studio that was impressive, it was the effect it was having on other areas of his development, as the confidence and motivation he’d gained from dance began to translate to his speech, and to the rest of his education.
“Ballet taught me that if I wanted to progress, I had to do it myself from the inside out. And I used that mindset to help me with my academic classes, to make it easier for myself to understand.”
It was significant, he says, that at the special school he attended, he made the best progress with teachers who encouraged his obsession with ballet and helped him to find ways to utilise it. “They had a saying at school about learning the third way. If a child couldn’t understand a maths problem one way, they tried another and then they tried a third. Ballet was like my third way.”
His early teenage years were still a struggle; he had very limited social skills and found conversation difficult unless it was about ballet. But by the time he was 15, he was able to take up a boarding place at the School of American Ballet; at 18, he graduated straight into his job with the Trocks.
“It was a whole adjustment of life,” he says. “I had to go from living in a dorm at school, doing ballet classes and academic classes, to being on my own. At first it was all overwhelming – travelling with the company, getting paychecks.”
Dancing professionally has evidently helped Martin-Nielson with one of the hardest challenges of his condition: acquiring social skills. People on the autistic spectrum are frequently assumed to lack empathy because their condition makes it difficult for them to “read” the thoughts and feelings of others. They cannot easily identify body language and facial expressions as emotional clues, and struggle with the kind of communication that most of us find instinctive. Working closely with his fellow dancers in class and rehearsal every day, Martin-Neilson has found himself getting better at identifying these emotional clues. “I can see in their body language if they’re tired or happy or if the partnering isn’t going well. And I can take that into the rest of my life. Now I’m very sociable with people; I like to talk a lot. It’s not an issue any more.”
All dancers in the Trocks are given bonkers stage aliases with even more bonkers backstories. Martin-Nielson is now known to dance fans as Nadia Doumiafeyva (described as “a ballerina of fiery attack and lyric somnolence”) and Kravlji Snepek (“a good natured Slav who wrenched the heart of all who saw him dance … in The Best Little Dacha in Sverdlovsk”).
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The Trocks, with Martin-Nielson far left. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
But outside the dance world it is Martin-Nielson’s own story that’s been attracting increasing media attention. He says he welcomes the publicity because he thinks it can help other people like him: “I want to make a difference, for the other children.” But sceptics don’t accept that so extreme a recovery is possible and have questioned whether Martin-Nielson suffered from the severe level of autism that he has claimed. They have also warned that he (and the media who report on his story) are peddling cruelly false hopes to the parents of autistic children, encouraging them in the false belief that a magic key exists to “unlock” the sufferers from their condition.
But Martin-Nielson shrugs off the attacks. He insists there has been no exaggeration of his autism. “When I was a child, they were very one-way with their diagnosis. They were certain I would never be able to develop enough to be an independent person.” And he absolutely sticks by his belief that ballet turned him around. “I think every autistic child or Asperger’s child has a trigger. At my school, I knew a guy who was obsessed with cartoons – he would memorise all the characters, all the storylines, and he would express them in the exact voices of the characters. It was the same with another kid with the weather, and another one who made amazing things with his Lego.”
What gives credibility to his story is his insistence that there was nothing magical about how that trigger worked for him. It was a combination of long, hard struggle, a physical talent, and the fact that ballet gave him so much of what he needed: a sense of structure, discipline, community and, above all, a way of rerouting his mental and social development through a non-verbal language.
“There is no cure for autism, and how anyone ends up in the long run is unpredictable,” he says. “But if a child is given the chance to pursue what they love, if they have the support they need, they will be happier. My autism will never go away. I never forget that it’s in my life. But I don’t have to focus on it any more. As a dancer, I live a 100% independent and stable life.”
SOURCE: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/20...-autism-les-ballets-trockadero-de-monte-carlo
He was told his autism meant he could never have an independent life – but the non-verbal world of dance changed everything
Philip Martin-Nielson as alter ego Nadia Doumiafeyva (foreground) with his fellow dancers in Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
“My favourite role is definitely Odette. I grew up obsessing with it. I knew every detail.” At 21, Philip Martin-Nielson is fulfilling his childhood fantasy of dancing with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the all-male New York company who have turned ballerina transvestism into a sublimely stylish and funny art.
Born in Middletown, New York, Martin-Nielson was four years old when he first knew he wanted to learn ballet, and 12 when he discovered the “Trocks”. Yet if the story of his career sounds like Billy Elliot with a tutu, what’s truly remarkable about it is that the first time he told his mother he wanted to dance was one of the first, halting verbal communications he’d been able to make.
At the age of three, Martin-Neilson was diagnosed as profoundly autistic – unable to speak, make eye contact with others or focus on the simplest task. He was so severely withdrawn that doctors and therapists warned his mother that there was little chance of him ever leading an independent life.
Now, as Martin-Nielson chats with me on Skype, that terrible early diagnosis seems impossible to believe. Charming, smiling and candid, it’s only the occasional hesitancy over an expression or a choice of word that betrays any sense that language was ever a problem.
Yet, from what he can remember of his early childhood, he was almost entirely locked away in a private world. “I didn’t speak or communicate, so I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was maybe only when I was six or seven that I knew I was different from anyone else.” Now he’s absolutely convinced that the key to his recovery was ballet.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘My autism is not an issue any more’... Philip Martin-Nielson. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
“I don’t exactly know what triggered it, maybe the TV, but from the time I was about four, anything dance-related or involving music was something I loved. For two years I tortured my mother to put me in ballet class.” His mother was unwilling at first. She feared he might be bullied for wanting to dance, and she had no idea how her uncommunicative child would cope with the demands. When she finally gave in, she was astonished to see how readily the six-year-old Philip was able to focus on his teacher’s instructions: “In ballet class I didn’t have to speak, I could just use my body, and that was easy for me.”
Something about the structure of a ballet class – the repetition, the rhythm, the sequencing of the exercise – made deep internal sense to him. By the time Martin-Nielson was 10, he was taking private classes, and was determined to become a professional dancer when he grew up. But it was not just his rapid progress in the ballet studio that was impressive, it was the effect it was having on other areas of his development, as the confidence and motivation he’d gained from dance began to translate to his speech, and to the rest of his education.
“Ballet taught me that if I wanted to progress, I had to do it myself from the inside out. And I used that mindset to help me with my academic classes, to make it easier for myself to understand.”
It was significant, he says, that at the special school he attended, he made the best progress with teachers who encouraged his obsession with ballet and helped him to find ways to utilise it. “They had a saying at school about learning the third way. If a child couldn’t understand a maths problem one way, they tried another and then they tried a third. Ballet was like my third way.”
His early teenage years were still a struggle; he had very limited social skills and found conversation difficult unless it was about ballet. But by the time he was 15, he was able to take up a boarding place at the School of American Ballet; at 18, he graduated straight into his job with the Trocks.
“It was a whole adjustment of life,” he says. “I had to go from living in a dorm at school, doing ballet classes and academic classes, to being on my own. At first it was all overwhelming – travelling with the company, getting paychecks.”
Dancing professionally has evidently helped Martin-Nielson with one of the hardest challenges of his condition: acquiring social skills. People on the autistic spectrum are frequently assumed to lack empathy because their condition makes it difficult for them to “read” the thoughts and feelings of others. They cannot easily identify body language and facial expressions as emotional clues, and struggle with the kind of communication that most of us find instinctive. Working closely with his fellow dancers in class and rehearsal every day, Martin-Neilson has found himself getting better at identifying these emotional clues. “I can see in their body language if they’re tired or happy or if the partnering isn’t going well. And I can take that into the rest of my life. Now I’m very sociable with people; I like to talk a lot. It’s not an issue any more.”
All dancers in the Trocks are given bonkers stage aliases with even more bonkers backstories. Martin-Nielson is now known to dance fans as Nadia Doumiafeyva (described as “a ballerina of fiery attack and lyric somnolence”) and Kravlji Snepek (“a good natured Slav who wrenched the heart of all who saw him dance … in The Best Little Dacha in Sverdlovsk”).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
The Trocks, with Martin-Nielson far left. Photograph: Zoran Jelenic
But outside the dance world it is Martin-Nielson’s own story that’s been attracting increasing media attention. He says he welcomes the publicity because he thinks it can help other people like him: “I want to make a difference, for the other children.” But sceptics don’t accept that so extreme a recovery is possible and have questioned whether Martin-Nielson suffered from the severe level of autism that he has claimed. They have also warned that he (and the media who report on his story) are peddling cruelly false hopes to the parents of autistic children, encouraging them in the false belief that a magic key exists to “unlock” the sufferers from their condition.
But Martin-Nielson shrugs off the attacks. He insists there has been no exaggeration of his autism. “When I was a child, they were very one-way with their diagnosis. They were certain I would never be able to develop enough to be an independent person.” And he absolutely sticks by his belief that ballet turned him around. “I think every autistic child or Asperger’s child has a trigger. At my school, I knew a guy who was obsessed with cartoons – he would memorise all the characters, all the storylines, and he would express them in the exact voices of the characters. It was the same with another kid with the weather, and another one who made amazing things with his Lego.”
What gives credibility to his story is his insistence that there was nothing magical about how that trigger worked for him. It was a combination of long, hard struggle, a physical talent, and the fact that ballet gave him so much of what he needed: a sense of structure, discipline, community and, above all, a way of rerouting his mental and social development through a non-verbal language.
“There is no cure for autism, and how anyone ends up in the long run is unpredictable,” he says. “But if a child is given the chance to pursue what they love, if they have the support they need, they will be happier. My autism will never go away. I never forget that it’s in my life. But I don’t have to focus on it any more. As a dancer, I live a 100% independent and stable life.”
- Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo begin a UK tour at London’s Peacock Theatre on September 15
SOURCE: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/20...-autism-les-ballets-trockadero-de-monte-carlo
