Ballerina juggles career, life with Browning

Sonia Rodriguez knows about balancing acts. Caught in a passionate affair with a young man on stage in The Merry Widow, she's the adulterous wife of an aging ambassador. In real life, she's the bride of a Canadian heartthrob from whom she is separated for much of the year.

Rodriguez is a ballerina trained to juggle diverse roles. However, the 25 year old's real-life experiences show her adept at adopting - and even enjoying - desparate realities simultaneously.

First soloist at the National Ballet of Canada, Rodriguez is married to skater Kurt Browning, one of this country's most likeable heroes. As Valencienne, the flirtatious, fun-loving wife of the Pontevedrian ambassador in the National Ballet of Canada's light hearted Merry Widow, she may be up to her ears in intrigue and romance. But as the skater's wife, she's home alone most nights spending hours on the phone with Browning and looking forward to quality time with him during their summer holidays.

Unlike Valencienne in The Merry Widow, which the National Ballet of Canada brings to Montreal next week, Rodriguez is a woman accustomed to biding her time and making choices.

"Of course, I want to have it all, but I know I can't do that," she says in a wistful voice from her home in Toronto. "Our careers aren't going to last forever."

At 31, Browning is at his peak,"skating better than ever" and touring North America most of the year, except for the sacred summer months. Rodriguez's career is just beginning to take off. Principal roles like the coveted Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty are starting to come her way.

Unlike the impetuous Valencienne, the supporting character she shares with two other dancers, Rodriguez is clear about her goals. She'd like children, a stable schedule, and more free time to visit her relatives in Spain.

Rodriguez's path has taken her from Toronto to Madrid, Monte Carlo and back to Toronto. Her Spanish parents moved to Madrid when she was 4. A year later, she was enrolled in a private ballet school with a teacher who had graduated from Monte Carlo's Princess Grace Academy, where little Sonia was sent each year to take examinations. By the time she was a teenager, she was spending her summers touring France and Italy in a small semi-professional touring company made up of current and former students of the academy.

This experience "gave me a really good sense of what it was like to be professional and tour."

In 1989, she won the highest honour at an international ballet competition in Capri. There, she met jury chief Betty Oliphant, then head of Canada's National Ballet School, who suggested she might be perfect for the Toronto company. In short order, Rodriguez auditioned in Toronto and was offered a contract the same day. She hadh't expected things to move quite so quickly. "It was a little shocking. It was a little scary." She was only 17.

Cool headed, she considered her options. A career with the National Ballet of Spain seemed out of the question. Rodriguez wanted stability and the Spanish company had a history of short -term directors. She tallied up reasons to move to Canada: she held a Canadian passport, she had trained in the acclaimed Russian Vaganova method favoured by The National Ballet of Canada and she admired the Canadian company's large repertoire. The downside was that she didn't speak English.

She took the job anyway and shortly afterward met Browning at a ballet reception in Edmonton. It took some time for her to accept the adulation that shadows Browning's every move. He is often stopped wherever he goes and although she concedes that admirers are polite, Rodriguez clearly finds the lack of privacy intrusive.

"Some days when we go out, everybody recognizes him. We call them Kurt Browning Days. But on other days, he's just a regular guy."