What Taking Beginner’s Ballet in College Taught Me About Perfection in the Professional Ballet World

I have been doing ballet since I was four years old. From little tutus to pointe shoes to stage makeup, I have experienced all the ups and downs of being a dancer. Yet, I never truly felt like a ballerina. The girls who wore black leotards, their hair perfectly slicked back without any wisps around their faces, perfect arches and turnout, who attended class at company studios in New York were ballerinas. Me with my dirty tights from wearing them to class and church because they were so much more comfortable than the tights we bought at Belk, bulky shoulders and thighs, and hair wisps that wouldn’t stay down no matter how much hair spray and gel my mom smeared on my head was most emphatically NOT a ballerina. I saw myself as the cheap, dollar-store imitation of a ballerina that brought all her charisma and passion to the studio but none of the grace and finesse.

This wasn’t something I thought as a child. In my young mind, I looked just like the ballerinas on my TV screen with long, lithe limbs and perfect placement. Looking at ourselves in the mirror was strictly discouraged at my childhood dance studio to ward off getting ‘stuck’ in the mirror rather than emoting to an imaginary audience. Performance was the emphasis, one I could easily slide into. Pretend was my favorite game as a child and any official reason to participate in an exercise of imagination was taken up without question. And so dance became a refuge, a place to go in order to feel empowered and untouchable. The most perfect place in the world for me was the studio. The viewpoint switch to self-criticism and dissatisfaction happened when I quit all other activities, began pointe work, and entered the battlefield of confusion, self-doubt, and acute awkwardness that is teenagerhood.

I began pointe training when I was eleven years old. As a dancer, your teacher telling you to buy your first pair of pointe shoes and sew on the ribbons was akin to Christmas Day levels of excitement. All ballerinas wear pointe shoes; ask any person on the street what they think of when they hear the term ‘ballet’ and they will probably say something along the lines of skinny, white women with long legs and white tutus dancing on their toes. While it sounds silly, female ballet dancers crave the moment when they can dance on their toes and achieve the level of ethereal lightness that can only be accomplished in pointe shoes. No one can accomplish what you see at American Ballet Theater performances without hard work and commitment, however, and every student had to improve slowly but steadily over years. Every other student but me.

I am honestly not sure if I just have a ridiculously low pain tolerance level or if I was just not cut out for dancing on the tips of my toes, but pointe was akin to self-inflicted cruel and unusual punishment for me. I never glided like the other ballerinas — I clomped, and balancing never failed to make me look shorter rather than taller. Flexibility had always been a struggle for me, but now even getting my leg to ninety degrees seemed impossible. My knees could never be forced into perfect straightness and I always seemed a little too far back on the box (the flat portion at the toes of the pointe shoe where ballerinas balance) of my shoe to actually achieve the ever-desired straight line. As the time passed, I grew incredibly frustrated by my lack of progress and the image in the mirror that had never held any interest to me before began to hold more and more sway over my time in the studio. Strength was not the problem; I had always been strong from a combination of sheer will to keep up with my older brother and his friends and years of swimming and dancing. The proof of my athletic childhood stared me straight in the face every time I looked in the mirror and saw my wide shoulders and muscular legs. Every time I went clothes shopping, I bought jeans that were too big around the waist so I could pull them up over my thighs and shirts always seemed skin-tight across my arms and shoulders. I was by no means a body builder, but I was always more athletic looking than the dainty, feminine sprites I took class with. While I had never been unhappy with my body, since I focused more on what I could do rather than how I looked, the image in the mirror as I struggled to dance on pointe began to haunt me, the sore thumb that stood out among the effortlessly graceful ballerinas. Everyone, teachers and fellow dancers alike, encouraged me, realizing my passion and commitment to attaining that perfect picture in the mirror that would never come.

Last year, I performed The Prayer from Coppelia as my graduating performance. It was also the final arrangement my dance teacher and mentor prepared before his retirement. The solo was special to me, involving several one-on-one rehearsals, a beautiful piece of music, and a long, flowing dress that swirled every time I moved. It was also my final piece performed on pointe. The Prayer isn’t a difficult piece, but I still struggled to maintain grace and composure as I shuffled and wobbled through the steps. Everyone said it was lovely and I relished every second of the calming piece, but I have yet to watch the recording or even put on my pointe shoes since that performance. For me, The Prayer was like saying goodbye. Goodbye to my dreams of being a perfect ballerina and ethereally gliding across the stage. And, possibly, even goodbye to ballet as my serious passion.

Then, this spring, I took a beginner’s ballet class to satisfy a requirement for my dance minor. So far, I had mostly avoided classical dance by taking modern and jazz and choreographing a fairly contemporary piece. But I needed ballet, and so I took ballet. I was still the wide-shouldered, big-legged, wispy-haired girl from when I first started classes except I now wore a too-big VBS t-shirt my brother had left behind three summers ago and yoga pants so that I wouldn’t have to drag along tights and a leotard to all of my morning classes. My body felt rusty and out of use, as if I had never spent years of my life yearning for a technical perfection that I knew by heart but could never seem to make reality on my body. And yet….I didn’t care. I was surrounded by fellow dancers who had allowed themselves to focus beyond their ballerina hopes and dreams as well as people who had never set foot in a ballet studio before in their lives. We were all of us struggling together to attain that feeling of beauty and perfection that we’d seen ballerinas exude onstage. Suddenly, I wasn’t the only one of my peers whose body shape was not ideal for ballet. In this beginner’s ballet class on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, we were all ballerinas forcing our way into a mold that was not made for us. For an hour and fifteen minutes, everyone was Gillian Murphy in Swan Lake or Misty Copeland in Firebird.

Don’t get me wrong, ballet is dominated by white, skinny woman and it is only recently that it has begun opening to a select few who do not fit that stereotype (most famously Misty Copeland who is African American, 5'2, and curvaceous). As a white woman, I feel incredibly privileged to have even had a performing art in which a large number of woman who look somewhat like me are represented, especially since girls of color have had to wait until 2015 for a female principle ballerina that looked like them. Diversity has been slower to penetrate into the professional ballet world than other artistic forms. I am back in the studio now, albeit sans pointe shoes, and loving the fact that my personal passion for ballet has been rejuvenated by seeing people of all different shapes, sizes, and colors come together to dance. I have accepted that I will never achieve that perfect image in my mind, but I can achieve a strong and solid ballet technique and push myself to new limits each and every class. My concern is now why the professional/professionally training ballet world doesn’t embrace diversity in the same way a beginner ballet class at a college does?

Perhaps diversity on all counts (race, body shape, etc.) would start to breath life into a very problematic art form that still causes mental and physical health problems for young girls who do not completely dedicate their lives to the form at age four or, even worse, for young girls who dream of being a ballerina but fear that the color of their skin or the shape of their body will bar them from ever attaining their goals. While those of us who are all right with skipping out on the professional circuit can achieve happiness in mediocrity, we cannot forget the little ballerinas of tomorrow who don’t want to settle but fly to new heights regardless of their ability to fit into the mold of what has traditionally been considered the perfect ballerina. It is time for ballet to accommodate perfection beyond their narrow and cramped definition and become rejuvenated by the influx of passion and beauty that will flow in with the expansion.