When Vivi DiMarco dances the role of Paquita in the upcoming performance of Ballet Vero Beach, her beauty will not go unnoticed, just as it didn’t when the Joffrey Ballet accepted her as a trainee, and when Ballet Nebraska hired her fresh out of college.
The critic for Omaha magazine certainly noticed her last fall in what DiMarco calls “only a little spotlight moment” in “Giselle.” Calling her “unforgettable,” he wrote it was her “breakout role” in the company. And it was: In December, she danced the prized role of Sugar Plum Fairy in the Ballet Nebraska’s “The Nutcracker,” which played in Omaha’s grand Orpheum Theater and toured nearby Iowa cities.
Ballet Nebraska shares some of its dancers with the newly formed Vero professional company.
When Adam Schnell, Ballet Vero Beach’s founder and artistic director, was told he “might want to wait to see Vivi first” before deciding on his first dancers in the spring of 2013, he was “only half-listening – whatever,” he recalls. It wasn’t until after he had cast his ballets that he saw DiMarco in rehearsal.
“Who is that?” he asked Ballet Nebraska’s Erika Overturff and Michael Carter. “Oh my gosh, this girl is beautiful.”
“We told you – that’s Vivi,” they said.
Schnell scraped together money for air fare and hotel so DiMarco could come to Vero as well. “That’s how strongly we felt about her.”
Next weekend, March 27 and 28, in Ballet Vero Beach’s final performance of the company’s season, DiMarco will dance as a soloist in “Paquita.” With Spanish flourishes, she will dance the role of the Gypsy girl who falls in love with a French lieutenant during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain.
Schnell has no doubt that that the audience will be dazzled. What may not come through, as she executes her 32 fouetté turns, is that the exquisite discipline DiMarco exercises in dance, she also demonstrates intellectually. An honors graduate of the University of Chicago in chemistry, she is likely headed to medical school or a Ph.D. program in pharmaceutical or materials research when she decides she has sated her yen for dance.
In the meantime, she volunteers in a lab, and tutors in math and chemistry to supplement the meager pay of a dancer, and several times a year teaches the three-hour SAT prep course offered by Kaplan.
And she lives “in close proximity” with a medical student: her new husband, Daniel Parecki.
Ballet and brains are enjoying a media pas de deux of late, with major newspapers like the New York Times as well as dance magazines profiling academically gifted ballet dancers and choreographers.
“It’s been such a cliché, that dancers aren’t smart,” says Schnell, who retired as a dancer before earning a B.A. with a double major in arts management and dance education.
Ivy League schools are attracting former dancers retiring from ballet to pursue their education, and those academically rigorous colleges are finally developing student-run companies to give them a way to keep dancing, while furthering the art on campus.
Justin Peck, a member of New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet and of late, a much talked about choreographer who is the focus of the new film, “Ballet 422,” got his start in dance at Columbia University, participating in the student-run Columbia Dance Cooperative, founded in 2007 by former professional dancers pursuing degrees. Princeton and Harvard have followed suit, and last year presented a joint performance in New York under the banner Ivy Ballet Exchange.
In the past six years, Yale, Harvard and Princeton have hired dance directors developing dance studies curriculum, with Princeton’s director hired in 2009 as part of a $101 million arts-boosting initiative there.
There is no dance curriculum at the University of Chicago. But there is a student-run company, University Ballet, or UBallet.
DiMarco, a Chicago native, trained at DanceWest studio as a child, then Hubbard Street’s Lou Conte Dance Studio while in college. She danced and choreographed for UBallet, and for two years, was its artistic director.
Combine all that with the difficult chemistry major – plus leading a Christian fellowship group on campus, and it begins to look like a miracle that DiMarco has managed to make her dreams come true.
“Dance and academia don’t go together automatically. Especially ballet, since it’s such a time commitment,” says Natalie Jerkins, a year ahead of DiMarco at University of Chicago and former executive director of UBallet. (A Vero Beach native, she has taken classes with Schnell. She is also my daughter – full disclosure.)
“What Vivi did getting a dance career out of college is pretty rare, and coming from such an academically focused school is even more exceptional.”
Beyond that, Natalie says, Vivi is ”the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
Before DiMarco graduated in 2012, she had only one course to finish her last year. She would take it in the morning, and head off to the Joffrey Ballet training program from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. “That really gave me the technical polish I needed to seriously be considered for a professional company.”
Luckily for Vivi, her family never balked at her pursuit of ballet as a profession, even though tuition costs at University of Chicago are among the nation’s highest. Her father, an engineering physicist who works with colliders, and her mother, a pediatric nutritionist, are avid fans of classical music. Her mother particularly loves opera and instilled that love in Vivi. Indeed, last August, Vivi married an opera singer; Daniel Parecki, the med student, recently sang in the chorus of Opera Omaha’s production of “Rigoletto.”
While DiMarco’s DNA includes all the requisite talents for ballet, it also involves some neurological hard-wiring that caught Schnell off guard.
“She’s ridiculously smart,” says Schnell. “It took Camilo and I some time to get used to that. She’s very intellectual in the way she approaches dance.”
He says DiMarco learns sequences differently from other dancers in that she doesn’t perfect her moves in stages but rather all at once.
“At first, I would ask, why is she a beat behind? And Camilo would say, ‘This is her process. It’s going to snap and it’s going to be flawless.’ It’s just her way of really absorbing what the choreographer wants and all of a sudden it just synthesizes. In that moment, it’s magic.”
At the same time, her mastery is never in doubt, he goes on.
“You can set something on a dancer and think, this could be great or this could be awful. But with Vivi, she never makes you feel apprehensive even in the most ridiculously difficult steps.”
The emotional component comes into play as well. Last fall, dancing Sugar Plum Fairy, DiMarco was transported by the grandeur of Omaha’s 2,700-seat Orpheum, an ornate French Renaissance-style theater that dates to 1927. “It was quite an otherworldly experience, just feeling all the energy of the Orpheum, and just feeling lost on the stage and completely giving yourself to the audience,” she says.
Performing to the smaller audience in Vero requires something of an adjustment. “You always have to remember: it’s somebody’s first time seeing what you’re doing. They come to participate in the art and you really have to be diligent and say, I’m going to deliver 150 percent.”
As for what the last layer of DiMarco’s dancing career reveals, or when it is revealed, she isn’t certain. The earliest she could apply to medical school would be 2016. “They’re always a chance I don’t get in, or I can’t let go of the ballet yet,” she says. “When the time comes, it will feel right. I’m very, very happy with the career I’ve had.”