Source:

When Le Clercq "was 15 and a prodigy in Balanchine’s school, he made a ballet called 'Resurgence' on her and some fellow students for a March of Dimes benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria. The music was Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, and at the close of the plangent adagio, Balanchine, as the Threat of Polio, came onstage wearing a large black cape and enveloped her; she sank to the floor. In the final movement — a sunny allegro — she reappeared in a wheelchair, children tossed dimes, and she rose and danced again. What at the time was a simple exercise in entertaining a charity audience acquired in retrospect the weight of an omen or a hex. Balanchine, who was deeply mystical, was haunted by the notion that he had somehow brought on her fate."

I love Le Clercq's attitude: "[S]he was mystified when people told her they admired her courage. To hear her tell it, she had just gone on. In fact, just going on required a choice. She once told me it took her 10 years to decide not to commit suicide. 'And then,' she said, 'I was fine.' ... It was not, in truth, all downhill after the polio. Life after dancing wasn’t less or worse, just different. When in 1984 a documentary about Balanchine was broadcast on television, she saw clips of herself dancing. I asked if that was hard. She said no — by that time she’d been sitting longer than she’d been standing, and besides, the friends she had danced with were retired, so they weren’t dancing anymore, either."