Twenty-two-year-old dancer Brooklyn Mack doesn’t look the part of a high-stakes gambler. He is all smiles and no poker face; warm, gracious, humble and articulate — not shifty, boasting or evasive.
 

Brooklyn Mack began dancing to improve his football skills. Photo by Dan Cook

But make no mistake: Mack is a gambler, at least in the world of international ballet. Dancing in the Helsinki International Ballet Competition in early June, Mack went against the explicit recommendation of his coach — Classical Ballet artistic director Radenko Pavlovich — and danced a solo from Swan Lake. He went on to win a silver medal and will also be featured on the cover of a forthcoming issue of Dance Europe magazine.
“I said, ‘Don’t do Swan Lake,’” Pavlovich recalls, sitting in the office of his Forest Acres dance school. “He did it anyway.”

The decision was less an act of defiance than an administrative snafu: Mack was on a deadline for applying to the competition and hadn’t had a chance to finalize the program with Pavlovich. Part of the application process involved submitting music along with his program, so Mack just sent what he had — which was Swan Lake.

Mack explains why it was such a risk.
“Swan Lake is one of the most classic of all ballets,” he says. “It has to be pure, clean, detailed. The technique and style are set. Judges will be really harsh.”

Adds Pavlovich: “[The judges] all look at different things. Western judges want purity. Eastern judges want old technique. From your fingers to your profile to your feet, everything has to be exactly right. It is such a demanding performance.”

Whatever it is they wanted, Mack apparently gave it to them, because his performance of Swan Lake led him to the second round of competition, when an initial field of about 90 dancers was whittled down to about 40. But the high-stakes gambling didn’t end there, because in the second round, Mack took another leap of faith — he danced his own choreography, set to the music “A Song for You” by Donny Hathaway.

Of all the participants in the competition, Mack estimates that only about three — himself included — danced to their own choreography.
“There was a big risk to that,” Mack admits. “But I was too inspired [by the music] not to do it.”

After a final third round — in which he danced to Cadence by local choreographer Terrance Henderson — Mack was awarded a silver medal, which carries with it a cash prize of about $8,500.

The silver medal in Helsinki is just the latest in the stunning career trajectory of the Elgin native, who started dancing about 10 years ago. Mack first got into dance as a means to an end — he wanted to improve his football skills and had heard ballet was a good way to do it. But from the start he studied hard — six days a week from day one — and eventually his love of dance took on a life of its own.

Getting his start on a scholarship with Pavlovich, Mack went on to spend his last three years of high school at the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington, D.C. 

“That was really the crossroads,” Mack says. “I thought, ‘If I go here, then I am really going to be doing this.’ I didn’t really decide, I just realized that I love doing it.”

Since then, he has danced as a apprentice with the Joffrey Ballet; was a member of the American Ballet Theatre’s second company; and, for the past three seasons, has been a principal dancer and soloist for the Orlando Ballet. He also won a silver medal in the 2006 USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Miss.

This coming season, Mack joins the Washington Ballet in the nation’s capital, where he will dance the lead role in Don Quixote in October.

Regardless of his successes and international accolades, however, Mack still comes back regularly to study with the man who gave him his start, Radenko Pavlovich.

“I always come back here,” Mack says. “This is home.”