A life of dance comes full circle

LINCOLN - The boy dances in silence, his gaze turned inward as he focuses on the sequence of whirls and jumps that will take him bounding across the wooden floor. The movements, based on a story of searching in the woods, are his own, but at 15, he's not yet wholly comfortable in his lanky frame, a bit hesitant to occupy and own the room.

With his teacher dancing in front of him, though, the boy loses himself in the music, a thunderous selection from the score of an action film. The moves come to life, glued into a storyline with dramatic tension.

"Yeah! Yeah!" the teacher says. "That's it! That's what you want to make the audience think -- that you don't know what's going to happen next."

The student is Joshua Cote, of Lincoln. The teacher is Richard Marsden, who was born here and returned here a year ago. In between his life's two Lincoln bookends, Marsden was a renowned ballet dancer whose career spanned 20 years and four dance companies, and took him to Russia, South Korea, Japan, Panama, Italy, Austria, France and Bermuda, to give just a few examples.

Silhouetted against a backdrop of icicles and bare branches in this dance studio that used to be a barn, Joshua practices the Stanley Williams method, sequences that focus on timing and precision to infuse basic ballet movements with flowing phrasing.

While technical ability is important, Marsden tells Joshua, it's phrasing that differentiates a great dancer from a good one. "When you're hearing the music, let that take you," Marsden instructs.

Joshua is just beginning. He's been studying ballet for just two years, but hopes one day to dance for the New York City Ballet, as Marsden did.

In the dance studio, on the Marsden family farm off Sherman Avenue, framed photographs hang above Joshua's head, and cover every inch of wall space unoccupied by a window, a barre or a floor-length mirror.

These photos disclose all the family history the room holds. There's Marsden as a child and Marsden performing as an adult, suspended in midair with arms and legs spread as wide as the four compass points. Another photo depicts a young Herci Marsden -- Richard's mother, now 67 and still teaching -- balanced perfectly on the toes of one foot. Her arms extend delicately upward, as does the other leg, calf next to her face and foot overhead. Her full skirt forms a delicate arc. She makes the pose look effortless.

This is the essence of ballet, and the essence of the Marsden family. The names of ballet greats -- George Balanchine, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev -- roll easily and frequently from Richard's lips. To him, they are colleagues and friends.

Marsden spent 14 years with the New York City Ballet, Balanchine's company. "Mr. B," as Marsden calls him, died in 1983, so Marsden never got a chance to work with him, but he did work with his successors, famed choreographers Jerome Robbins and Peter Martins.

Marsden's return to his hometown echoes one his father, Myles, made in 1958, resulting in the founding of the ballet school and the State Ballet of Rhode Island. Myles Marsden, also a dancer, met Herci Munitic in her native Croatia, where the two danced for the national ballet. Though the couple has since split and Myles now lives in Las Vegas, Herci continues the tradition with the help of Richard and several other family members. Richard's sister is the state ballet's executive director. His brother is one of the company's principal dancers, and is married to another of the company's former principals.

Though not all in the family have made dance their life's work, they've all dabbled at some point, and Richard, a trim 38-year-old with red hair, toes permanently pointed out and hand gestures like ocean waves, considers dance his destiny. "I was raised by dancers," he says.

It was at the Sherman Avenue dance school that Herci Marsden started her 6-year-old son in dance classes as an outlet for his irrepressible energy.

Marsden attended Central and Lonsdale elementaries and Lincoln Middle School, but even then, ballet was pulling him away from his hometown. At the age of 12, he won admittance to a summer program at the School of American Ballet in New York. When he was 15, the school accepted him into its full-year program. He rented an apartment in Manhattan, but rarely saw it. Dance classes occupied eight hours a day, six days a week. Then there were performances. During those years, Marsden's mother visited him every two days or so, running her ballet company all the while.

Marsden was invited to join the New York City Ballet at age 18. His years with that company took him around the world. Memorable performances include one at the Kremlin in 1991, before an audience including Mikhail Gorbachev, just five months before the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1995, Marsden danced at the National Theatre of Panama, for an audience including the Central American country's first lady. "We had a full moon for the second act of Gisele," he recalls, the marvel still in his eyes.

In 2000, Marsden moved to the West Coast to join the Diablo Ballet in California, a 12-member company comprising experienced dancers, an all-star team of sorts, or "the Navy SEALS of ballet," to use Marsden's analogy.

Marsden also danced for the Sacramento Ballet. It was there that he performed the role he considers his best: that of Hamlet. "To talk Shakespeare is difficult," Marsden says. "To dance Shakespeare is even more."

A Sacramento Bee critic wrote that Marsden danced "as if the role were tailor-made for him," and Marsden believes that's the ultimate compliment. He says experience in contemporary dance widened his repertoire. Although he habitually walks with a ramrod-straight spine, he's also capable of walking -- and dancing -- with a slouch, anathema to a classical dancer, but a distinctive characteristic of Marsden's Hamlet.

The Bee reviewer, Patricia Beach Smith, called Marsden an "actor-dancer." That, too, is how Marsden sees himself, and how he believes dancers should be. "Ballet is based on theater," he says.

Marsden hasn't ruled out returning to full-time work in dance as an artistic director for a ballet company, but for the time being, he says he's relishing having weekends free from performing for the first time since he was a teenager.

In Lincoln, Marsden and his wife, Christine, also a former dancer, run a business selling organic products such as herbal teas and homemade lotions. The business concept evolved out of California's emphasis on clean, healthy living and Marsden's belief in Eastern medicine, which he says protected him from career-ending injury, as well as arthritis and weight gain.

Marsden developed bone spurs on his ankles as a teenager. "I couldn't even plie," he remembers. Not one to admit defeat, Marsden kept dancing, and learned years later that he'd actually cracked the bone spurs off, breaking his own bones by the sheer force of weight and will. Years later, on the verge of surgery, Marsden tried homeopathic medicine. He never had the surgery.

To dance is to make pain and effort look painless and effortless, Marsden says, but even after a lifetime of dance, he still bubbles with enthusiasm for his art. "It's just wonderful to dance," he says. "It's just amazing."