
I love ballet.
I love ballet, and just typing these words sends me into a defensive crouch, so to be clear: I don’t love ballet culture. I don’t wear pink, or little gauze skirts to class. I don’t thrill to tutus and I own just one leotard, because I’d rather wear a t-shirt that covers my arms. I am saddened by the thin, blank-eyed girls I sometimes see in class, unable to tear their gaze from the mirror, forever adjusting their fit. I think “balletcore” is ridiculous and have never had surgery to achieve a “ballet body,” for dystopia’s sake, unless you count the reduction that brought my cancerous chest down from a D-cup to a Balanchine-acceptable B.
I love ballet for its structure and rigor. I love the monotony, the way the endless repetition of basic movements at the barre calms my mind and stretches my quads, actions with predictable, reliable reactions. I love sharing the space of the studio with dozens of others, each pulled to class by the thread of their own secret hopes. The practice of ballet removes me to a place both outside myself, with my quotidian worries, and essentially of myself, stripped bare. I place my left hand on the barre, as I first was taught at eight years old, and as the pianist starts to play I am borne back through the years, my 56-year-old body a container for my Ballet 1 self.
I don’t love ballet for its historic myopia of form. I hate its classical perpetuation of racist stereotypes and colonialist tropes, and I hate its reification of a toxic and unattainable female physical ideal, reliant on predictable ideals of beauty, woman as fairy, as flower, as sprite. I see the patriarchy made manifest in the Western ballet tradition, with its bending of silent and pliant dancers to the will of some godlike man, its infantilization of young women, its callous disposal of older ones, and I want no part of that nonsense.
But still, I love ballet.
I was a semiserious ballet student for seven or eight years as a young person, until punk rock stole me away. I was initially put into classes not against my will, but also not really of my own volition. I don’t remember asking for them, it just was just a thing that little girls did, for a time, as so many of them still do today. But once I was there, I bit down and held on hard, advancing through the levels at Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet with clockwork precision. I didn’t understand it then, but looking back I think I responded to the discipline of the training, this space where where there were clear rules and what seemed to be comprehensible expectations. Every class started with pliés and moved on to tendus. Learn to pirouette? Swap out your baby blue leotard for lilac and move up to the next class. I was an awkward bookworm with glasses and even in elementary school I was fearful of misreading social cues. In ballet, I knew what to do, I was praised when I did it right, and at least in the early years, corrected and encouraged when I didn’t.
And, of course, as a student in a school attached to a professional company, there was the Nutcracker. I was in it five times, and it is the source of some of my earliest joys and at least one enduring humiliation. (Read more on that here!) But more vivid than the memory of the (in retrospect wild) thrill of performing on the stage of what was then the Seattle Opera House, are the memories of learning to navigate life backstage. How to put on your makeup, how to get fitted for your costume, how to stalk the older dancers for their used pointe shoes, how to play endless games of hearts in the dressing room you shared with a dozen other girls. The Nutcracker put me into community with them all, a shared experience richer than daily class. In class we were all business, but during Nutcracker season we got to have fun, giggle, and playact as party guests and toy soldiers. We had agency in a world of arcane ritual that told us we were different and special. What more could a twelve-year-old want?
At that age I was no stranger to worlds of arcane ritual, having grown up in a family of Episcopalians for whom church was the family business. Being an angel in the Nutcracker was a lot like being an altar girl — mostly you stood around looking holy in a long white gown — but by the time I was 13 I was starting to realize that church was maybe sort of old-fashioned and problematic, a realization that had yet to land in terms of ballet.
When that penny did drop, a few years later, I turned away without regret. Seattle in the 80s had so much more to offer. I had changed high schools and, along with learning to drink and smoke I was figuring out how to make friends, and how to have agency in this new and exciting subculture full of its own rituals of dress and behavior. Though I didn’t stop dancing then, I didn’t take ballet again with any regularity for more than 30 years.
I did occasionally go to the Nutcracker, though, and every time I did I got the same warm wash of familiarity I would get going to Christmas Eve services with my family, in the church where I was baptized by my grandfather, where my father sang in the choir. Neither the art form nor the religion, each fraught with centuries of baggage, was exactly right for me, but each reliably looped me back to a childhood I am lucky enough to remember as a happy space of safety and love. Sometimes I think I have spent a lifetime trying to reconcile these opposing truths.
Two years ago this month I was in the sixth month of cancer treatment that had left me skinny, exhausted, and bald. I was trying to keep it together enough to continue to work. I was healing from a broken ankle. And five days a week over the holidays I had to travel to the hospital for a dose of external beam radiation. The party line about radiation was that it was “easier” — less debilitating than chemo, less violent than surgery — but that was not my experience. I was so worn down by six months of hospital that I had fallen into a dark depression. I was sick of being sick, and beginning to be quietly afraid that I would never be well.
At some point that December, my friend Zoe and I went to see the Sarah Polley film Women Talking — a film about a culture and a community coming to terms with the patriarchal sickness at its core. As we stood on the sidewalk outside the theater and she asked me how I was, I found myself at a loss. “I think,” I said slowly, “I need a way of understanding what is happening to me beyond the medical explanations. I need some sort of spiritual framework. I think I might need to go to church?”
I did not, after that, actually darken the door of a church. Nor did I manage to find much in the way of spiritual guidance outside a few ad hoc conversations and a tarot reading. But three months later I did walk into a ballet studio, still in treatment, with a port-o-cath in my chest, and there I found what I didn’t yet know I was looking for.
It’s been almost two years since that first class. The port has been replaced by an ever-fainter scar. I’ve had a second surgery and a second broken limb. I’ve started taking modern classes, in Horton technique and in contemporary “release”-based forms, and I’ve moved to a new town an hour away, which makes getting to any of these classes a giant pain in the ass. But I haven’t stopped taking ballet, even if some days, as I drag myself to the car at 8:45 on a Saturday morning to make the long drive into the city, I wonder what I’m trying to prove.
There’s a lot of cultural conversation these days about midlife and menopause as a realignment of identity, a closing of the loop between our adult selves and the child we leave behind at puberty. In ballet class I have found this to be true, even if for older dancers, this sense of closure, of completeness, can be bittersweet, as our minds finally hear clearly what our bodies were telling us all those years ago, just as our bodies begin to lose the ability to execute on the message. I am still making my own peace with this conundrum, which isn’t pretty sometimes. In fact, this weekend, I didn’t go to class at all, I think simply to prove to myself that I didn’t have to.
But I have come to wonder if, also, the practice of ballet, with its connection a 600-year-long movement tradition born as an entertainment for aristocrats, is a way of strengthening the muscles that allow us to survive under flawed, oppressive systems. At the barre we are chopping wood and carrying water, no reward for our efforts in sight, just a daily reminder of imperfection and failure in the quest for transcendence. When I’m in class sharing space with a hyperextended 15-year-old, I am liberated, because I must accept that there is no chance I’ll ever be that 15-year-old again. I find am comfortable in my body, in my track pants and my t-shirt, doing my best to grasp fleeting moments of grace. For that, I have ballet to thank.
Related!
We don’t usually do much for Christmas. My family is far away, and Paul is allergic to the holiday consumerism and treacle. But I scored some free tickets to the Nutcracker here in Chicago, and we’re going later this week. The Joffrey’s version recasts the story to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with a working-class immigrant family at its center rather than the standard upper-class Germans. If I recall correctly (I also saw it last year, thanks to my beloved Eiren) the second act “ethnic” variations also don’t traffic so brazenly in racist stereotypes. I can’t wait to snuggle into a seat at the Lyric and check back in.
There are other versions of the Nutcracker out there that also reinvent or subvert the tradition, including Donald Byrd’s Harlem Nutcracker, a Jewish Nutcracker, a Hip-Hop Nutcracker, etc. Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is darkly hilarious, with cross-gender casting, “adult themes,” groovy set design by Charles Burns, and the greatest “Waltz of the Snowflakes” ever.
Speaking of the Nutcracker: this 20-minute video of comedian Gareth Reynolds attempting to rehearse with Pacific Northwest Ballet is pretty amusing.
I loved reading this profile of the incomparable Mikhail Baryshnikov, who I was lucky enough to meet in the early 90s, while working as a stagehand for a benefit he was performing in at the Joyce Theater. My job was to stand in the wings and hand him a towel when he came offstage. He was incredibly nice. I touched his sweat!
Last, did you know that a short and sweet documentary about a shoestring ballet school in Nigeria is up for an Academy Award? Watch Then Comes the Body here on Vimeo.
This essay is so damn good, Martha!! Can't help sharing that it's been an emotional ballet season for me. I just saw my still-beloved classic NYC Ballet Nutcracker and then saw my granddaughter Eva with one of the youngest dancer-cohorts in the very non-traditional Berkeley Ballet Theater 'Nutcracker Bird.' And now I'm contemplating getting back into class myself at an arthritic age 73. Am I completely crazy!? I love picturing you in the wings of The Joyce handing Misha his towel!
"At the barre we are chopping wood and carrying water, no reward for our efforts in sight, just a daily reminder of imperfection and failure in the quest for transcendence." goddamn, Martha