BY: MADDIE GEHLING
Trumpet lessons at four, then baseball at five. On Mondays and Wednesdays, cheer practice runs until 6 p.m. Driver’s ed classes start immediately after school. And somebody’s got to walk the dog.
Activities keep every member of the Heying family busy, but they come and go. Only one thing has remained constant for nearly the last fifteen years: Carly, the eldest Heying child, is a dancer.
“I started in first grade, and that was one class a week,” Heying, 19, said. “I have had a pretty strictly ballet education my whole life.”
Starting with technique shoes (what Heying explained can also be called “ballet slippers”) she took lessons for three years at Dubuque City Youth Ballet in Dubuque, Iowa.
“The first couple years we had to wear pink leotards and pink tights,” Heying said. “The second year you could wear either pink or black, but Mom preferred pink, so I wore pink and everyone else wore black.”
“Did you want to wear black?” Elizabeth, Heying’s mother, asked.
“Of course I wanted to wear black!”
In fourth grade, Heying graduated to multiple classes a week, as well as taking classes on pointe. That December, she played a toy soldier in Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker.”
“That really started my performing experience,” Heying said.
In high school Heying began to take lessons several times a week, and by the time she graduated high school in 2017, she was off to the studio on the upper floor of the Dubuque Grand Opera House every day of the week. She also participated in annual performances of “The Nutcracker,” as well as every spring ballet the studio put on.
“We did ‘Giselle,’ so I was a willi in that … We did ‘Swan Lake’ when I was a freshman, so I was in the swan corps for that,” Heying said. “In ‘Nutcracker,’ which is my favorite thing ever, I got to be a demi-soloist in ‘Waltz of the Flowers,’ Rat Queen my junior year.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jeg5nXmogLQ
Aleece Duggan, 21, danced with Heying at Dubuque City Youth Ballet until she graduated high school in 2015. Something she said she’ll always remember from dancing with Heying is her energy and excitement for being on stage and expressing herself through movement.
“Carly was one of my favorite people to dance with,” Duggan said. “She dances with so much expression and just enthusiasm that she brought a difference into every character.”
Duggan and Heying often performed as “comic relief characters” together, she said.
“I remember my senior year when we did ‘Fairest of Them All,’ and we were dwarves together. She was insanely good at being able to give us that little spark we all needed to be OK with going out of our comfort zones,” Duggan said. “She’s just always put so much happiness and zest into whatever she does, whether that’s class or performances. She always puts her heart into it, and you can really tell.”
In December of 2017, Heying danced in “The Nutcracker” one final time before she aged out of the Dubuque City Youth Ballet program. It was a bittersweet moment for everyone – the end of a season, the last winter performance for so many graduating seniors. But for Heying, it was something even more special.
“My senior year I was Sugar Plum Fairy, which was my absolute dream role for always and forever,” Heying said. “I came home that night [after the final dress rehearsal] and said, ‘This is a day I hope I remember until I die.’ There was a community I loved, so many friends that were dancing, I was doing what I loved. It sort of felt like the culmination of my whole first-grade-to-graduation process.”
But Heying didn’t stop dancing after graduating from high school – in fact, she chose to major in dance at the University of Iowa. Heying said even with years of classical ballet training, the program still challenges her every day, as it’s based in a more contemporary dance style.
“Most of the people I’m dancing with now have been taking jazz and modern and contemporary and a whole bunch of other classes,” she said. “Jumping into that, and especially taking major-level courses in modern without ever taking any introductory modern courses in my life, has been a real challenge … It’s a lot of different body pathways that I’m working, different muscles, which has been challenging, but really good.”
Allie Recht is one of those classmates – turned friend. Trained in tap, jazz, contemporary and ballet, Recht said starting class at the University of Iowa trained her to take a more modern approach in her dance, as well.
“It was like ballet was my thing at home, and now my thing is modern,” Recht, 19, said.
Recht and Heying take dance studies classes together at school, and both are pursuing Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in dance.
“We talked because we were there next to each other,” Recht said. “During the sixth week of classes we had talks during our ballet classes and we wanted to compare notes, and so we scheduled breakfast, which turned into a thing where we had breakfast together literally every day after that.”
Heying’s younger sister, Audrey, said when she returns home from college on break, she always finds the time to dance – whether it’s her feet under the table at dinner, in the living room or in the kitchen.
“One time, she was practicing in the middle of the kitchen, which apparently she thought was a good idea,” Audrey, 16, said. “There was a lamp on the edge of the counter and also on the stove, there was a plate with mail on top of it. She was dancing and she accidentally bumped the ‘on’ switch for the stove, so that set the mail on fire and scorched the plate. She also managed to knock over the lamp and shattered that.”
But after over a decade of dance classes, summer intensive programs, teaching dance classes and performing in shows, Heying said she feels ready to do something very different with her future.
“I plan to go to law school,” Heying said. “[Dance] is more of a lifestyle that I hope to continue than anything else. I hope to keep movement in my life somehow, and I don’t know how exactly. Working with the fine arts would be cool.”
Elizabeth, a retired lawyer, said she has faith her daughter will accomplish whatever she sets her mind to because she is so disciplined.
“Whether the dance brought that out, or she was naturally that way and dance just benefitted from that, I don’t know … which is the chicken or which is the egg,” she said.
For now, though, it’s ballet barre at 9 a.m., history of dance at 1 p.m. and dance kinesiology at 3 p.m., and Heying’s schedule will remain that way for another three years.
“I don’t know what experiences lie ahead with that, but I think getting to experience the fine arts first-person has made that a huge priority in my life,” Heying said. “I don’t know if there will be fine arts legal opportunities, but I’d be really excited about it if there are. We’ll see.”