Dancing Back into the Light
Feb 8, 2010 in General
Soo Youn Cho comes back from an ACL injury to perform the title role in The Sleeping Beauty
Soo Youn Cho was flying.
At least, that was how it felt to her that Friday afternoon in September 2008, as she soared around the rehearsal room at Tulsa Ballet’s headquarters.
Cho was rehearsing the role of Kitri, the female lead in the ballet version of "Don Quixote." It is a demanding part, full of challenging combinations of steps and pirouettes and leaps, but it was also one that Cho had always dreamed of dancing.
And that dream was getting closer to coming true, as the opening night of the production was just a couple of weeks away.
"We were rehearsing the first act solo," Cho recalled, "and I was very excited about doing this, really wanted to do it well. And maybe I was too excited ."
As Cho returned to earth after one of those soaring leaps, she heard an unfamiliar sound.
"It was so loud," she said, her eyes going wide at the memory. "It was like bones — like a chicken bone that you " and she mimed snapping something in two.
Cho ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee when she landed. While the sound of the ligament rupturing was "scary," she said she did not feel much pain at the time.
"I really thought that I could just rest for the weekend and I'd be fine," Cho said, laughing. "I didn't get worried until everyone kept telling me not to move. And when the ambulance came for me, then I really got worried."
That Cho will be performing the title role in "The Sleeping Beauty" this coming weekend is a testament to her determination — and a willingness to relearn some things about herself and how she danced.
Cho, a demi-soloist with the company, will alternate with principal dancer Karina Gonzalez as Aurora, the princess who falls under the spell of a witch that sends her to sleep for years. Coincidentally, Gonzalez made her debut in a principal role with Tulsa Ballet's 2006 production of "The Sleeping Beauty."
"A lot of other dancers have told me that they have had a similar injury and went back to dancing," Cho said. "But when it is you, and all the doctors are saying it would be a year before I could dance again you can't help but worry."
Melanie Seaman, a Tulsa physical therapist who has worked with Tulsa Ballet for four years, met with Cho soon after her fall.
"She was one scared lady, because dancing is all she's done all her life," Seaman said. "She didn't understand how something like this could have happened."
Cho started dancing in her native South Korea at age 5. Her mother enrolled her in a dance class because Cho was, in her words, "not very healthy because I didn't eat much. She thought if I did some exercise, it would make me start eating."
What it did was make her fall in love with dance.
"Dance really became my whole life," she said. "When I was still in school, whenever I had free time, I would be practicing dance steps. My ballet teacher really was a second mother to me."
Before joining Tulsa Ballet in 2007, Cho had won awards at some of the world's top dance competitions, including first prizes at Germany's Tanzolymp in 2005 and the prestigious Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland (2002), as well as earning a bronze medal at the Varna competition in Bulgaria and a gold medal at the Korea Ballet Competition, both in 2001.
Even so, Seaman said, "I told her that her hips were weak, her balance was weak, even her core body strength wasn't what it needed to be.
And she looked at me like I was crazy. But I was able to show her, using her good leg, what was wrong, and how it could be remedied."
Cho first had to go through surgery, which was performed by a New York doctor who specializes in treating dancers' injuries. Then Cho and Seaman embarked on a year-long process of therapy.
"Some people in the profession favor an accelerated therapy," Seaman said, "but I believe that ends up pushing the patient too fast, and they often re-injure themselves."
Cho began taking daily classes, doing only the most basic moves, three months after surgery. It would be almost 10 months after surgery before Seaman thought her able to jump.
And that posed additional problems.
One of the problems with an ACL injury is that it also damages the nerve that tells the brain "where your knee is in space," Seaman said. "That's something vitally important for a dancer to know when she's coming down from a jump. That's what scared her the most, having to relearn how to know what her knee was doing."
Another lesson Cho learned in the course of her therapy was to listen to her own body.
"I always thought that, no matter how tired I was, I must just push through and keep going," Cho said. "The day I injured myself, it was the last rehearsal of a Friday, and I knew I was tired, but I kept going. Now I've learned."
Cho returned to the stage in Tulsa Ballet's production of "Dracula," again alternating in the female lead roles with Gonzalez. And taking on the title role in "The Sleeping Beauty" has been daunting, but Cho is not one to back away from a challenge.
"Our therapy got to be a game toward the end," Seaman said. "I would think of something I knew she wasn't yet able to do, and show it to her, and it would just drive her nuts. Then three or four days later, she'd show up and be able to do it perfectly.
"I told her and Marcello that every athlete I've worked with who's had this injury and gone through therapy will come back stronger than ever," Seaman said. "That's certainly true of Soo Youn. She's an impressive young lady."
