More than any other art, classical ballet makes gender its problem. The focus is obvious but subtle. Almost every class is two-thirds female and the hallways of a ballet school are always disproportionately pink. But ballet also curates a vision of femininity as the very ideal of its practice. The vision is manifest not only in the old, narrative productions of the nineteenth century—like The Nutcracker, or Swan Lake, or Giselle—full of the tiaras and tulle that women wear, but also in the newer, abstract pieces of the twentieth century and after, where dancers shuck off fairy-tale stories and make abstract shapes in nothing more than leotards. In all of these, women are the furthest extension of the classical ballet idiom, literally and figuratively. It’s women who rise up to their toes en pointe, women who unfurl their legs to that height around the ears, women who do the thirty-two fouettés. Women who are lifted up to make gravity-eluding shapes in the air. The pas de deux, a male-female dance at the core of classical technique (partnering is usually the last class added to a dancer’s training), remains a vision of heterosexual relations that exchanges support for lift, ballast for flexibility, power for finesse. Men are in control; women are on display. Ballet stages gender with every step.
Ballet has always known, that is, that gender is performance. It’s easy to assume or even to dismiss the word—performance—when it comes at you in a theory of culture. In ballet, it comes at you with the power of art. Femininity is something to be perfected and made beautiful. A hard, endless, noble kind of work. That’s why ballet can seem, to the young women practicing it—to me, for example—like an honest and subtle thing, even if its artifice is obvious—more than obvious, pretty embarrassing, really—and its relevance waning. Here’s the ideal, it says. Here’s the effort. Here’s the distance between the two.
“You have to fall in love with the discipline”: that’s how Wendy Whelan puts it.
Whelan was until October probably the greatest female ballet dancer working in America. Six weeks ago she gave her last performance with New York City Ballet, the company where she danced for thirty years. I saw that final show. I probably also saw her first, since I grew up with the New York City Ballet and for some time lived close enough to go to most season openers. Whelan arrived in the company just after George Balanchine died—Balanchine, the founder and choreographer who made it the greatest and most important place for dancing in history. He famously declared that “Ballet is woman.” Whelan’s career stretched from the time I came to dance as a passionate childlike fan to the time I came to dance as a serious young-adult critic to the time—now—when I come to dance as an uncertain, middle-aged watcher. I loved Whelan through all of this. She was the first ballerina I picked out as special and followed particularly, one I could always count on both to show me something new and to remind me of what I loved. Steely-thin as a young dancer, she only got thinner, more muscular, as she aged; she has an angular face and limbs with muscles so long and powerful that it seems her bones have to stretch to fit them. Her fingertips don’t trace arcs in the air so much as send arrows through it. As Alexei Ratmansky, a choreographer for the company, pointed out in a New York Times story, the span from knee to ankle in Whelan’s legs is “perfectly proportioned,” offering her legwork a hyper-precision that she can exploit mercilessly. As a young dancer no part of her was soft. Plus she wasn’t classically good-looking. She wasn’t an obvious Aurora, the “Sleeping Beauty,” or Odette, the swan from Swan Lake. Not an obvious Sugar Plum fairy, in Nutcracker. But she was strong. She worked hard. There was an unapologetic sense of effort, even tension, in everything Whelan did. To some, that was off-putting. I thrilled to it. “If it were any easier for me I wouldn’t have been interested,” Whelan said about dancing in a documentary interview, and I believed her when she said it.
Photo by Henry Leutwyler
I danced from when I was four and told my mother out of the blue that I needed to start ballet class to when I was sixteen and left for college in a funk of injury as well as acquiescence—finally—to my basic lack of talent. Classical ballet requires a certain kind of body in women. Height helps, but proportion matters more: long legs and a short torso, a small head and even, articulate feet. I have none of those. My feet are double-wide. I’m moderately tall but it’s mostly torso; my legs are short and squat. My head is abnormally large. I have big hands and stay thin only with extreme effort. Plus I’m not flexible enough, musical enough, quick enough, physically articulate enough for classical ballet. I knew all this early; from the age of about twelve, I knew I’d never be much good. But I kept going—daily classes, exercises, stretching, in spite of my body’s resistance. Or because of my body’s resistance, as if I wanted to defy the more-and-more insistent suggestion that hard work might not after all be the entirety of the endeavor. I kept my makeup and sewing supplies, for ballet, in a green tackle box. I punctured blisters to make callouses form more quickly. I could snap the shank of a pointe shoe and get blood out of satin. I wanted to believe that beauty was the product of effort. Faced with the agonizing difference between what you see in your mind and what you see in the mirror, the only answer is effort.
That’s what discipline means, after all. Classical ballet is built from a series of basic steps, which students practice at the barre for the first half of class before moving into the center of the room for more complicated combinations. The first and most well-known is the plié, a bend of the knees, but perhaps the most basic of those basics is the battement tendu, a movement of the foot and leg out and in. The exercise couldn’t be simpler, but so much builds on it: the reach of a tendu toward each position—front, side, back—defines a kind of radius, emphasizing how the surety of a dancer’s up-and-down axis allows the reach of a dancer’s out-and-in sweep. If you can do tendus slowly and well, you understand how every part of your body fits together. If you can do tendus quickly and well, you’re ready to use that understanding. Tendus are an unassuming test. A sadistic teacher could make up a pretty good hour out of nothing but tendus. Balanchine reportedly gave his dancers dozens of tendus per class.
This fall, when with Whelan’s retirement I began to think about my own involvement with ballet, I visited a school near my home and watched some classes. The atmosphere was familiar, though I’d never been to this particular academy before: the waiting room where parents keep watch with a motley of coats and bags and water bottles, the halls where students take up various versions of slouch and stretch. The air of sweaty innocence scored by the overlapping fuzz of different classical music CDs thumping out from different classes. Inside, the rows of intent faces, the visible intake of breath as preparations sound for the next exercise. The furrowed brows while combinations are explained. There is no room for sentimentality in ballet class; what grace and loveliness come are wrung from an industrial commitment to repetition. Tendus, especially. Because this is an excellent school, because it teaches clean, pure, technique, every class I saw had a lot of them: the hesitant group of barely-begun six-year-olds just as well as the fleet of breathtakingly-advanced teenagers. Tendus, tendus, tendus. 16, 32, 64. One side, the other. Again. I realized, watching, how revealing the step is, how you can tell from tendus which bodies make sense, in the strange and sense-defying idiom of classical ballet, and which don’t. Given tendus, even an out-of-practice eye (mine, at this point) can pick out the dancers who will certainly have the chance to make real beauty with their bodies and the dancers who never will.
Who never will: the decision to train in any art is the agreement to open yourself to a similar disappointment—to realize that your voice or skill with words or drafting ability might never be enough, regardless of how much you try. The same with the decision to practice a sport, perhaps (though athletics, which also maintains bodily health and includes the periodic pleasure of winning at competition, seems to me more forgiving in this regard than art, the goals of which are unquantified, inhuman and out of reach; worth mentioning, perhaps, is the fact that dance requires a physical condition that is ultimately punishing for joints and bones and muscles). Such a realization might be the real lesson of growing up. Not the achievement of the ideal but the relinquishment of it. An early version of the inevitable, middle-aged concession that much if not most work is wasted, that you will never reach the standards set for yourself, that the narrative of effort and merit is a lie that you learn, live, distrust, and then pass on again. What choice do you have?
And yet ballet seems a particularly cruel brand of that choice, given the magnitude of work it requires and purity of beauty it promises, given how those standards and beauty are lodged in the brute physical fact of having a body and the weird, ideological performance of being a woman.
There’s a history to this performance, of course—though the twinning of femininity and virtuosity is surprisingly recent. Dance forms gestured towards ballet from the sixteenth century, when French kings included choreography in court pageantry. But ballet became recognizably ballet only from the early nineteenth, when Marie Taglioni rose onto the tips of her toes (actually not quite the tips, but the effect was the same) and lifted an art form with her. The image of Taglioni as La Sylphide, clad in a white tutu (pictured), still seems lodged in some archetypal cache labeled ballerina. With Taglioni, dancing shook off its heritage as the concern of men who wanted to be noble and became the glory of women who wanted to be beautiful. Taglioni’s accomplishment was purposefully paradoxical, since she made ballet seem more otherworldly only by making ballet much more arduous (Jennifer Homans describes this combination well in her history Apollo’s Angels). Taglioni leaped, turned, skimmed the floor with her toes: with her, movements that were formerly seem as rare stunts became part of the standard vocabulary. To do this, she practiced six hours a day (under her father’s tutelage). She performed steps over and over and over. She made sure that she could hold the most difficult poses for a count of one hundred. All this to make ballet ethereal, otherworldly, light, graceful, feminine. Taglioni underlined the silent truth of the art form; ballet is woman when ballet is work.
Taglioni did more. When her dancing concealed that work, when she made grueling steps appear natural and spontaneously expressive, she made ballet—precise, noble, restrained—an opportunity for emotion. Taglioni’s art emerged when a classicist drive for form ran into the romanticist need for feelings. Women in particular loved the results, Homans reports, because they saw in it a chance for femininity to be passionate. Taglioni put on stage an emotional depth that had been excluded from respectable definitions of what women should do. So women adored Taglioni. Who knows if they suspected the six-hour days.
The standard narrative of Whelan’s career is that she softened, in her maturity as a dancer, in order to reach new heights. By her thirties, she was no longer tense with effort. She relaxed and achieved greatness. The culmination of this shift is generally thought to be a 2005 ballet called After the Rain, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon and now staged most often as its second half only. In it, Whelan appears in a pale-peach leotard without tights, recently without shoes, her hair down—as close to naked as a ballerina is likely to get. She and a partner move through a series of intimate entanglements. He lifts her from the ground, he leaves her there. She curls and extends. He carries her, horizontal, over the floor, raises her onto his shoulder, his back, his thigh. The ballet seems unconventional in its simplicity and vulnerability. But in other ways it’s the essence of conventionality, a pas de deux that takes to extreme the woman’s exposure as an aesthetic object. This piece presents a limit-beyond-limit of women’s work, in which subjection emerges from the other side of achievement. Whelan’s body, with its almost ethereal glow, seems in this piece to have strained itself into translucence. This is what comes after working so hard, this is the reward. It’s not just that you get to be perfect. It’s also, then, that you get to feel.
I have never liked After the Rain. Or, perhaps more accurately: I have never liked the fact that I like it. The drive toward unassailable beauty is not, covertly, a desire for emotional openness. At least, I hoped not.
This fall, waiting for Whelan’s last show and watching ballet classes, I decided to take a class, too, for the first time in about two decades. I’d been enduring a bad season, in general, a time when various efforts had come to nothing, when my mind and emotions felt as wrinkled and worn as my body. So I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done. I ordered a new leotard and a new pair of pink tights and I sewed a new pair of shoes (you never forget) and I put my left hand on the barre and stood in fifth position and did some tendus. I remembered the nothing-else-like-it sensation in my thighs, with those tendus, the satisfaction when the simple movement of your legs coming together pulls your whole body into alignment—the feeling something like a spiritual version of perfectly sealing a Ziploc. I remembered why this training is so alluring. And then, as I looked at myself in the mirror, so impossible. It was over, what had never been. I didn’t go back to the studio.
The farewell performance for Whelan included that documentary about her career, in which she spoke about her gratitude for the past and her optimism for the future (she will keep dancing, in different forms; she has begun some modern-dance collaborations). She spoke of her evolution, her gradual transition into self-confidence. “I was not necessarily beautiful then,” Whelan said of her early years. “I’m beautiful now.” The audience liked that line. Look at this gorgeous woman, the thousands of us thought together, saying that she wasn’t! Imagine her needless diffidence, those years ago! How funny, we agreed. We all laughed. Then the movie ended, and the dancing began again, and there was Whelan in the flesh, taking her last steps on the NYCB stage—and then she finished, and curtsied, and high-fived her partners, and collected flowers, and the curtain came down. And we all cried.
But I watched the next day’s performance, too. It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Outside was a bright fall day. The roses and confetti from the last night had been cleaned from the stage. The program was full of Tschaikovsky, including a Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3 that included several apprentices—youngest of the company’s members, just beginning their careers. (Whelan started as an apprentice.) One of the dancers came from that ballet school whose classes I had just observed. She is not yet twenty, already among the best of the best in the world, dancing on this wide, wonderful stage, and she still has so far to go—to earn a full spot in the company, to become a soloist, to become a principal. To get better and even better. “You don’t have to have a master plan of how you’re going to be successful,” she explained in a podcast interview from last June. “You just have to work hard.” Also: “you deserve to dream big.”
I asked her how she got involved with ballet—this art, history, discipline that has become her work and her dream. She told me that she wanted to dance before she’d seen a single performance, before she’d seen any of her eventual idols, like Whelan, on stage or even in video. She was drawn by the image on a poster showing a young girl performing a perfect tendu. She thought, “I can do that.”
Tags: ballet, beauty, dance, siobhan phillips, work, writing
Wow, this is outstanding.
“…the decision to train in any art is the agreement to open yourself to a similar disappointment—to realize that your voice or skill with words or drafting ability might never be enough, regardless of how much you try.”
Very well put! I think this is why something like Amadeus is so brutal to watch as an artist, you just KNOW you are more likely to be a Salieri than a Mozart.
I really feel this way in sports, too! You can try your hardest in a particular sport, be it team or individual, and then run into someone who is just built for a particular set of movements, with the fast-twitch muscles they need, and just blow away everyone else on their first try.
I’ve seen this with all of the sports I have tried, with mixed feelings of awe and envy.
ETA: I should’ve read the piece–which is beautiful–more closely, and see that she touches on this briefly. I’d only add that the flipside to athletics is that there is the very real probability of losing, which is never pleasant. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve pretty much consistently lost in any athletic endeavor that involves winning, but you learn to take refuge in setting smaller goals for yourself, whether it’s “I’m going to pass consistently and accurately today” or “I’m going to try to have a personal record.. in meets.. that take place in the spring.” 😉
I now have a very curious question in mind of whether or not it’s ultimately more satisfying to spend time working on something that has less measurable milestones like art, or something that is all about being measured, like sports and athletics. That being said, I suspect that for both it can be about immersing yourself and chasing the perfect moment.
“Chasing the perfect moment”–a few years ago I went to the recital of some adult friends who take low-level community classes. The dancing was about what you’d expect from people who started ballet as grown-ups, but one woman in particular brought me to tears. Nothing about her body was right for ballet, and she was not a skilled dancer, and yet in everything she did it was clear that she had never felt more beautiful than she did during the performance. I hope she’s never stopped.
Yes. At some point, especially if you’ve made the foolhardy mistake of starting it [whatever it is] as an adult and not going back in time to start at age 5–you have to grow comfortable with the idea that you are just doing this for fun and you should just take pleasure in it as opposed to hoping you might be the next breakout star!
As a lifelong couch potato who has taken up running at the onset of middle age, I have to say, there’s something satisfying about pushing the body to do things it has not done before. I’m never going to win any races. (Even among my peers in age and experience, I am quite slow.) But the pleasure of it is new and entirely satisfying.
The joke is that I am getting my money’s worth out of each race by taking my time.
Yes! I was actually thinking of the movie “Frank,” which I just watched last week- the lead character in it wants so badly to be a good musician but isn’t really. It’s kind of brutal in that way.
Kind of off-topic I really liked how the lead character romanticized Frank’s mental illness and saw it as the catalyst of his musical talents, and then he met Frank’s parents and they’re like “No, he was musical and creative long before his diagnosis, stop glorifying mental illness.” It was refreshing in a way.
Right, totally! “If anything, it slowed him down.” It was a really fascinating look at the whole myth of the “genius-but-crazy artist,” alongside a few other ideals/myths of artistic life. Wasn’t what I was expecting out of it, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
I always feel compelled to stick up for Salieri– he was quite a good composer in his own right (besides being a non-murderer). You could do worse!
I saw a documentary a couple of years ago about retired ballet dancers, and it does seem like a pretty brutal life for the vast majority. It’s incredibly hard to get a spot in a company at all, and the rates of injuries are just horrible. (Especially for the male dancers, who do all those lifts). A lot of the people they interviewed whose careers had already ended were only in their 40s, and most of them were in terrible chronic pain.
Also on Salieri — totally agreed. I’ve never been a fan of Mozart’s work (it’s always struck me as too mechanical or something), but I find Salieri’s work lovely.
Yes. I found this with karate: eventually, it came down to the cold fact that no matter how many stairs I can run, no matter how clean my form for katas was, I’m still 5’2 and built too slim to ever get much power behind a punch, and I’m just not an aggressive person. Maybe there’s a way to find a better karate without aggression; there didn’t seem to be in the class I was in. I miss it.
Thank you for this, it’s brilliantly written.
I think “I could get blood out of satin” sums up ballet in its entirity – a phrase to remember.
Yes, that is perfect -another iteration of “an iron hand in a velvet glove”, in a sense.
Exactly. It certainly sums up my 20 years of ballet training and performance in 7 words or less. Those who think that dancers aren’t tough, or that ballet is all tutus and fluff, should look at their feet just out of pointe shoes and watch them dance on stress fractures.
This is wonderful. I’m 41 and I’ve never been able to give up ballet classes for more than a couple of years at a stretch. Fortunately I knew early on that I would never dance professionally: wrong body, wrong brain (I am also an English professor!). But I keep renegotiating my relationship with ballet. In particular I find that I now enjoy training much more than performing. It’s ironic that the mind matures into enjoying the repetitive ritual of class at right about the time the body starts to pack it in.
There’s a similar thing that I like about kung fu — depending on how you learn it, there’s no real external referent for your progress. You don’t have a real good way to measure you against anyone else, so eventually you just start to practice for the sake of practicing, which I like a lot.
Thank you so much for this. As someone who loves to dance but whose body isn’t built for ballet, this really hit me.
ballet! i’m always here for ballet on the toast. this was beautifully written.
i quit ballet over a decade ago now, and i still sometimes have nightmares that i am back in the studio and can’t dance the way i want to. and i know that’s what it would be like.
The nightmares! I know those. Being in class and not getting my body to do what the teacher is saying is my go-to stress dream.
I have those too…but then they’re balanced by the occasional dreams in which I can do EVERYTHING PERFECTLY, even stuff that isn’t really physically possible, like levitating yourself out of splits into sous-sous. Those dreams are heavenly.
I have been thinking that maybe I got addicted to the feeling of Never Being Good Enough no matter how hard I tried as a ballet student in the wrong body in high school, and that’s why I’m in graduate school now?
Damn. That is great analysis and I am now considering it myself and finding it eerily suitable.
exactly why my musings on ballet are less fond than this article, however beautifully written. ballet is good to the few and cruel to the many and i wish it weren’t idealized the way that it is.
So, so good! I love ballet, the impossibility of the movement and gravity. Thank you for writing this!
These lines killed me, for different reasons:
Faced with the agonizing difference between what you see in your mind and what you see in the mirror, the only answer is effort.
Uggggggh this is soooo gooood. I dance like an elephant, and not one of the good ones from Fantasia, but there have been times in my life when I was immersed in writing and singing, and that feeling of almost greatness – even when it’s relative – is so addictive and devastating.
ballet is woman when ballet is work.
YES. So much fucking work being a woman. Unrecognized – praised when done well, that is, up to someone else’s standards but appearing effortless – mocked when those standards tried for but not met.
lovely, lovely. I am the world’s worst ballerina so I love this more than you know. Thanks for writing it.
I started learning violin a few years ago, at the old age of 32. I tell everyone it’s my zen practice. I know I will never be very good, but I love practicing.
This is me and EVERY new thing I have started as an adult, from ballroom dancing to Korean lessons. I won’t ever be proficient, but it just feels good.
Good on you! I tried taking up violin at 16, but I had to stop because I couldn’t stand to listen to myself. I’m still thinking about learning a new instrument now in my 30s, though.
That was me with the flute! I could never get a clear sound — it always sounded fuzzy at the edges — but damn, I loved practicing.
Thank you for this! As another long torso-ed, formerly aspirational ballet dancer, this rings really true to me. I tried going back to ballet a few years ago as an out of practice adult, boy was it hard to reconcile the ways my body had changed in just a few short years. I pulled more than a few muscles because of over-exertion. If I went back again I would probably sign up for an easier class just to make sure I don’t push myself so hard to try to be that 16 year old again.
There’s still something really relaxing to me about just spending a good hour and a half just working singularly on moving your muscles in just the right way, listening to the music and remembering combinations – everything else just falls away.
I found the intense focus, the increased proprioception, and the necessity of engaging every muscle in precisely the right sequence very similar to yoga, in that it’s possible to do badly but when done well, paradoxically so much easier as everything clicks into place.
This is one of my favorite articles, and it explains so much about ballet. Thank you for sharing.
This is simply outstanding.
As another long-torsoed, short-limbed woman who struggled with ballet and modern dance from the ages of 5-20, I would like to whisper, alluringly, “come to the dark side: bellydance!” An art form that is made for the long of torso and short of leg and, depending on how you go about it, offers just as many opportunities to get blood out of satin. To me, the real joy of bellydance performance is the opportunity to improvise. As someone who spends most of my life in my head and at a computer, it’s the best way to be in the moment, experiencing and expressing myself through my body rather than with words. There have been times when I have to say that bellydance has saved my life.
Yes! Bellydance was my answer too, it feels so much more organic on my body.
By the way, I’d love to hear about how it saved your life, if you’re willing to share your story. It did mine too, postpartum, and I’m thinking of collecting such stories into a book.
Dickinson College! Does that mean the school where you went to watch ballet was CPYB?? My teacher trained up there, and we used go up there for their summer sessions- and select of us- for a couple of weeks in the winter. During the winter weeks, when we would miss classes, we’d do schoolwork in the Dickinson library.
It is interesting how dependent on (a little bit more varied now, but still pretty strict) physical “look” ballet is. I remember watching girls much younger than me and know they would very soon surpass me, no matter how hard I worked, because their bodies were so much better-built for ballet.
This piece is lovely, thank you.
Yep! What a great memory. CPYB is terrific, and so is the Dickinson library. Thanks.
Yes, just to echo what everyone else is saying, I loved this piece.
The writing in this piece is just awesome throughout, but I loved the first paragraph in particular. As someone who also does a lot of writing, part of me hopes that it’s the result of the same kind of relentless effort and discipline required for ballet.
I took ballet from when I was nine until when I was twelve, participating in our tiny community production of the Nutcracker three times. (We were on a now-closed American military base in Iceland. Our only instructor was the wife of an officer who’d been in the company of the St. Louis ballet when she was younger.) I was so miserable in those years and I think ballet literally saved my life.
When we got back to the USA, I had to quit. It was much more expensive and further from home. I cried and cried, because I knew that at my age, quitting meant kissing any chance of a dance career goodbye.
With the perspective of twenty years, I’m glad I wasn’t able to pursue it. My proportions aren’t bad, but my knees don’t go over my toes (external tibial rotation, I’ve been told), and I have slight lordosis. I loved dance so much I would have done it until I inevitably hurt myself. I likely wouldn’t have been able to get a career in ballet, and I would have injured myself trying.
But to this day, on the rare occasions I go to a ballet, I flash back to how it felt to do some is those movements. I would do plies and tendus holding onto kitchen counters for another decadeand then some. I can still remember every step (if not the names) of my solo as a snowflake when I was twelve, mere days before we moved away.
This was a gorgeous piece, thank you!
Just a quick comment that I love After the Rain unashamedly, partly because of the music (thanks, Arvo Part) and partly because this version (even though it’s just a snippet) will always claim a piece of my heart.
Wow that video is amazing!
This piece broke my heart. For me, ballet is what saved me from the pressure to live up to expectations. It was clear even before I was developed enough for pointe shoes that I would be too tall to dance professionally, so I never concerned myself with achieving perfection. What was the point(e)? Instead, I took all the anxiety and frustration of the assignments, tests, applications, jobs; all the constant competition with my peers to prove myself worthy, and channeled it into connecting my mind and spirit with my too-long body in effort to create something beautiful.
After a health scare a few years ago that left me feeling vulnerable, incomplete, and distrustful of my body, I remember first looking at myself in the studio mirror when I returned back to class (standing in tendu, of course) and realizing that no surgeon’s scalpel could cut away the beauty and power that looked back at me. Imperfect, but beautiful and powerful.
This was such a melancholic joy to read. How exquisitely written. While you may have not have the physical ability to express beauty in your dance, you have certainly found it in your writing and should be proud of it.
Where do you live (if you are willing to share on the interwebs!) I have done judo lots of places, there might be secret judo near you! You can often talk your way into university clubs if you find the right people, for example.
I gave up ballet once I’d progressed to pointe shoes. The other girls were teetering across the room in their bourres, and there I was, clinging on to the barre, no longer able to pretend my ankles would ever be strong enough to support my weight on the tips of my toes (I still do frequent ankle-strengthening exercises, but those just keep me from hurting myself on long walks). It was sad, because I’d been quite good up until that point, but it was clear I’d never be able to progress from leather to satin.
This was so amazing that I have nothing intelligent or eloquent to contribute. All I can say is that you nailed it. Thank you for writing this piece.
I wanted ballet but my parents could afford modern dance. At 14 my knees taught me that being a distance runner and a dancer were not two compatible roles, and surgery ensued. A week after getting the nerve up to start again, and embrace the modern dance instead of trying for perfect pointe, my teacher died in her sleep the night before my brother’s recital. No dance for me.
I’m 44 now, have endured multiple accidents and knee injuries and know that my childbearing (and then smashed in an accident) pelvis will never dance, but I caught myself doing plies at the sink again just yesterday, trying to see if I could even line up everything correctly. My daughter came in and discovered how to spin in her socks on the wood floor. I showed her how to use her legs to spin and wanted desperately to do a tour jete. It was like flying, I want that sensation back.
Oh, how I hope for you that you reclaim that for yourself. Maybe take your daughter, too. I like Sneza’s assertion. Dance is even sweeter after injury, heck, so is standing and walking. Your dance will contain that knowledge.
"Because it's not that I can't get super pissed about stuff, but I have never been able to translate that into actual physical aggression in a setting like a martial arts class"
Same here! "Heyyyyy… maybe we can talk this thing out" (makes opponent soothing cup of cocoa)
I don’t care if I never perform — I will never stop taking classes! What ballet does to the body is interesting, mysterious. Thank you for this.
oh, god. i’m fifteen and i’ve been dancing for twelve years, even though i know it will never amount to much. i still love it, though. thank you for this.
Misty Copeland. That is all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0cdXr_1MA
Misty Copeland. That is all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0cdXr_1MA
I loved this. I was turned off ballet very early, by a childhood class that made me feel I couldn’t dance — and I carried that feeling with me for a long time. But I’ve come to ballet as an adult and enjoy it immensely, precisely because I have exactly zero expectations. I am slightly overweight, and have the flexibility of a 34 yr-old — so whatever I do in that class is purely for me, and not tied to any ambition.
I loved this. I was turned off ballet very early, by a childhood class that made me feel I couldn't dance — and I carried that feeling with me for a long time. But I've come to ballet as an adult and enjoy it immensely, precisely because I have exactly zero expectations. I am slightly overweight, and have the flexibility of a 34 yr-old — so whatever I do in that class is purely for me, and not tied to any ambition.
Yes! Bellydance was my answer too, it feels so much more organic on my body.
By the way, I'd love to hear about how it saved your life, if you're willing to share your story. It did mine too, postpartum, and I'm thinking of collecting such stories into a book.