There’s a wildly popular genre of videos on YouTube that show cats, usually orange, doing human things. They follow a pattern, always sentimental: a mama cat works her paws to the bone for her kitten, she rescues another animal incurring sacrifice and risking danger, stuff like that. Sometimes she ends up in the hospital. Because my mind is strange, I thought of the great choreographer George Balanchine, who taught his cat, Mourka, to jump on command. I wrote an AI-inspired story about her.
Long ago, before the orange kitten was born, she had a name: Mourka.
She had been light once. Light as a sunbeam in summer, light as ferns. She lived in a small, unassuming home, a prefab in a neighborhood of mansions. But it was filled with music and the personality of a giant: A slight man in flip flops and a casual shirt. He snapped his fingers and twitched his nose, and she jumped on command. He whispered, “At last I have a body I can create on.”
The man had an unusual name: Balanchine. It sounded like the name of a step.
But Mourka didn’t belong to him, not really. She belonged to his wife, Tanaquil, who danced on only two legs. Her lines were so long they looked like white streaks of clouds in a pale blue sky. But the sky was cruel. It crushed her body one summer, just after her twenty-seventh birthday. Polio. She never danced again.
She gave Mourka to someone kind, but kindness dies. Mourka was passed along, name forgotten, body aging. One day, she ended up on the street.
And then something small pressed against her belly. A kitten. Orange. Soft as breath. She jumped, she pounced. Then she danced.
Mourka named her Petite Allegro. Because that’s what she was: small and impossibly fast. She leapt and twisted and turned. Soon, with ease Petite did entrechat dix, gargouillades, and her favorite: pas de chat.
Mourka never told her about the man who sniffed and snapped his fingers or the woman who looked like streaks in the sky. She never told Petite Allegro about the leap captured in that photograph that now existed only in an out of print book.
She just watched.
She cleaned other cats’ dens. She washed dishes for tuna shops. She gave up her own warm corner when winter came and the heater only reached one bed. And at night, she showed Petite how to stretch.
How to bend, without breaking.
How to land, without noise.
How to jump, not for height—but for meaning.
And one day, a letter came. Embossed. Real. “Corps de Ballet.”
Mourka read it in the kitchen, paws trembling. She didn't cry. She just wrapped Petite's lunch with ribbon and said, “Remember your tail.”
On opening night, Mourka sat in the back. She didn’t belong to that world anymore, but she had once. She could still smell the rosin on the stage.
The music began.
Petite stepped into the light.
Her first leap was not high. But it was clean and honest: a pale white streak in a blue sky.
In that moment, Mourka did not see her daughter.
She saw her mother, in a white tutu, just before the silence came.
She saw herself in midair, long ago.
And she saw something new.
The audience applauded.
But Mourka? She just folded her paws in her lap and smiled.
The gargouillade has been described as a cat shaking water from her paw. Here, Between 2:02 and 2:09 Margaret Tracey executed four perfect gargouillades at the end of an exhausting variation full of impossibly difficult combinations. Petite allegro at its finest.