What Makes a Dancer?

On coming back and figuring out where I went

Earlier this month I did something I haven’t done in thirty years: I went to a ballet class. And then I went to another, and then another.

This didn’t happen out of the blue. I had been thinking about ballet even before the pandemic, and at some point in 2020 attempted a few Zoom classes, where I did barre holding onto a chair and tried not to kick the bookshelf with my battements. But this day, April Fools Day, was the first time I had walked into a studio, scuffed Capezios on my feet, since 1992. What better day, I figured, to take the risk of being foolish in public?

I registered for the class in a fit of frustration with my compromised body. I’ve started up circus again but I’ve lost so much upper body strength this past year that I have to fight for skills I once had mastered. My left pectoral muscle still pulls and aches, stiff and scarred despite months of gentle therapy. But it’s spring! My ankle is healed, my hair is growing back, I am less tired and I am desperate to move.

I was nervous before class started, but once the pianist began picking out a 4-4 tune for pliés the nerves washed away. Muscle memory is a wild and powerful thing, and as the barre progressed through tendus and ronds de jambe I was beyond surprised to discover that mine has apparently just been dormant, not dead all these years. I was not alone. While the class is billed as beginning, students run the gamut – many true beginners, still figuring out where to put their arms; a few ringers, clearly too good for this class, offering an aspirational model; and a cohort of dancers like me, excavating long-ago training from under layers of sediment, one piqué turn at a time.

A few days after that first class I picked up a copy of Alice Robb’s Don’t Think Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet, a memoir of her three years as a student at the School of American Ballet and a cultural history of the complicated legacy of stoicism, submission, and self-destruction ballet training often gifts to its students. SAB is the highly competitive feeder school for the New York City Ballet, founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1948 and considered by popular mythology the ne plus ultra of American ballet. Students must audition to get in, and are weeded out annually if they fail to progress to SAB expectations. Robb herself was “expelled” (her word) when she was 12, and the wound incurred by being cast out of Mr. B’s paradise still bleeds. 

There’s a lot of good history in Robb’s book, and a great deal of smart criticism as she mines ballet’s cultural import. I’m not going to go into full book-review mode, but I appreciate that she’s not looking for easy answers, and if ballet and the ways it has shaped (and warped) women’s identity is a subject of interest, it’s an excellent read. But what has stuck with me since I finished is Robb’s unwavering understanding of her SAB experience as special, even extraordinary.

I started taking ballet when I was eight years old, after a savior of a mom at the athletic club where I took swimming lessons steered my mother away from dance classes at the club and towards the preprofessional training program at Pacific Northwest Ballet. I studied at PNB for six years until I was 14, progressing through the levels from pink leotards to baby blue to maroon, forest, and navy. I rushed to class after school eager to change into my dance clothes and pin up my hair. I applied myself not just to the physical lessons of ballet but, like Robb, those of its attendant culture. I learned to lacquer my bun with AquaNet, to carry a ludicrously large dance bag, and to parse the failings of my body with studious attention.

As a school attached to a company, PNB, like NYCB, had a Nutcracker full of roles for children, and I performed in it five years running, checking in at the stage door of the Seattle Center Opera House like a boss. First I was a buffoon, the role for the littlest kids, who run out in the middle of the second act from under Mother Goose's skirt to dance around in their red pajamas. Later, I got a coveted role in the first act party scene, and I was cast as a toy soldier twice. When I was 13 I was an angel, the role for the tallest girls, the ones who didn't fit into any of the other costumes but were not yet old enough or skilled enough to dance in the corps. As angels, we were allowed to take company class on stage before performances, and I thought I had truly died and gone to heaven. 

One year, I was assigned to be part of the dragon – in which eight little girls in black tights and shoes were strung together in descending order of height on a harness to hold up hoops that made up the body of a Chinese New Year-style dragon. We ran around the stage on our tiptoes under cover of the cloth making up the dragon’s back, whiplashing back and forth as the male dancer manipulating the dragon’s head turned and swooped. Usually I was the second girl in the line, but one night the little girl on the end got sick and I was subbed in at the last minute. This was a very important role, as the girl on the end had to, as the music hit its final button, pick up one leg and balance on the other in attitude. I did this proudly, holding tightly to the waist of the girl in front of me, and then as the transition music kicked in and the dragon started to move, I was jerked forward and I fell. My whole body tumbled out from underneath the cloth, taking down the kid in front of me as well, and we were dragged offstage in a jumble of arms and legs. Francia Russell, the artistic director, a former NYCB dancer herself, dressed me down in public backstage, and I have never forgotten the sting of that humiliation. Some wounds still seep.

Eventually, like so many young dancers, I developed boobs and hips and an eating disorder, and I left PNB. I don't remember if I was asked to leave, or if I wasn't advanced, or if I just decided at some point that this was going nowhere and I would be better off somewhere else. My mother doesn't remember either. She can't remember anything from this period of my life – there was just too much going on.

But while I left Pacific Northwest Ballet School, I didn’t stop dancing. Instead, I went elsewhere, and I don’t  remember the transition as traumatic. I followed one of my PNB teachers, Perry Brunson, to a space called the Dance Lab, which was run by a celebrated Spanish dancer named Sara DeLuis, who was coincidentally the stepmother of a friend of my sister’s. I took ballet there and I took modern and jazz at Spectrum Dance Theater with my other teacher, Jenny Hillock, who I had met years before through my father. And I went to class off and on all through high school, sometimes in secret, even as I was pulled away by the tug of cooler friends and parties and the thrill of the Seattle scene, then just starting to prove itself exceptional. 

When I went away to college, scared and dislocated, I enrolled in a ballet class, and while I flunked art history that first semester, I kept on dancing. When I dropped out of Oberlin for a while and returned to Seattle I studied in a studio in Meany Hall on the University of Washington campus with a wondrous young teacher whose name I can't remember, though I wish I could, because even though none of these names mean anything to you – Sara, Perry, Jenny, teacher I can't remember – they were real and important people to me, and not just to me but to dance in Seattle, look them up. 

When I returned to Ohio, there was a new teacher who became the newest important person in my short life as a dancer. Ann Cooper Albright joined the faculty my senior year, and I quickly became her acolyte. By spring I had finished all the requirements from my philosophy major, and I was dancing pretty much all the time, and I remember that final semester as one of sudden, immense possibilities. I worked as Ann's teaching assistant, and I danced in her company, a company into which she had cast me not by audition but after watching me dance at the Oberlin College disco. This astonished me, that such a thing was possible, that I could just dance, and it might make me a dancer. 

Commencement weekend I performed in a student show, and afterward a woman – A parent? An alum? – cornered me to say, with fervor, “Don’t ever stop dancing.” But of course, shortly thereafter, I did. After graduation I went to the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, for the summer and studied with Chuck Davis, the legendary master of American African dance, and with the luminous Peggy Baker, a brilliant dancer who worked with Mark Morris and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. But I was lonely and broke and surrounded by such an abundance of talent my own feeble efforts seemed pointless. For reasons I can’t remember I left ADF a week early to hop a train to New York, where an entry level admin job in the dance world, at the Joyce Theater, was waiting for me. 

For a year I took classes around town, at the Hawkins studio and at Cunningham, and I performed a bit with friends from ADF, at Dance Theater Workshop and at the Kitchen. But young and on my own I was adrift, and I couldn't find my people. Without the anchor of community I drifted away, unmoored, and no one appeared to notice. My boyfriend was a lighting designer, so I followed him to summer stock and learned to be an electrician. Later, I would tour with the company then known as Feld Ballets/NY as part of the crew. From time to time, as we were setting up on the stage in some theater in Milwaukee or Sarasota, I would bust out a pirouette and the other electricians would mark me and nod, not bad. I longed to take class with the company, but I never did. Instead, I moved to Chicago, and that was that.

For decades, I declined to frame any of this as special. Rather, my dance background felt like something to hide. My peers – mostly men, and a few women – were getting famous playing music, or making movies. Later, they were writing books. No one cared about dance, it was so deeply uncool, and besides, I had dropped out, I wasn’t that good, no one forced me to leave. But as I would go on to experience in my romantic life, even though the breakup had been my idea, in its destructive wake I grieved the loss while pretending to the world it was no big deal. Just one of those things, a childish pursuit now set aside. Once I found my way to aerial classes ten years ago and discovered I was still flexible, I would occasionally tell people “I used to be a dancer,” if they asked about my leg lines. But I rarely elaborated, still unsure whether my experience was unique or pedestrian, where I fit in the taxonomy of dreams deferred.

But reading Robb’s book I realized, wait, maybe it was special. If Robb can spin three preteen years at SAB into a thwarted life in ballet, what does that make my story? PNB is one of the top ballet schools in the country. Perry Brunson was Mark Morris’s mentor. The American Dance Festival is a rarefied space. I’ve subjected you to this long personal history, full of so many names that mean nothing, from which I’ve actually cut several paragraphs, because when I think about it now at 55 I’m able to see it as extraordinary.

Aging in general and serious illness in particular, I’ve found, have propelled my memory full-throttle back to these formative years. I seem to have blocked out my 30s (a story for another time) but the sense-memory of the ballet studio, the light through the second-story windows, the plink of the piano, the tang of rosin and hairspray and sweat – it’s all right here. And as my psyche has grown stronger even as the body it’s attached to deteriorates, I see how I may have prematurely cut off this beautiful limb to spite the face I thought I needed to wear. But there is no time for regret. 

Alice Robb was born in 1992, the year I stopped dancing, and here perhaps is where our stories diverge. For all the intellectual power of her book her perspective may be, I hazard gently, immature, barely 20 years removed from that traumatic expulsion at age 12. At the end of Don’t Think Dear she returns to a beginning ballet class, feeling as though she’s playing dress-up. She cannot bring herself to speak to anyone else, though she notes – as I did – who’s clearly got training and who doesn’t. “I am not trying to be a dancer,” she writes. “This is some sort of therapy, or recreation.” 

Me, I don’t distinguish. The teacher waves us to the corner of the room and demonstrates: tombé-pas de bourree-chassé-saut de chat. 

“OK now,” he claps. “Let’s go, two or three dancers at a time.”

We nervously assemble ourselves into pairs, exchanging looks of mock terror, and we are off across the floor, and because I am dancing, I am a dancer. It’s actually that simple, after all these years.