The Sweet Spot
How a softball injury sent jazz dancer Mary Leonard soaring into a whole new career
It reads like a classic story. A 15-year-old Queens girl is treated to a trip to the ballet; watching the beauty onstage, she falls head over heels in love with dance. For the next decade, she immerses herself in technique classes, determined to improve, and finally realizes her dream of becoming a Broadway dancer.
That’s Mary Leonard’s story, and it’s all true. But it doesn’t end there. In a twist that diverges from the fairy tale, Leonard wound up with a major injury shortly after finally breaking into New York’s dance scene that curtailed her dance career. The happy ending is still there, though. Gradually, Leonard found her way onto a new path that allows her to use the skills she gained as a dancer, and to help people better appreciate their own bodies.
In the beginning, it really was as simple as a story. One of the nuns at Leonard’s Catholic school had tickets for the ballet and took her along to watch Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn create magic onstage. “It was overwhelming; I instantaneously felt in love with it,” says Leonard.
Managing dance classes around the city on top of high school was too problematic, so Leonard postponed her dance education until she was 18, when she enrolled in Marymount Manhattan College. The college granted her three credits per semester to take classes “with all the great dance teachers in New York.”
She went crazy. “I worked my butt off, taking three classes a day. I was exhausted, trying to make up all the time I missed,” laughs Leonard. “But I was a mess, and I needed to strengthen my technique.”
Starting at a relatively late age—for a female dancer, at least—was a challenge. Leonard remembers an avant-garde modern choreographer who told her there was something “off” about her movement. “But one of the guys in his company said, ‘Don’t let anyone do that to you—don’t listen to them. You have plenty of time,’” recalls Leonard.
Then there was ballet. There’s nothing like ballet class to improve technique. Leonard took daily classes for years, but it didn’t come easily to her. Pirouettes, quick footwork, high extensions—they were all challenges.
But jazz—now that was something different. Somehow it just came naturally to her, an understanding of how to use her hips and move the right way. Jazz was her home. Leonard still remembers the teachers who recognized her strengths and encouraged her. One was Luigi, the one-named jazz phenomenon with a studio on Broadway. Leonard first took his classes when she was 15 and continued to study with him for years. “He was very, very sweet,” she recalls. “No matter what level you were at, he gave the impression that you mattered.”
Lee Theodore, a performer and choreographer who founded the American Dance Machine, was another mentor. By her early 20s, Leonard had begun taking class with the company. Theodore saw she had a knack for jazz, and encouraged the young dancer to keep working on her technique. So Leonard persisted, enrolling in a masters degree in movement science at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College largely so that she could continue taking dance classes on the side.
And she kept training with the company, soon performing in informal shows. Theodore was precise and demanding “like a drill sergeant,” says Leonard, “but she really taught me how to dance; she really put the time in.”
The company’s training was rigorous. American Dance Machine was dedicated to preserving and performing dances from past Broadway shows, and that meant the dancers had to be incredibly versatile. Each day of the week, they were drilled in styles of dance from various decades. Monday was the 1920s, Tuesday the ‘30s, Wednesday the ‘40s, and so on, until the dancers were at ease doing everything from the Charleston, to the mambo, to the 1960s jerk.
Despite all the work, the hours of sweat and exhaustion, Leonard’s passion for gliding and flying freely across a floor never dimmed. She was acting on the side, making more money for small roles in soap operas and other shows than she ever did from dancing. Yet, she’d still turn down offers in order to take class.
And all that work was paying off. In the late 1970s, Leonard finally made it to Broadway, performing with the American Dance Machine in a tribute to musical comedy songwriters Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe. Soon after, she was formally invited to join the company.
Less than two weeks later, everything changed. During a softball game one Saturday, a runner from the other team slid into second base and hit Leonard hard, tearing her groin on both sides. She felt a tingling pain, but wasn’t sure what had happened. “I went to class on Monday, and after class we did 32 Italian changements [pulling the feet up to the groin on every jump]. I got up to go to rehearsal and I couldn’t lift my legs,” she says.
Theories about the body were different then. Physical therapists were virtually unheard of, and the prescription for injured dancers was often Pilates exercises or visits to the chiropractor. For over a year, Leonard had her back regularly adjusted by the company chiropractor. “I didn’t know why I couldn’t get better,” Leonard says ruefully. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m getting in touch with my turnout, this is how it’s supposed to feel.’ But that wasn’t right.”
The injury stuck around for four years, eventually forcing her to stop dancing. “I couldn’t go see a Broadway show for a long time,” she sighs. “I knew I was lucky to have been able to dance at all because I started so late, but I was just starting to get good. It was very disappointing.”
But she didn’t have the luxury to feel sorry for herself. By then, Leonard had a young daughter and was just getting divorced, and the real issue was survival. She found a job teaching; on the side, she started helping a neighbor get into shape, and began working as a personal trainer in her spare time. Eventually, it became the ticket to a new career. Personal training—helping people get into better shape through one-on-one consultations—turned out to be a lucrative profession she enjoyed and excelled at.
One morning, walking into the space she leased for training sessions, Leonard met a physical therapist who worked nearby. Gary Guerriero was a gifted physical therapist who, as Leonard puts it, was wasting his time working for someone else. He helped her finally recover from the groin injury, and she convinced him to leave his dead-end position. In 1991, the two opened the U.S. Athletic Training Center, specializing in physical therapy and conditioning.
“Oh, we were in way over our heads,” she remembers. “We made every single business mistake we could make.” But the business grew and eventually thrived; these days, clients include world-class athletes and celebrities.
Leonard is convinced her dance background—including the masters degree from Columbia—played a key role in that success. “After 20 years of staring at yourself in the mirror to make sure everything’s perfect, your eyes are so trained to having your body in the right place when you’re doing a move,” she says.
Plus, though they’re often unknown in the sports world, many of the tips and theories that help dancers improve are just as effective for athletes. They might sound funny, but the images dance teachers use to encourage subtle changes in their students’ movements—“imagine balloons lifting your head higher,” “think of waterfalls cascading down your spine” work just as well on athletes. So do exercises that isolate particular muscles, and reminders to engage the core when jumping.
Leonard says she takes delight in advising professional athletes on how to move better, and helping others look good is part of her work. But the best element of the job is guiding people who’ve never done much physical activity to become more comfortable in their bodies.
“You give them such a gift,” she gushes. “They don’t know anything about their bodies, don’t know where to start. All of a sudden I have them and I know I can make them feel great about themselves.”
She tells the story of a young woman, overweight, who came to her and was profoundly affected by the training. “She morphed—got a whole new body, and her face transformed,” describes Leonard. “She went away on vacation and met a guy and got married—I don’t think she’d even had a boyfriend before that.”
With her career finally stable, Leonard can now focus on another body—her own. Several years ago she started dancing again, letting go of her fears of looking foolish or being “too old.” A new teacher, Frank Hatchett at the Broadway Dance Center, encouraged her to come and do whatever she wanted. “His style fits my body best,” she explains. “He’s freeing, very funky with technique woven into it.”
Hatchett got sick two years ago, though, and Leonard wasn’t sure what to do. But she looked up Luigi online, and there he was, still teaching at age 83. So she took a class. “I walk in, and he knows who I am, even though it’s been like 30 years.”
These days, Leonard dances purely for herself. “I just love it,” she says. “I don’t compare myself to what I was before, but some days I still have great moments of the free feeling of moving with the music. So it’s almost a spiritual thing for me.”