March 21, 2023 • 54 mins
PART TEN - "If it is going to stick with us forever, it matters that we get it right."
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You started your book in the classroom. Why was that.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
The vast majority of people who have ballet in their
lives will spend the vast majority of their time in
the classroom. You are learning how to be a student,
You're learning how to communicate your ideas or not, and
you're absorbing all kinds of lessons about your place in
(00:31):
the world and how you are or are not valued
simply by who the teacher pays attention to, how the
classroom is structured.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
But I think about what it felt like to go
to ballet class every day as a kid. It feels routine.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the ballet classroom.
A big room with a high ceiling, old crown molding,
tall pillars, big mirrors on one side, a piano in
the corner where the Russian pianist played, the long wooden
(01:08):
bar that lined the wall. Our point shoes clip clopped
and echoed every day. I'd pin up my hair and
tape up my toes. I'd walk in, put down my
water bottle to save my favorite spot at the bar.
The point shoes smelt like satin, sweat and sweet glue.
I might chat with my friends while I stretched, but
(01:30):
mostly I was silent until class began. I liked the quiet,
the focus, the preparation, and of course once class started,
I didn't talk at all. It was a daily practice
that I didn't give much thought. That wasn't until I
started to read Chloe Angel's book Turning Point, How a
(01:53):
new generation of dancers is saving ballet from itself. Chloe
interviewed one hundred people to analyze ballet culture today. When
I read it, I got to this section about ballet's
hidden curriculum, the things children learn by accident, the unintended
lessons they pick up in the classroom. I underlined line
after line Chloe wrote, in this hidden curriculum, the ideal
(02:16):
ballet dancer is silent, observant, and obedient. The ideal dancer
should also be pleasing and pleased, her face never conveying
how much pain she's in. I wrote in the margins,
realizing how this has affected me. When I was reading
that part of your book about the hidden curriculum, It's
(02:39):
like this light bulb went off, This realization like donned
in my brain and I just thought, my gosh, like
how much of my personality and how much of my
life has been molded by spending every day in a
(03:02):
ballet class as a kid. It just like really got
me questioning all kinds of things about myself. Did you
have that experience?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I'm not very good at ballet, Like, I'm just not.
About five years ago, I was talking to my therapist
about why that bothered me so much that I wasn't
good both actually and fictionally at ballet, and I realized
(03:33):
that it was because it felt like failing at a
very particular kind of femininity that I had wanted to
succeed at since I was very, very small. And one
of the things that you learn in ballet is what
a good woman looks like, how you're supposed to look,
(03:54):
how you're supposed to move, how you're supposed to behave,
how you're supposed to tolerate pain, how you're supposed to conceal labor,
who you're supposed to obey, who you get to have
power over. You learn all that in the ballet studio.
(04:15):
But the reward for all that is accomplishing this very
particular kind of femininity. I spent so much of my
youth looking up to the women who had done it
and wanting to be like them, And I didn't do it,
(04:37):
didn't achieve it, and that disappointment is really profound, not
just because it feels like failing at ballet, because it
feels like failing at womanhood.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I think it's so hard to get over ballet because
the lessons start early in the ballet classroom and they're
folded into something otherworldly, something deeply beautiful. It's like Chloe
once said to.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Me, that shit stays with you forever.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
For my heart, podcasts and Rococoa punch. This is the
turning room of mirrors. I'm Erica Lance, Part ten Reverence.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I think ballet in a lot of ways benefits from
the perception that it is a world apart, that it's
separate from the real world, that it doesn't have to
play by the rules of the real world. But it isn't,
and it does. It's just a workplace. It's the real world.
It's not separate from the real world.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
In the classroom, teachers drilled us on the same steps
over and over. They yelled above the music while we danced,
shouted corrections things we had to change. They reminded us
to smile, something you need to train yourself to be
able to do when you perform I remember one time
a girl in my class just couldn't get the steps.
The teacher had her do them solo across the floor
(06:21):
while we all watched in the corner. She started to cry,
but the teacher kept having her comeback and start again.
We were trained to make impossible things look easy, and
I became attached to the facade of perfection.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I think about the suffering that we accept and the
innovation that we don't pursue because we're so attached to
ideas about tradition and suffering. I remember very distinctly sitting
(06:59):
in the audience of a New York City ballet performance
and thinking, this is all just a really great metaphor
for womanhood. You're working incredibly hard to make this thing
look beautiful, and you're expected to conceal all of the
work that goes into that. And in fact, if you
(07:21):
show the work, if people know how hard you're working
to make this perfect, flawless, ethereal, highly feminine thing, you've failed.
Contrast that with a lot of the activities that my
(07:43):
men friends and peers were either playing or watching. You're
allowed to show the work. You know, if you get
sacked in football, you're allowed to grimace. In fact, in
European football you were encouraged to let people know how
much it hurd You actually get rewarded for flopping on
(08:04):
the ground and making a scene and showing the work.
But in this high per feminine activity, you have to
conceal all the pain. You have to conceal all the work.
And in fact, I think that the gap between what
you see on stage as an audience member and what
you know the dancer is most likely experiencing that duality
(08:24):
and that contradiction is part of the appeal of ballet.
It's part of the mystique of ballet, which is profoundly
messed up.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, that's such a good point too, Like people do
know that point shows are incredibly painful, and people would
ask me that when they learned I was dancing on
point and want to hear about my feet and yeah,
what do your feet look like? Are they all messed up?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And something that I think people should really sit with
and think, should we really be applauding people for being
able to conceal their pain as well as they do?
Is that really a skill that we want young people,
and particularly young women and girls to be cultivating and perfecting.
And the other place where it really felt like a
metaphor for womanhood was that, you know, you think of
(09:14):
a balid answer, you think of a woman. But in
most of the professional ballet world, at least men are
in charge. Meanwhile, girls out number of boys in ballet
classes twenty to one. And you know, the woman is
the icon, and she's the person you look at on stage,
(09:37):
but behind the scenes controlling the levels of power, it's omen.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Boys in ballet do not have it easy. They might
deal with stigma, terrible bullying or homophobia, a pressure to
be more quote unquote masculine. But in the classroom, boys
hold a special place.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
You know, there are all these to try and get
more boys into ballet. There's a chronic shortage of boys
in ballet. For most of them, they don't want to
be there. They have to be cajoled into going and
bribed into staying, either because they're given scholarships or they're
held to a lower standard of behavior and talent than girls.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Are.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Lots of men that I interviewed said that their teachers
had put off the transition from shorts to tights for
as long as they possibly can because they didn't want
to scare the boys out of ballet. Meanwhile, the girls
have been wearing heavily circumscribed attire to ballet since they
were three, and there are no exceptions. If you don't
(10:43):
feel comfortable in the let art and the tips doesn't matter.
If you don't want to do it, there are ten
other girls who do. And so ballet culture in general
bends over backwards to get boys into ballet, to keep
boys into ballet. One artistic director told me that boys
in ballet are treated like golden princes or like little princes.
(11:08):
They're treated like they're special and better than girls, and
the girls see that and the boys internalize it, and
so I don't think we should be surprised that when
those boys grow up and become professional dancers and enter
a company that is run by a man with unquestioned power,
that they start looking around and thinking, my behavior doesn't
(11:28):
have any negative consequences. These women are disposable. I am
special and irreplaceable. And a lot of girls and young
women in ballet are trained to be quiet and obedient
(11:49):
and compliant, and to tolerate pain and discomfort and things
that cross boundaries.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Chloe Angel says she realized while she worked on her
book that sometimes she'd go back to this old way
of thinking of seeing herself and the world.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I started calling it ballet brain because it would happen
a lot. And I really noticed when I started observing
ballet classes for field work and for reporting, was that
I could not take my eyes off the teacher. I
(12:47):
was at a local dance studio in my town of Carlville, Iowa,
and instead of looking out at these young dances in
a pre point class, I just kept watching the teacher
when I was supposed to be reporting on these girls
and their transition from flat to point. And I just
(13:08):
remember noticing that about myself and thinking, oh boy, it's
really in me, because that's the other point of reference
as you're constantly checking the teacher, either because they are
demonstrating an exercise or because you're checking you know, are
they watching me? Do they like what they see? Do
they not like what they see? Am I worthless?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Today?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's really in me in ways that I am aware
of and also ways that I'm not aware of yet.
And I was very fortunate to be living with someone
and having my book edited by someone who didn't grow
up in ballet and who didn't come to it with
a lot of the assumptions and sort of taken for
granted ideas that I did, And so having to explain
(13:53):
some of these concepts, especially the more egregious ones, to
non ballet people, was really easy to see, like, oh,
I got a bad case of ballet brain on that one.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Do you remember some other instances like that moment in
the studio when you were like, wait a minute, I'm
doing X or I'm assuming why.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
An artistic director of an American ballet company told me
about the handful of times when he's decided to not
renew a contract of a dancer who he didn't think
was in good enough shape, was too fad, And he
explained it to me that, you know, they do everything
(14:41):
they can to make sure their dancers are healthy, and
they really trying to support them in getting into shape,
which again is a euphemism for skinny, but if they're not,
in his words, if the dancer is not willing to
put in the work, then he has to think about,
you know, the long term spinal health of the men
a lifting them. And he said something to me like,
(15:03):
my back remembers every dancer I ever lifted, and I
finished the interview and I was like, yeah, I mean, look,
that's not ideal, but I get it. It makes sense
to me. And I walked down into my kitchen and
I recounted a lot of the interaction to my then fiance,
who did not rob in ballet, knew basically nothing about
ballet until he started dating me, and he was like, yeah,
(15:27):
that sounds pretty messed up. My instinct was to defend
it and to saying no, this is why it has
to be this way.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
That was my reaction too. Of course, you need to
worry about men's backs. But then I started to realize
the health of both the man and the woman is
at stake in this scenario, the man's back and the
woman's injuries and long term health problems that come from
eating disorders. Telling the woman to lose weight is prioritizing
the man's health. Then you realize, what if we did
(15:58):
value the health of the women as much as we
value the health of the men.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
The short term mental health, the long term employment prospects,
the long term physical health. Shit, what if we said, okay,
so don't lift her, we'll choreograph something different, and you
won't lift her and she'll get to be the size
and wait that she is and still have a job.
I mean, when you actually think about it, guys, it's
not rocket science. It's just a question of deciding, like
(16:27):
what do we value and what are we willing to
change in order to actually act on those values.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I was surprised reading your book about some of the
physical effects of dancing on young bodies. I mean, I
really it was like, Oh, what.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
What I learned researching the book that I never learned
is that once you stretch a ligament, it never contracts
back like a muscle. A muscle you can stretch and it,
you know, can return to its old shape. Ligaments can't
do that. And you know so many of the places
that we stretch as dances with stretching ligaments, and you
(17:14):
know you stretch that out at seven eight, it's never
going back.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And why does that matter?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
It matters because you won't be a dancer forever, and
unless you maintain the strength to match that flexibility, you're
going to have real instability and real problems.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Starting so young. As part of the problem, the physical
therapists Chloe interviewed said young kids should be stretching less.
Young dancers working on their turnout can change the way
their bones grow because of twisting in their growth plates.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
There should be much less of an emphasis on developing
an extreme flexibility. There's no reason for an eight year
old to be doing oversplits Beyond injury. Young dancers can
have malnutrition because of their eating habits, even if they
don't have a diagnosable eating disorder. Malnutrition might affect their
brain development. It can lead to hormonal changes and lower
(18:05):
bone density in kids who are still developing. That can
make them more vulnerable to broken bones and ask your
porosis later in life. I also think that kids have
to be both told and shown that their pain and
their discomfort will be taken seriously. What they've learned is
(18:26):
that they will be rewarded for ignoring their own instincts
and their own experience of their own body.
Speaker 6 (18:36):
Like I'm not.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Disregarding the traditions. I'm not saying we should junk them.
I'm saying that we can do some things differently. All
we have to do is be a little bit irreverent
and being like, okay, so we change it. So what
one of the physical therapists I talked to said, we
should not be putting girls on point until they're fifteen,
to which a lot of people in the valley were like, oh,
(18:58):
that would fundamentally change and when people could stop their
careers and okay, and.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
So like change it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
See what happens. I mean, I don't think it can
be worse the what we have now, which is like
permanent skeletal and ligament damage in twelve and thirteen and
fourteen year olds.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Chloe says maybe dancers could have longer careers if they
had fewer injuries as kids.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And I would say it requires a certain level of irreverence,
and ballet breeds reverence, reverence for tradition, reverence for authority.
It just breeds reverence. Let's be a little lit irreverent
and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Literally, at the end of every class you have reverence.
You know, it's like literally reverence is built into the
class structure.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's such a good point. I'm annoyed that I didn't
notice that it's like right there bowing and the curting.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
It's right there.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
At the end of every class. It's tradition for students
to do a final slow dance. I always loved this
part of class. How it ends beautiful and slow, just
simple expression. The center of the dance is a bow
to the mirror where the audience would be. Then everyone
curtsies to the teacher. It's called reverence.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And it's also a reinforcement of authority and of the hierarchy,
bowing and curtsying to the teacher. And it's just a
to me, it feels like a reminder that this art
form has some very strange rules.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Ballet has some strange rules, but it seems hard for
teachers to break free from them. Maybe it's because we
look to our predecessors, to the figures we admire, we
mimic what they did, and in the case of Americans
in ballet, we often look to balancing. What are some
(21:13):
of the main effects of balancing that you see in
the world of ballet?
Speaker 7 (21:19):
What comes to mind?
Speaker 2 (21:21):
The first thing I'll say is that he left us
some truly fantastic choreography, really and truly against my best,
strongest desires. Some of my favorite ballets Stow Balancing, ballets,
Jules is spectacular, Sarahnad is beautiful, Which is why when
(21:41):
people asked me after the book came out, are you
trying to cancel balancing? And I was like, even if
I wanted to How would I do that? How does
one even?
Speaker 8 (21:51):
How do you?
Speaker 7 (21:52):
You can't?
Speaker 8 (21:59):
He's you know, in the aa, in the water, in
the soil, he's like, he's The ecosystem of ballet is
sort of suffused with this and shaped by this, And.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know where to begin.
No God, but balancing.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
A lot of people call balancing a genius. To me,
that word is charged. It's hard for me to hear
it without bristling. Teresa Ruth Howard says, we need to
think about who we give that label to.
Speaker 9 (22:37):
It's always been interesting to me how we assign the
moniker of genius to Balanchine, which I think he is,
But I find it interesting that the same title is
not applied to Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Arthur Mitchell the founder of Dance Theater of Harlem. After
Mitchell danced in Balancing Company, he went back to his
community in Harlem to teach ballet. Then he started a
ballet company.
Speaker 9 (23:07):
Arthur Mitchell may not be a choreographic genius, but I
think that where his genius lay is in the idea
that he created an organization that really challenged the field
of ballet itself, who it belonged to. He created a
new idea of what American ballet was and what it
(23:27):
looked like.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Theresa has noticed that Arthur Mitchell often gets criticized for
a leadership style. She thinks he learned from Ballenging.
Speaker 9 (23:35):
He was cut from the fabric of balancing that was
his model. He was very demanding, he demanded respect. But
he's a black man, he oftentimes gets dare I say,
villified for those same characteristics. So Arthur Mitchell is creating
the same culture as a balanching in his own context,
(23:58):
but it's perceived much differently than balancing. We don't call
them a genius.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
There are so many people who do great things who
aren't called geniuses, and people who never get to develop
their genius because of norms, expectations, barriers, who's given opportunities
and resources. I also hardly ever hear the term applied
to women. I'd be happy to throw out the label
genius altogether, precisely because of who it leaves out. People
(24:28):
use the word genius like it's a fact, when really,
when you're talking about art, it's an opinion. In a way,
it's so weird genius is discussed is this inherent trait
you are a genius or you're not. We like to
bestow it upon people. Maybe it's a comfort. It feels
good to think somebody knows better, someone can lead me.
(24:50):
Once you've been dubbed a genius, I think there are
fewer checks on the choices you make. Even your art
is viewed with less scrutiny. You can damage others in
the name of your art without as much critique. It's
seen as worth it. Those sacrifices are worth it for
the output. When you hear someone as a genius, you
feel this magic. You fall in line.
Speaker 6 (25:14):
I think if you think about, you know, what kind
of role model do you want balancing to be for
people who are going to be the future of ballet.
Do you want him to be this godlike figure who
had everything figured out and had all the answers, and
you had to obey and believe him and do what
(25:35):
he said, and if you did that, everything would be
all right.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Jim Steichens the author who studied balancing's early years in
the US, and like Chloe, he sees how balancing is
viewed in an almost religious way.
Speaker 6 (25:48):
I don't think we want those kind of leaders anymore,
you know, I think those kind of leaders are what
we are discovering create these toxic environments in ballet. And
so if we can think of Balanchin in a more
down to earth humane way and not had this myth
(26:12):
of the lone male white genius, right, if we can
think about art as this collaborative enterprise that takes all
these people, I think that's where it really makes a difference.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
This reminded me of something I noticed among dancers trained
in Balanchine's lineage. Even the dancers who never worked directly
with balancing know all these beautiful little stories about him,
anecdotes that once helped them learn the choreography or that
emphasizes genius, but other than that, they felt like they
knew hardly anything about him.
Speaker 10 (26:46):
When you're in the Balanchine system, he's like the unspoken
for lack of far better term, god. It was ingrained
in our brains to respect and idolize him.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Catherine Morgan says that I'm like with a lot of choreographers,
Balanching is never called George. Everyone calls him by his
last name, Balanchine or mister Balanchine or mister b.
Speaker 10 (27:11):
He was amazing he's a genius, blah blah blah, and
you don't think about it because it's not talked about
it being like the extreme body expectations, or the darker
sides of him, any of that. It's just it's not
talked about, so I don't actually know.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
So a lot never gets excavated. Dancers don't get to
see the source of their own culture, the culture they
swim in every day. In conversations with dancers, I've also
sometimes noticed this pressure never to speak ill of balancing.
Some of that pressure comes from love gratitude. One former
dancer said, he gave me my life. It feels like
(27:52):
airing dirty laundry when you're talking about someone you see
as your father, your mother, your everything. I think some
pressure also stems from fear. There's a strong perception that
if you speak ill of balancing, even now, it will
harm your career. And then there's this fear that admitting
to flaws in the past will tarnish an art form
(28:14):
that already feels fragile. They want the art form to survive,
and I do too, But in my mind, not confronting
the darker sides is what could make ballet cave in
on itself.
Speaker 9 (28:27):
We're mythologizing trauma for the art.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Theresa Ruth Howard sometimes gets frustrated by how dancers remember balancing.
It's like a memory gets mingled with these romanticized clouds
of perfume.
Speaker 9 (28:45):
They're not really digging underneath what that did to them,
what that culture did to them. When you hear the
dancers speak what they sacrifice, the human sacrifice that they actually,
like French, press down to not feel or think about
(29:07):
what we make okay in our minds so that we
can dance, so we can just dance, so we can
be seen as a dancer. That is generational trauma, and
it is something that is folded into the legacy and
lift it up in a way.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
When you say generational trauma, do you feel like that's
affecting ballet students today like children today?
Speaker 9 (29:32):
Absolutely. I think that the way that it shows up,
the way that it presents is in the way that
we talk about and lionize Balanchin because he held women
in a very particular space. They are the flowers and
the men are the gardeners that pick the flowers. This
is problematic, and so I'm not saying that they're using
(29:56):
that language but it is a behave sort of way
of being. There can be values around the body, there
can be values around behavior. What is the appropriate way
to behave as a dancer, And so you don't have
to speak it. We behave these things, We behave our values.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Imagine that ballet is an old English manor house. It's
full of rooms, and in every room people are dancing.
That's how choreographer and scholar Adashola Acinley talks about ballet,
and I can't stop thinking about it. They say, one
(30:50):
room in the manor house is the Grand Hall. Everyone
looks at the Grand Hall. It's full of an audience.
It's where the attention is, the buzz and the lights.
The Grand Hall is where people like Balanchine live, or
people who've been permitted to enter Balancine's world. But ballet
is vast. There are many rooms in the manor house.
(31:12):
There are many rooms of ballet. So many people are
dancing it in their own companies, their own choreography, their
own way. We've been looking at just this one room,
its privilege and its restrictions, because this room is still
allowed to dictate how dancers should be. If you are
(31:38):
in that grand hall, that one room can feel like
your whole world. The thing is that someday you're going
to have to leave it. There's this saying that a
dancer dies twice. As a ballerina, from day one, you're
always counting down to your first death, the day you
(31:59):
have to retire from the stage, leave the grand hall behind.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Oh.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
I can't even begin to touch how rich that culture
is and was.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Seventies. A Land says her ballet self was hard to shed.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
And there is an addiction to being on stage, to
having certain rhythms of what it takes to be on
stage and to be an elite athlete. There was a
ritual from six o'clock to eight o'clock of getting ready,
of getting primed of self talk and self preparation to
be a performer. I remember when I stopped, it did
(32:41):
take me about two years to come down from that pitch,
that energetic pitch of preparation physiologically literally physiological chemical.
Speaker 11 (32:55):
When you finally do move on, there's a recovery period,
and I think the recovery period into the quote unquote
real world takes about ten years on average to function
(33:17):
in the normal world.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Wilhelmina, Frankfurt says, part of the adjustment is realizing how
abnormal your life has been.
Speaker 11 (33:26):
For decades, people have been making decisions for you about you,
and your life has been determined by a daily schedule.
It's almost military in a way. You know, the bugle blows,
that's class.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
There's this weird thing about the elite professional ballet world.
It's like time and age move differently than they do
for other people. On one hand, you have to grow
up fast. You're treated like an adult when you're just
a kid, and then you might become a professional dancer
at sixteen or seventeen. On the other hand, even years
(34:09):
after you enter the company, you aren't treated like an adult.
So many of your life decisions are in the hands
of the company. Members of the Quart of Ballet are
often called kids. Coaches yell out to dancers in rehearsal.
Good girl, good girl.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
Your responses are somewhat thwarted and childlike, and you got
to catch up.
Speaker 11 (34:37):
How do you get a job? And who are you?
Speaker 7 (34:57):
I like, catch myself doing a thing that I to
do in the ballet that I have to like check
and recalibrate that I'm not actually in the theater, And
that's not how people do things here on the outside.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You may remember Sophie Flack danced with New York City Ballet,
and then, in the economic downturn in two thousand and nine,
she was let go. To Sophie, it felt like being discarded,
like her body just filled a hole that could be
filled by someone else. She didn't want to keep dancing
after that, but the loss overwhelmed her. Without Ballet to
(35:46):
determine her every step in the world, she hardly knew
where to begin. Eventually, she decided the first step would
be education, to go to college. She picked Columbia.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
When I went to Columbia, it felt like I just
exited a bunker.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
At first, she felt superior. After all, most people in
her classes were teenagers. She was in her mid twenties,
and she'd been working this intense job at one of
the most elite art institutions in the world.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
I kind of walked on to campus feeling like hot shit.
I came from City Ballet, like you just moved out
of your parents' house, you know, Like I had a life,
Like I'd had certain experiences. I felt worldly, I'd traveled.
So I went in being kind of snooty and like
(36:34):
day one. I was very humbled. I was like, Oh,
you're actually like crazy smart and I know nothing. I
was like, oh, okay, there is a whole world outside
of the theater. I didn't know. My mind was freaking blown.
How little I knew, how much there was to learn.
(36:57):
And I was an expert at everything that happened in
the and I knew it really well, and I understood
the ballet world, but I didn't understand what happened outside
of the ballet world. I don't know how to talk
to people really, or people of authority even had to
talk to them, because we didn't talk to our superiors
(37:18):
at all. I mean, it's literally like growing up in
a terrarium, like a glass enclosing that is self sustaining
and you don't need anything else but like the stuff
within the terrarium.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Sophie started to realize this terrarium had grown around her
for years, starting way back when she was ten eleven, twelve,
when she felt herself pulling away from the outside world
to focus on ballet.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
I couldn't participate in a lot of social things after school, things,
normal childhood things, and I would sort of reframe them
in my head, like, oh, that's stupid, Like I would
put them down because I couldn't partake. I'd tell myself,
what I'm going to do is more important. And that
was like a coping technique that I developed in my
(38:11):
own head. Like even these friendships, these bonds don't matter
because who cares about children. No one's even going to
remember this, And I would just like really sort of
tear down all the things that I was missing out on.
But looking back and now that I have my own children,
the things that I missed out on were extremely formative.
(38:32):
And I'm kind of weird and screwed up because I
miss them. What makes you say that? I mean, I
imagine a child separated from her peer group to join
a cult, and it's taught a different culture, a different
(38:57):
way of looking at things, things like if it's not uncomfortable,
you're not doing it right. Being uncomfortable is normal. You
bury your feelings and you're never good enough. I mean,
these things are different than the things that you're normally taught.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
I hope.
Speaker 7 (39:23):
I have two kids, and a person's childhood is extremely important,
important a whole rest of your life, your personality, how
you see the world. I spend so much time trying
to learn everything I was wrong. Those dumb things really matter,
(39:49):
They're really important. Even if the activity seems dumb, you're
missing out on experiences and memory. That she who people
are and I feel like him doing a lot of
ketchup now and after I left the ballet world at
(40:12):
twenty five, which for me felt very young at the time,
but now that I'm on the outside, that was a
long time. That was twenty years in the ballet world
that shaped me a lot.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Sophie Flack says she had to unlearn ballet. She'd been
told that the skills she gained in the ballet classroom
would serve her for the rest of her life, but
she found they did the opposite. Sophie says she had
to learn that her well being mattered.
Speaker 7 (40:42):
The biggest lesson in post ballet was actually recovering from
postpartum depression, because I approached motherhood like I approached ballet,
with a lot of self sacrifice and for the betterment
of the cause of the art form, you know, abandoning
(41:06):
the self and it completely. As a new mom, I mean,
I might have had horrible postpartum anyway, but with that
approach and my hyper perfectionism. I really lost my mind.
I started to become psychotic. This was like real next
level and I was having whatever suicidal ideation and there's
(41:34):
more that I don't really want to share right now,
but it was very scary. And after I had a breakdown,
I started taking my mental health more seriously. I was like, Okay,
I need to relearn how to think. If I'm hungry,
(41:56):
I eat. If I'm tired, I rest. I mean, like
literally listening to my body and articulating my needs. I'm
still learning how to do that better, because there is
life after dance.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
Oh no, no, okay, stupid free Oh ouch.
Speaker 6 (42:27):
Sounded like.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
Well.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Sophie sits on the floor of her living room. Her
daughter Eleanor climbs onto her back. Eleanor nestles her head
into her mother's neck with a mischievous smile.
Speaker 7 (42:39):
Mom, Yes, can me dance?
Speaker 5 (42:41):
Thicken?
Speaker 7 (42:42):
We well, we give to I think mostly I'm just
gonna talk and not dance. But if you wanted to dance,
you could.
Speaker 5 (42:51):
You could do that.
Speaker 6 (42:54):
Wow.
Speaker 7 (42:55):
I'm not really a dancing mood right now.
Speaker 5 (42:57):
I'm more in a talking mood.
Speaker 10 (42:58):
Wet it I know?
Speaker 4 (43:02):
With me?
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Eleanor started a creative ballet class this year a room
of three and four year olds. When you're thinking back
to your childhood being in something that you now sometimes
compare to entering a cult at a young age, how
do you feel about your daughter potentially starting to dance yourself.
Speaker 7 (43:25):
I am very conflicted. I mean, I'm conflicted about all
the things. Like you know, I'm trying to recount as
truthfully as I can about all these things, but pretty
much everything I say has like another side to it. Really,
it's really hard to record a podcast about it because
I don't have enough time.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
To like really say it fully.
Speaker 7 (43:45):
Actually, yeah, I always have this like flip side of
like love for this art form, and it was a
really great way for me to live. It gave me
something to live for.
Speaker 5 (44:08):
I don't really talk very much about ballet. I don't
have photos around me. It's the past life. It's a
past life, and it's woven into the cells. But I
don't wear it. It's not a badge.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
But Stephanie's land still feels ballet in her. There are
times that comes out in full force, Like just a
couple of years after she'd retired from the stage, she
was guest teaching at a local school of the arts.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
And I passed a room where somebody was rehearsing some
Chopin and a lot of the robins ballets had Chopin
on stage.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
And something happened to Stephanie, something that would happen many
times over the coming decades. The music took her back,
like a flashback, a sudden whiff of her past life
that reminded her how real it had been.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
It's so disceral, and I was so jarred because I
didn't know about this. It was literally like being flooded
and shifted back in time. It was quite jarring. Actually,
then it was for me sad because I was still
very close to having finished, and there were still the
(45:16):
parts of me that were like kind of like the
loose tooth before it falls out. I hear music and
it's instantly a ballet. I see the steps, I see
people doing it. I can actually feel the heat of
the stage lights and the warmth of the wings. This morning,
(45:37):
I was driving and the music for Diamonds from Jewels
came on and I started welling up driving in the
car listening to that. Seeing Susanne Farrell and Peter Martin's
in front of my the screen of my mind and
thanking them, be so grateful for having witnessed that and
(46:02):
having that be part of a life. Every time I
hear a piece of music, something is evoked and provoked,
and the relationship.
Speaker 7 (46:14):
To it is so deep, and.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
What gratitude for that.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
We've been talking a lot about these dark sides of ballet?
Speaker 7 (46:45):
Is it worth it?
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Why ballet?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
The feeling that you get as an audience member, which
is like complete awe at what humans can do when
they work together in its best form, in its purest form.
You feel at home in your body when you dance,
and it's it's transcendent, like when everything goes right, when
(47:11):
everything lines up and you're like spinning perfectly in a
pirouet and you know you're going to land it cleanly,
and then you do. There's nothing like it, right, nothing
like it. You feel so at home in your body
and like that's not nothing, it's really precious, it's really valuable.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
My most recurring dream is a pirouet on point on point,
and I spin and I spin, I spin and I
spin and I spin and I spin and I don't
stop spinning for a long time. It's something I could
never do. In the real world or maybe anyone could do,
but just rotating, rotating, and then at the end of
(47:58):
the pirouet, I just stay balanced on point. I don't
come down.
Speaker 9 (48:03):
I just hover.
Speaker 10 (48:05):
Ugh.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
And it is that feeling in your body that you
don't get anywhere else. I don't know how to describe it.
If it's like flying, but it's the most beautiful feeling.
I still remember what that feels like. And so those
dreams are so vivid. Those are the types of dreams
that I one hundred percent think they're real. While I'm
in the dream, I feel that dream in my body
(48:29):
more than any other dream that I have. Yeah, and
then I wake up and I realize it's not it's
not reality, but it's so glorious that it is stuck
with me all these years and it keeps coming back
to me even though I haven't done it in so long.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
And that is why ballet matters, Because you haven't done
it in over a decade, but it's still in you.
And so it matters that we get this right. If
it is going to stick with us forever, it matters
that we get it right.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
It matters that we get this right. This is something
all ballet teachers know you need a strong foundation, you
need good technique. It's another lesson the classroom teaches us,
and it's one I think we shouldn't discard when it
(49:38):
comes to ballet. With bad technique, you can't keep up
with complicated steps. You're in trouble a couple of flaws
or placement issues, and you're dancing isn't safe. Even if
it looks beautiful years later, it'll lead to injury. The
thing is, it's really hard to retrain. It's hard to
(49:58):
get rid of bad habits dance. That's why when you
learn ballet, you start with the basics and you repeat
those basics every day for the rest of your dancing life.
First a plia, a knee bend, then the port de bras,
(50:19):
move your arms, and then tondu you slide your leg
out so it's stretched and pointed. Once you tondu, you
realize it's the base of most steps. Almost all ballet
steps are modified tondus. Tondus in different forms balancing understood this,
(50:43):
and he loved his tondus. He had his dancers drill them,
not just eight tondus, not sixteen, not thirty two, not
sixty four they did hundreds at all speeds, front side back.
He'd prod them, saying, what are you saving it for
a deer? Then he'd say faster. You drill until it's automatic,
(51:15):
until it's etched neurologically in your brain. When culture is drilled,
culture becomes automatic too. We need to look at the
tandue of ballet culture, the foundation. If we don't address
the problems there, we'll have injuries later on. And that's
(51:37):
what's happened. There are people now being injured, being harmed
by dancing ballet, and that's why we have to confront
the past. It all builds on itself. Balancini is considered
a genius because he changed ballet. He pushed the boundaries
of what was acceptable on stage to make ballet beautiful.
(52:02):
We need change too, We need to take a risk.
That's how we make it better, That's how we keep
it alive. And we can't wait to make this change.
What are you saving for?
Speaker 7 (52:14):
Dear?
Speaker 1 (52:34):
The Turning is a production of Roccoa, Punch and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me.
Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed
by James Trout Jessica Carisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
(52:58):
So many thanks to all of the people who helped
and supported us with this project, including Gretchen Gavitt, Jacob
Nicola and Theo Silber, Margaret Lambert, Kayla Reid Stella, Grizant,
Lisa Zegarmi, John Frishkoff, Zack Smith, Jacob Smith, Courtney Smith, Weezmore,
Erica Berger, Paul English, Betsy McMillan, Holly Palandro, Matt Silverman,
(53:21):
and Andrew Lesser. Special thanks to beth n Mcaluso, Kate Osborne,
Christine Ragassa, Travis Dunlap, Elizabeth Wachtel, Brianna Hill, Simon Pullman,
Nancy Wolfe, Alison Canter, and the wonderful teams at Racco
Punch and iHeart Podcasts for their support. Our executive producers
(53:51):
are John Paratti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, and
Katrina Norvell and Niki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos
and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram
at Rococo Punch and you can reach out via email.
The Turning at Rococo punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance.
(54:12):
Thanks for listening.
You started your book in the classroom. Why was that.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
The vast majority of people who have ballet in their
lives will spend the vast majority of their time in
the classroom. You are learning how to be a student,
You're learning how to communicate your ideas or not, and
you're absorbing all kinds of lessons about your place in
(00:31):
the world and how you are or are not valued
simply by who the teacher pays attention to, how the
classroom is structured.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
But I think about what it felt like to go
to ballet class every day as a kid. It feels routine.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the ballet classroom.
A big room with a high ceiling, old crown molding,
tall pillars, big mirrors on one side, a piano in
the corner where the Russian pianist played, the long wooden
(01:08):
bar that lined the wall. Our point shoes clip clopped
and echoed every day. I'd pin up my hair and
tape up my toes. I'd walk in, put down my
water bottle to save my favorite spot at the bar.
The point shoes smelt like satin, sweat and sweet glue.
I might chat with my friends while I stretched, but
(01:30):
mostly I was silent until class began. I liked the quiet,
the focus, the preparation, and of course once class started,
I didn't talk at all. It was a daily practice
that I didn't give much thought. That wasn't until I
started to read Chloe Angel's book Turning Point, How a
(01:53):
new generation of dancers is saving ballet from itself. Chloe
interviewed one hundred people to analyze ballet culture today. When
I read it, I got to this section about ballet's
hidden curriculum, the things children learn by accident, the unintended
lessons they pick up in the classroom. I underlined line
after line Chloe wrote, in this hidden curriculum, the ideal
(02:16):
ballet dancer is silent, observant, and obedient. The ideal dancer
should also be pleasing and pleased, her face never conveying
how much pain she's in. I wrote in the margins,
realizing how this has affected me. When I was reading
that part of your book about the hidden curriculum, It's
(02:39):
like this light bulb went off, This realization like donned
in my brain and I just thought, my gosh, like
how much of my personality and how much of my
life has been molded by spending every day in a
(03:02):
ballet class as a kid. It just like really got
me questioning all kinds of things about myself. Did you
have that experience?
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I'm not very good at ballet, Like, I'm just not.
About five years ago, I was talking to my therapist
about why that bothered me so much that I wasn't
good both actually and fictionally at ballet, and I realized
(03:33):
that it was because it felt like failing at a
very particular kind of femininity that I had wanted to
succeed at since I was very, very small. And one
of the things that you learn in ballet is what
a good woman looks like, how you're supposed to look,
(03:54):
how you're supposed to move, how you're supposed to behave,
how you're supposed to tolerate pain, how you're supposed to conceal labor,
who you're supposed to obey, who you get to have
power over. You learn all that in the ballet studio.
(04:15):
But the reward for all that is accomplishing this very
particular kind of femininity. I spent so much of my
youth looking up to the women who had done it
and wanting to be like them, And I didn't do it,
(04:37):
didn't achieve it, and that disappointment is really profound, not
just because it feels like failing at ballet, because it
feels like failing at womanhood.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I think it's so hard to get over ballet because
the lessons start early in the ballet classroom and they're
folded into something otherworldly, something deeply beautiful. It's like Chloe
once said to.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Me, that shit stays with you forever.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
For my heart, podcasts and Rococoa punch. This is the
turning room of mirrors. I'm Erica Lance, Part ten Reverence.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I think ballet in a lot of ways benefits from
the perception that it is a world apart, that it's
separate from the real world, that it doesn't have to
play by the rules of the real world. But it isn't,
and it does. It's just a workplace. It's the real world.
It's not separate from the real world.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
In the classroom, teachers drilled us on the same steps
over and over. They yelled above the music while we danced,
shouted corrections things we had to change. They reminded us
to smile, something you need to train yourself to be
able to do when you perform I remember one time
a girl in my class just couldn't get the steps.
The teacher had her do them solo across the floor
(06:21):
while we all watched in the corner. She started to cry,
but the teacher kept having her comeback and start again.
We were trained to make impossible things look easy, and
I became attached to the facade of perfection.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I think about the suffering that we accept and the
innovation that we don't pursue because we're so attached to
ideas about tradition and suffering. I remember very distinctly sitting
(06:59):
in the audience of a New York City ballet performance
and thinking, this is all just a really great metaphor
for womanhood. You're working incredibly hard to make this thing
look beautiful, and you're expected to conceal all of the
work that goes into that. And in fact, if you
(07:21):
show the work, if people know how hard you're working
to make this perfect, flawless, ethereal, highly feminine thing, you've failed.
Contrast that with a lot of the activities that my
(07:43):
men friends and peers were either playing or watching. You're
allowed to show the work. You know, if you get
sacked in football, you're allowed to grimace. In fact, in
European football you were encouraged to let people know how
much it hurd You actually get rewarded for flopping on
(08:04):
the ground and making a scene and showing the work.
But in this high per feminine activity, you have to
conceal all the pain. You have to conceal all the work.
And in fact, I think that the gap between what
you see on stage as an audience member and what
you know the dancer is most likely experiencing that duality
(08:24):
and that contradiction is part of the appeal of ballet.
It's part of the mystique of ballet, which is profoundly
messed up.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, that's such a good point too, Like people do
know that point shows are incredibly painful, and people would
ask me that when they learned I was dancing on
point and want to hear about my feet and yeah,
what do your feet look like? Are they all messed up?
Speaker 2 (08:50):
And something that I think people should really sit with
and think, should we really be applauding people for being
able to conceal their pain as well as they do?
Is that really a skill that we want young people,
and particularly young women and girls to be cultivating and perfecting.
And the other place where it really felt like a
metaphor for womanhood was that, you know, you think of
(09:14):
a balid answer, you think of a woman. But in
most of the professional ballet world, at least men are
in charge. Meanwhile, girls out number of boys in ballet
classes twenty to one. And you know, the woman is
the icon, and she's the person you look at on stage,
(09:37):
but behind the scenes controlling the levels of power, it's omen.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Boys in ballet do not have it easy. They might
deal with stigma, terrible bullying or homophobia, a pressure to
be more quote unquote masculine. But in the classroom, boys
hold a special place.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
You know, there are all these to try and get
more boys into ballet. There's a chronic shortage of boys
in ballet. For most of them, they don't want to
be there. They have to be cajoled into going and
bribed into staying, either because they're given scholarships or they're
held to a lower standard of behavior and talent than girls.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
Are.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Lots of men that I interviewed said that their teachers
had put off the transition from shorts to tights for
as long as they possibly can because they didn't want
to scare the boys out of ballet. Meanwhile, the girls
have been wearing heavily circumscribed attire to ballet since they
were three, and there are no exceptions. If you don't
(10:43):
feel comfortable in the let art and the tips doesn't matter.
If you don't want to do it, there are ten
other girls who do. And so ballet culture in general
bends over backwards to get boys into ballet, to keep
boys into ballet. One artistic director told me that boys
in ballet are treated like golden princes or like little princes.
(11:08):
They're treated like they're special and better than girls, and
the girls see that and the boys internalize it, and
so I don't think we should be surprised that when
those boys grow up and become professional dancers and enter
a company that is run by a man with unquestioned power,
that they start looking around and thinking, my behavior doesn't
(11:28):
have any negative consequences. These women are disposable. I am
special and irreplaceable. And a lot of girls and young
women in ballet are trained to be quiet and obedient
(11:49):
and compliant, and to tolerate pain and discomfort and things
that cross boundaries.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Chloe Angel says she realized while she worked on her
book that sometimes she'd go back to this old way
of thinking of seeing herself and the world.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I started calling it ballet brain because it would happen
a lot. And I really noticed when I started observing
ballet classes for field work and for reporting, was that
I could not take my eyes off the teacher. I
(12:47):
was at a local dance studio in my town of Carlville, Iowa,
and instead of looking out at these young dances in
a pre point class, I just kept watching the teacher
when I was supposed to be reporting on these girls
and their transition from flat to point. And I just
(13:08):
remember noticing that about myself and thinking, oh boy, it's
really in me, because that's the other point of reference
as you're constantly checking the teacher, either because they are
demonstrating an exercise or because you're checking you know, are
they watching me? Do they like what they see? Do
they not like what they see? Am I worthless?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Today?
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's really in me in ways that I am aware
of and also ways that I'm not aware of yet.
And I was very fortunate to be living with someone
and having my book edited by someone who didn't grow
up in ballet and who didn't come to it with
a lot of the assumptions and sort of taken for
granted ideas that I did, And so having to explain
(13:53):
some of these concepts, especially the more egregious ones, to
non ballet people, was really easy to see, like, oh,
I got a bad case of ballet brain on that one.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Do you remember some other instances like that moment in
the studio when you were like, wait a minute, I'm
doing X or I'm assuming why.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
An artistic director of an American ballet company told me
about the handful of times when he's decided to not
renew a contract of a dancer who he didn't think
was in good enough shape, was too fad, And he
explained it to me that, you know, they do everything
(14:41):
they can to make sure their dancers are healthy, and
they really trying to support them in getting into shape,
which again is a euphemism for skinny, but if they're not,
in his words, if the dancer is not willing to
put in the work, then he has to think about,
you know, the long term spinal health of the men
a lifting them. And he said something to me like,
(15:03):
my back remembers every dancer I ever lifted, and I
finished the interview and I was like, yeah, I mean, look,
that's not ideal, but I get it. It makes sense
to me. And I walked down into my kitchen and
I recounted a lot of the interaction to my then fiance,
who did not rob in ballet, knew basically nothing about
ballet until he started dating me, and he was like, yeah,
(15:27):
that sounds pretty messed up. My instinct was to defend
it and to saying no, this is why it has
to be this way.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
That was my reaction too. Of course, you need to
worry about men's backs. But then I started to realize
the health of both the man and the woman is
at stake in this scenario, the man's back and the
woman's injuries and long term health problems that come from
eating disorders. Telling the woman to lose weight is prioritizing
the man's health. Then you realize, what if we did
(15:58):
value the health of the women as much as we
value the health of the men.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
The short term mental health, the long term employment prospects,
the long term physical health. Shit, what if we said, okay,
so don't lift her, we'll choreograph something different, and you
won't lift her and she'll get to be the size
and wait that she is and still have a job.
I mean, when you actually think about it, guys, it's
not rocket science. It's just a question of deciding, like
(16:27):
what do we value and what are we willing to
change in order to actually act on those values.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
I was surprised reading your book about some of the
physical effects of dancing on young bodies. I mean, I
really it was like, Oh, what.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
What I learned researching the book that I never learned
is that once you stretch a ligament, it never contracts
back like a muscle. A muscle you can stretch and it,
you know, can return to its old shape. Ligaments can't
do that. And you know so many of the places
that we stretch as dances with stretching ligaments, and you
(17:14):
know you stretch that out at seven eight, it's never
going back.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And why does that matter?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
It matters because you won't be a dancer forever, and
unless you maintain the strength to match that flexibility, you're
going to have real instability and real problems.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Starting so young. As part of the problem, the physical
therapists Chloe interviewed said young kids should be stretching less.
Young dancers working on their turnout can change the way
their bones grow because of twisting in their growth plates.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
There should be much less of an emphasis on developing
an extreme flexibility. There's no reason for an eight year
old to be doing oversplits Beyond injury. Young dancers can
have malnutrition because of their eating habits, even if they
don't have a diagnosable eating disorder. Malnutrition might affect their
brain development. It can lead to hormonal changes and lower
(18:05):
bone density in kids who are still developing. That can
make them more vulnerable to broken bones and ask your
porosis later in life. I also think that kids have
to be both told and shown that their pain and
their discomfort will be taken seriously. What they've learned is
(18:26):
that they will be rewarded for ignoring their own instincts
and their own experience of their own body.
Speaker 6 (18:36):
Like I'm not.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Disregarding the traditions. I'm not saying we should junk them.
I'm saying that we can do some things differently. All
we have to do is be a little bit irreverent
and being like, okay, so we change it. So what
one of the physical therapists I talked to said, we
should not be putting girls on point until they're fifteen,
to which a lot of people in the valley were like, oh,
(18:58):
that would fundamentally change and when people could stop their
careers and okay, and.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
So like change it.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
See what happens. I mean, I don't think it can
be worse the what we have now, which is like
permanent skeletal and ligament damage in twelve and thirteen and
fourteen year olds.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Chloe says maybe dancers could have longer careers if they
had fewer injuries as kids.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
And I would say it requires a certain level of irreverence,
and ballet breeds reverence, reverence for tradition, reverence for authority.
It just breeds reverence. Let's be a little lit irreverent
and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Literally, at the end of every class you have reverence.
You know, it's like literally reverence is built into the
class structure.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That's such a good point. I'm annoyed that I didn't
notice that it's like right there bowing and the curting.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
It's right there.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
At the end of every class. It's tradition for students
to do a final slow dance. I always loved this
part of class. How it ends beautiful and slow, just
simple expression. The center of the dance is a bow
to the mirror where the audience would be. Then everyone
curtsies to the teacher. It's called reverence.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And it's also a reinforcement of authority and of the hierarchy,
bowing and curtsying to the teacher. And it's just a
to me, it feels like a reminder that this art
form has some very strange rules.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Ballet has some strange rules, but it seems hard for
teachers to break free from them. Maybe it's because we
look to our predecessors, to the figures we admire, we
mimic what they did, and in the case of Americans
in ballet, we often look to balancing. What are some
(21:13):
of the main effects of balancing that you see in
the world of ballet?
Speaker 7 (21:19):
What comes to mind?
Speaker 2 (21:21):
The first thing I'll say is that he left us
some truly fantastic choreography, really and truly against my best,
strongest desires. Some of my favorite ballets Stow Balancing, ballets,
Jules is spectacular, Sarahnad is beautiful, Which is why when
(21:41):
people asked me after the book came out, are you
trying to cancel balancing? And I was like, even if
I wanted to How would I do that? How does
one even?
Speaker 8 (21:51):
How do you?
Speaker 7 (21:52):
You can't?
Speaker 8 (21:59):
He's you know, in the aa, in the water, in
the soil, he's like, he's The ecosystem of ballet is
sort of suffused with this and shaped by this, And.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know where to begin.
No God, but balancing.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
A lot of people call balancing a genius. To me,
that word is charged. It's hard for me to hear
it without bristling. Teresa Ruth Howard says, we need to
think about who we give that label to.
Speaker 9 (22:37):
It's always been interesting to me how we assign the
moniker of genius to Balanchine, which I think he is,
But I find it interesting that the same title is
not applied to Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Arthur Mitchell the founder of Dance Theater of Harlem. After
Mitchell danced in Balancing Company, he went back to his
community in Harlem to teach ballet. Then he started a
ballet company.
Speaker 9 (23:07):
Arthur Mitchell may not be a choreographic genius, but I
think that where his genius lay is in the idea
that he created an organization that really challenged the field
of ballet itself, who it belonged to. He created a
new idea of what American ballet was and what it
(23:27):
looked like.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Theresa has noticed that Arthur Mitchell often gets criticized for
a leadership style. She thinks he learned from Ballenging.
Speaker 9 (23:35):
He was cut from the fabric of balancing that was
his model. He was very demanding, he demanded respect. But
he's a black man, he oftentimes gets dare I say,
villified for those same characteristics. So Arthur Mitchell is creating
the same culture as a balanching in his own context,
(23:58):
but it's perceived much differently than balancing. We don't call
them a genius.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
There are so many people who do great things who
aren't called geniuses, and people who never get to develop
their genius because of norms, expectations, barriers, who's given opportunities
and resources. I also hardly ever hear the term applied
to women. I'd be happy to throw out the label
genius altogether, precisely because of who it leaves out. People
(24:28):
use the word genius like it's a fact, when really,
when you're talking about art, it's an opinion. In a way,
it's so weird genius is discussed is this inherent trait
you are a genius or you're not. We like to
bestow it upon people. Maybe it's a comfort. It feels
good to think somebody knows better, someone can lead me.
(24:50):
Once you've been dubbed a genius, I think there are
fewer checks on the choices you make. Even your art
is viewed with less scrutiny. You can damage others in
the name of your art without as much critique. It's
seen as worth it. Those sacrifices are worth it for
the output. When you hear someone as a genius, you
feel this magic. You fall in line.
Speaker 6 (25:14):
I think if you think about, you know, what kind
of role model do you want balancing to be for
people who are going to be the future of ballet.
Do you want him to be this godlike figure who
had everything figured out and had all the answers, and
you had to obey and believe him and do what
(25:35):
he said, and if you did that, everything would be
all right.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Jim Steichens the author who studied balancing's early years in
the US, and like Chloe, he sees how balancing is
viewed in an almost religious way.
Speaker 6 (25:48):
I don't think we want those kind of leaders anymore,
you know, I think those kind of leaders are what
we are discovering create these toxic environments in ballet. And
so if we can think of Balanchin in a more
down to earth humane way and not had this myth
(26:12):
of the lone male white genius, right, if we can
think about art as this collaborative enterprise that takes all
these people, I think that's where it really makes a difference.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
This reminded me of something I noticed among dancers trained
in Balanchine's lineage. Even the dancers who never worked directly
with balancing know all these beautiful little stories about him,
anecdotes that once helped them learn the choreography or that
emphasizes genius, but other than that, they felt like they
knew hardly anything about him.
Speaker 10 (26:46):
When you're in the Balanchine system, he's like the unspoken
for lack of far better term, god. It was ingrained
in our brains to respect and idolize him.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Catherine Morgan says that I'm like with a lot of choreographers,
Balanching is never called George. Everyone calls him by his
last name, Balanchine or mister Balanchine or mister b.
Speaker 10 (27:11):
He was amazing he's a genius, blah blah blah, and
you don't think about it because it's not talked about
it being like the extreme body expectations, or the darker
sides of him, any of that. It's just it's not
talked about, so I don't actually know.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
So a lot never gets excavated. Dancers don't get to
see the source of their own culture, the culture they
swim in every day. In conversations with dancers, I've also
sometimes noticed this pressure never to speak ill of balancing.
Some of that pressure comes from love gratitude. One former
dancer said, he gave me my life. It feels like
(27:52):
airing dirty laundry when you're talking about someone you see
as your father, your mother, your everything. I think some
pressure also stems from fear. There's a strong perception that
if you speak ill of balancing, even now, it will
harm your career. And then there's this fear that admitting
to flaws in the past will tarnish an art form
(28:14):
that already feels fragile. They want the art form to survive,
and I do too, But in my mind, not confronting
the darker sides is what could make ballet cave in
on itself.
Speaker 9 (28:27):
We're mythologizing trauma for the art.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Theresa Ruth Howard sometimes gets frustrated by how dancers remember balancing.
It's like a memory gets mingled with these romanticized clouds
of perfume.
Speaker 9 (28:45):
They're not really digging underneath what that did to them,
what that culture did to them. When you hear the
dancers speak what they sacrifice, the human sacrifice that they actually,
like French, press down to not feel or think about
(29:07):
what we make okay in our minds so that we
can dance, so we can just dance, so we can
be seen as a dancer. That is generational trauma, and
it is something that is folded into the legacy and
lift it up in a way.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
When you say generational trauma, do you feel like that's
affecting ballet students today like children today?
Speaker 9 (29:32):
Absolutely. I think that the way that it shows up,
the way that it presents is in the way that
we talk about and lionize Balanchin because he held women
in a very particular space. They are the flowers and
the men are the gardeners that pick the flowers. This
is problematic, and so I'm not saying that they're using
(29:56):
that language but it is a behave sort of way
of being. There can be values around the body, there
can be values around behavior. What is the appropriate way
to behave as a dancer, And so you don't have
to speak it. We behave these things, We behave our values.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Imagine that ballet is an old English manor house. It's
full of rooms, and in every room people are dancing.
That's how choreographer and scholar Adashola Acinley talks about ballet,
and I can't stop thinking about it. They say, one
(30:50):
room in the manor house is the Grand Hall. Everyone
looks at the Grand Hall. It's full of an audience.
It's where the attention is, the buzz and the lights.
The Grand Hall is where people like Balanchine live, or
people who've been permitted to enter Balancine's world. But ballet
is vast. There are many rooms in the manor house.
(31:12):
There are many rooms of ballet. So many people are
dancing it in their own companies, their own choreography, their
own way. We've been looking at just this one room,
its privilege and its restrictions, because this room is still
allowed to dictate how dancers should be. If you are
(31:38):
in that grand hall, that one room can feel like
your whole world. The thing is that someday you're going
to have to leave it. There's this saying that a
dancer dies twice. As a ballerina, from day one, you're
always counting down to your first death, the day you
(31:59):
have to retire from the stage, leave the grand hall behind.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Oh.
Speaker 5 (32:06):
I can't even begin to touch how rich that culture
is and was.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Seventies. A Land says her ballet self was hard to shed.
Speaker 5 (32:17):
And there is an addiction to being on stage, to
having certain rhythms of what it takes to be on
stage and to be an elite athlete. There was a
ritual from six o'clock to eight o'clock of getting ready,
of getting primed of self talk and self preparation to
be a performer. I remember when I stopped, it did
(32:41):
take me about two years to come down from that pitch,
that energetic pitch of preparation physiologically literally physiological chemical.
Speaker 11 (32:55):
When you finally do move on, there's a recovery period,
and I think the recovery period into the quote unquote
real world takes about ten years on average to function
(33:17):
in the normal world.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Wilhelmina, Frankfurt says, part of the adjustment is realizing how
abnormal your life has been.
Speaker 11 (33:26):
For decades, people have been making decisions for you about you,
and your life has been determined by a daily schedule.
It's almost military in a way. You know, the bugle blows,
that's class.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
There's this weird thing about the elite professional ballet world.
It's like time and age move differently than they do
for other people. On one hand, you have to grow
up fast. You're treated like an adult when you're just
a kid, and then you might become a professional dancer
at sixteen or seventeen. On the other hand, even years
(34:09):
after you enter the company, you aren't treated like an adult.
So many of your life decisions are in the hands
of the company. Members of the Quart of Ballet are
often called kids. Coaches yell out to dancers in rehearsal.
Good girl, good girl.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
Your responses are somewhat thwarted and childlike, and you got
to catch up.
Speaker 11 (34:37):
How do you get a job? And who are you?
Speaker 7 (34:57):
I like, catch myself doing a thing that I to
do in the ballet that I have to like check
and recalibrate that I'm not actually in the theater, And
that's not how people do things here on the outside.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You may remember Sophie Flack danced with New York City Ballet,
and then, in the economic downturn in two thousand and nine,
she was let go. To Sophie, it felt like being discarded,
like her body just filled a hole that could be
filled by someone else. She didn't want to keep dancing
after that, but the loss overwhelmed her. Without Ballet to
(35:46):
determine her every step in the world, she hardly knew
where to begin. Eventually, she decided the first step would
be education, to go to college. She picked Columbia.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
When I went to Columbia, it felt like I just
exited a bunker.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
At first, she felt superior. After all, most people in
her classes were teenagers. She was in her mid twenties,
and she'd been working this intense job at one of
the most elite art institutions in the world.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
I kind of walked on to campus feeling like hot shit.
I came from City Ballet, like you just moved out
of your parents' house, you know, Like I had a life,
Like I'd had certain experiences. I felt worldly, I'd traveled.
So I went in being kind of snooty and like
(36:34):
day one. I was very humbled. I was like, Oh,
you're actually like crazy smart and I know nothing. I
was like, oh, okay, there is a whole world outside
of the theater. I didn't know. My mind was freaking blown.
How little I knew, how much there was to learn.
(36:57):
And I was an expert at everything that happened in
the and I knew it really well, and I understood
the ballet world, but I didn't understand what happened outside
of the ballet world. I don't know how to talk
to people really, or people of authority even had to
talk to them, because we didn't talk to our superiors
(37:18):
at all. I mean, it's literally like growing up in
a terrarium, like a glass enclosing that is self sustaining
and you don't need anything else but like the stuff
within the terrarium.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Sophie started to realize this terrarium had grown around her
for years, starting way back when she was ten eleven, twelve,
when she felt herself pulling away from the outside world
to focus on ballet.
Speaker 7 (37:49):
I couldn't participate in a lot of social things after school, things,
normal childhood things, and I would sort of reframe them
in my head, like, oh, that's stupid, Like I would
put them down because I couldn't partake. I'd tell myself,
what I'm going to do is more important. And that
was like a coping technique that I developed in my
(38:11):
own head. Like even these friendships, these bonds don't matter
because who cares about children. No one's even going to
remember this, And I would just like really sort of
tear down all the things that I was missing out on.
But looking back and now that I have my own children,
the things that I missed out on were extremely formative.
(38:32):
And I'm kind of weird and screwed up because I
miss them. What makes you say that? I mean, I
imagine a child separated from her peer group to join
a cult, and it's taught a different culture, a different
(38:57):
way of looking at things, things like if it's not uncomfortable,
you're not doing it right. Being uncomfortable is normal. You
bury your feelings and you're never good enough. I mean,
these things are different than the things that you're normally taught.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
I hope.
Speaker 7 (39:23):
I have two kids, and a person's childhood is extremely important,
important a whole rest of your life, your personality, how
you see the world. I spend so much time trying
to learn everything I was wrong. Those dumb things really matter,
(39:49):
They're really important. Even if the activity seems dumb, you're
missing out on experiences and memory. That she who people
are and I feel like him doing a lot of
ketchup now and after I left the ballet world at
(40:12):
twenty five, which for me felt very young at the time,
but now that I'm on the outside, that was a
long time. That was twenty years in the ballet world
that shaped me a lot.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Sophie Flack says she had to unlearn ballet. She'd been
told that the skills she gained in the ballet classroom
would serve her for the rest of her life, but
she found they did the opposite. Sophie says she had
to learn that her well being mattered.
Speaker 7 (40:42):
The biggest lesson in post ballet was actually recovering from
postpartum depression, because I approached motherhood like I approached ballet,
with a lot of self sacrifice and for the betterment
of the cause of the art form, you know, abandoning
(41:06):
the self and it completely. As a new mom, I mean,
I might have had horrible postpartum anyway, but with that
approach and my hyper perfectionism. I really lost my mind.
I started to become psychotic. This was like real next
level and I was having whatever suicidal ideation and there's
(41:34):
more that I don't really want to share right now,
but it was very scary. And after I had a breakdown,
I started taking my mental health more seriously. I was like, Okay,
I need to relearn how to think. If I'm hungry,
(41:56):
I eat. If I'm tired, I rest. I mean, like
literally listening to my body and articulating my needs. I'm
still learning how to do that better, because there is
life after dance.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
Oh no, no, okay, stupid free Oh ouch.
Speaker 6 (42:27):
Sounded like.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
Well.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Sophie sits on the floor of her living room. Her
daughter Eleanor climbs onto her back. Eleanor nestles her head
into her mother's neck with a mischievous smile.
Speaker 7 (42:39):
Mom, Yes, can me dance?
Speaker 5 (42:41):
Thicken?
Speaker 7 (42:42):
We well, we give to I think mostly I'm just
gonna talk and not dance. But if you wanted to dance,
you could.
Speaker 5 (42:51):
You could do that.
Speaker 6 (42:54):
Wow.
Speaker 7 (42:55):
I'm not really a dancing mood right now.
Speaker 5 (42:57):
I'm more in a talking mood.
Speaker 10 (42:58):
Wet it I know?
Speaker 4 (43:02):
With me?
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Eleanor started a creative ballet class this year a room
of three and four year olds. When you're thinking back
to your childhood being in something that you now sometimes
compare to entering a cult at a young age, how
do you feel about your daughter potentially starting to dance yourself.
Speaker 7 (43:25):
I am very conflicted. I mean, I'm conflicted about all
the things. Like you know, I'm trying to recount as
truthfully as I can about all these things, but pretty
much everything I say has like another side to it. Really,
it's really hard to record a podcast about it because
I don't have enough time.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
To like really say it fully.
Speaker 7 (43:45):
Actually, yeah, I always have this like flip side of
like love for this art form, and it was a
really great way for me to live. It gave me
something to live for.
Speaker 5 (44:08):
I don't really talk very much about ballet. I don't
have photos around me. It's the past life. It's a
past life, and it's woven into the cells. But I
don't wear it. It's not a badge.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
But Stephanie's land still feels ballet in her. There are
times that comes out in full force, Like just a
couple of years after she'd retired from the stage, she
was guest teaching at a local school of the arts.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
And I passed a room where somebody was rehearsing some
Chopin and a lot of the robins ballets had Chopin
on stage.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
And something happened to Stephanie, something that would happen many
times over the coming decades. The music took her back,
like a flashback, a sudden whiff of her past life
that reminded her how real it had been.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
It's so disceral, and I was so jarred because I
didn't know about this. It was literally like being flooded
and shifted back in time. It was quite jarring. Actually,
then it was for me sad because I was still
very close to having finished, and there were still the
(45:16):
parts of me that were like kind of like the
loose tooth before it falls out. I hear music and
it's instantly a ballet. I see the steps, I see
people doing it. I can actually feel the heat of
the stage lights and the warmth of the wings. This morning,
(45:37):
I was driving and the music for Diamonds from Jewels
came on and I started welling up driving in the
car listening to that. Seeing Susanne Farrell and Peter Martin's
in front of my the screen of my mind and
thanking them, be so grateful for having witnessed that and
(46:02):
having that be part of a life. Every time I
hear a piece of music, something is evoked and provoked,
and the relationship.
Speaker 7 (46:14):
To it is so deep, and.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
What gratitude for that.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
We've been talking a lot about these dark sides of ballet?
Speaker 7 (46:45):
Is it worth it?
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Why ballet?
Speaker 2 (46:48):
The feeling that you get as an audience member, which
is like complete awe at what humans can do when
they work together in its best form, in its purest form.
You feel at home in your body when you dance,
and it's it's transcendent, like when everything goes right, when
(47:11):
everything lines up and you're like spinning perfectly in a
pirouet and you know you're going to land it cleanly,
and then you do. There's nothing like it, right, nothing
like it. You feel so at home in your body
and like that's not nothing, it's really precious, it's really valuable.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
My most recurring dream is a pirouet on point on point,
and I spin and I spin, I spin and I
spin and I spin and I spin and I don't
stop spinning for a long time. It's something I could
never do. In the real world or maybe anyone could do,
but just rotating, rotating, and then at the end of
(47:58):
the pirouet, I just stay balanced on point. I don't
come down.
Speaker 9 (48:03):
I just hover.
Speaker 10 (48:05):
Ugh.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
And it is that feeling in your body that you
don't get anywhere else. I don't know how to describe it.
If it's like flying, but it's the most beautiful feeling.
I still remember what that feels like. And so those
dreams are so vivid. Those are the types of dreams
that I one hundred percent think they're real. While I'm
in the dream, I feel that dream in my body
(48:29):
more than any other dream that I have. Yeah, and
then I wake up and I realize it's not it's
not reality, but it's so glorious that it is stuck
with me all these years and it keeps coming back
to me even though I haven't done it in so long.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
And that is why ballet matters, Because you haven't done
it in over a decade, but it's still in you.
And so it matters that we get this right. If
it is going to stick with us forever, it matters
that we get it right.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
It matters that we get this right. This is something
all ballet teachers know you need a strong foundation, you
need good technique. It's another lesson the classroom teaches us,
and it's one I think we shouldn't discard when it
(49:38):
comes to ballet. With bad technique, you can't keep up
with complicated steps. You're in trouble a couple of flaws
or placement issues, and you're dancing isn't safe. Even if
it looks beautiful years later, it'll lead to injury. The
thing is, it's really hard to retrain. It's hard to
(49:58):
get rid of bad habits dance. That's why when you
learn ballet, you start with the basics and you repeat
those basics every day for the rest of your dancing life.
First a plia, a knee bend, then the port de bras,
(50:19):
move your arms, and then tondu you slide your leg
out so it's stretched and pointed. Once you tondu, you
realize it's the base of most steps. Almost all ballet
steps are modified tondus. Tondus in different forms balancing understood this,
(50:43):
and he loved his tondus. He had his dancers drill them,
not just eight tondus, not sixteen, not thirty two, not
sixty four they did hundreds at all speeds, front side back.
He'd prod them, saying, what are you saving it for
a deer? Then he'd say faster. You drill until it's automatic,
(51:15):
until it's etched neurologically in your brain. When culture is drilled,
culture becomes automatic too. We need to look at the
tandue of ballet culture, the foundation. If we don't address
the problems there, we'll have injuries later on. And that's
(51:37):
what's happened. There are people now being injured, being harmed
by dancing ballet, and that's why we have to confront
the past. It all builds on itself. Balancini is considered
a genius because he changed ballet. He pushed the boundaries
of what was acceptable on stage to make ballet beautiful.
(52:02):
We need change too, We need to take a risk.
That's how we make it better, That's how we keep
it alive. And we can't wait to make this change.
What are you saving for?
Speaker 7 (52:14):
Dear?
Speaker 1 (52:34):
The Turning is a production of Roccoa, Punch and iHeart Podcasts.
It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me.
Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed
by James Trout Jessica Carisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
(52:58):
So many thanks to all of the people who helped
and supported us with this project, including Gretchen Gavitt, Jacob
Nicola and Theo Silber, Margaret Lambert, Kayla Reid Stella, Grizant,
Lisa Zegarmi, John Frishkoff, Zack Smith, Jacob Smith, Courtney Smith, Weezmore,
Erica Berger, Paul English, Betsy McMillan, Holly Palandro, Matt Silverman,
(53:21):
and Andrew Lesser. Special thanks to beth n Mcaluso, Kate Osborne,
Christine Ragassa, Travis Dunlap, Elizabeth Wachtel, Brianna Hill, Simon Pullman,
Nancy Wolfe, Alison Canter, and the wonderful teams at Racco
Punch and iHeart Podcasts for their support. Our executive producers
(53:51):
are John Paratti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, and
Katrina Norvell and Niki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos
and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram
at Rococo Punch and you can reach out via email.
The Turning at Rococo punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance.
(54:12):
Thanks for listening.
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