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
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
(00:26):
you're absorbing all kinds of lessons about your place in
the world and how you are or are not valued
simply by who the teacher pays attention to, how the
classroom is structured. When I think about what it felt
(00:48):
like to go to ballet class every day as a kid,
it feels routine. I spend 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 bar that lined the wall. Our point
(01:11):
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 smelled like satin, sweat
and sweet glue. I might chat with my friends while
I stretched, but mostly I was silent until a class began.
(01:33):
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 new generation of dancers is saving
(01:55):
ballet from itself. Chloe interviewed a hundred people to analyze
ballet culture today. When I read it, I got to
this section about Ballet's hidden curriculum, the thing's children learned
by accident, the unintended lessons I pick up in the classroom.
I underlined line after line. Chloe wrote, in this hidden curriculum,
(02:16):
the ideal 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,
(02:38):
It's like this light bulb went off, This realization like
dawned 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
(03:02):
a ballet class as a kid. It just like really
got me questioning all kinds of things about myself. Did
you have that experience? 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
(03:25):
that I wasn't good both actually and fictionally at ballet,
and I realized 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
(03:47):
is what a good woman looks like, how you're supposed
to look, how you're supposed to move, how you're supposed
to be hay, how you're supposed tolerate pain, how you're
supposed to conceal labor, who you're supposed to obey, who
(04:08):
you get to have power over. You've learned all that
in the ballet studio. But the reward for all that
is accomplishing this very particular kind of femininity. I spent
(04:28):
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, 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.
(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 me, that shit stays with you forever.
(05:23):
From my Heart, podcasts and Rococo Punch. This is the
turning room of mirrors. I'm Erica Llance, Part ten Reverence.
I think ballet in a lot of ways benefits from
the perception that it is a world apart, that it's
(05:46):
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. In the classroom,
teachers drilled us on the same steps over and over.
They yelled above the music while we danced, shouted corrections
(06:07):
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 while we
all watched in the corner. She started to cry, but
the teacher kept having her comeback and start again. We
(06:29):
were trained to make impossible things look easy, and I
became attached to the facade of perfection. 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 in the audience
(07:00):
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 show the work,
(07:22):
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 men friends and peers were
(07:45):
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're encouraged to
let people know how much it You actually get rewarded
for flopping on the ground and making a scene and
showing the work. But in this hyper feminine activity, you
(08:09):
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 and that contradiction is part of the
appeal of ballet. It's part of the mystique of ballet,
which is profoundly messed up. Yeah, that's such a good
(08:35):
point too, Like people do know that point shoes 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? And something that I think
people should really sit with and think, should we really
(08:56):
be applauding people for being able to conceal their pain
as well as they do? Is at really a skill
that we want young people, 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 a ballot answer, you think
(09:16):
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, but behind the scenes controlling the
(09:40):
loves of powers a women. Now, 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. You know,
there are all these to try and get more boys
(10:01):
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 are. Lots
(10:21):
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 feel comfortable
(10:44):
in the leotard and the tights, 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. They treated
(11:08):
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, 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 have any
(11:28):
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 and compliant, and
(11:49):
to tolerate pain and discomfort and things that cross boundaries.
(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. I started
calling it a ballet brain because it would happen a lot.
And I really noticed when I started observing ballet classes
(12:38):
for field work and for reporting, was that I could
not take my eyes off the teacher. I 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
(13:01):
when I was supposed to be reporting on these girls
and their transition from flat to point. And I just
remember noticing that about myself and thinking, oh boy, it's
really in me, because that's the other point of reference,
because you're constantly checking the teacher, either because they are
demonstrating an exercise or because you're checking you. Are they
(13:25):
watching me? Do they like what they see? Do they
not like what they see? Am I worthless? Today? 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
(13:45):
lot of their assumptions and sort of taken for granted
ideas that I did. And so having to explain 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.
(14:08):
Do you remember some other instances like that moment in
the studio when you are like, wait a minute, I'm
doing X or I'm assuming why. 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
(14:30):
a dancer who he didn't think was in good enough
shape it was too fat. And he explained it to
me that, you know, they do everything they can to
make sure their dances 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,
(14:53):
if the dance is not willing to put in the work,
and then he has to think about, you know, the
long term spinal health of the men who are lifting them.
And he said something to me like, 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
(15:14):
I walked out into my kitchen and I recounted a
lot of the interaction to my then fiance, who did
not rob in Vallet and you basically nothing about Valley
until he started dating me, and he was like, yeah,
that sounds pretty messed up. My instinct was to defend
it and to say, no, this is why it has
to be this way. That was my reaction too. Of course,
(15:37):
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 the 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
(15:58):
if we did value the health of the women as
much as we value the health of the men. 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
(16:18):
and wait that she is and still have a job.
I mean when you actually think about it, because it's
not rocket science. It's just a question of deciding, like
what are we value and what are we willing to
change in order to actually act on those values. I
was surprised reading your book about some of the physical
(16:42):
effects of dancing on young bodies. I mean, I really
it was like, Oh, what what I learned researching the
book that I'd never learned is that once you stretch
a ligament, it never contracts back. It's like a muscle.
A muscle you can stretch and it can return to
(17:02):
its its old shape. Ligaments can't do that. And you know,
so many of the places that we stretch as dances
were stretching ligaments, and you know, you stretch that out
at seven eight, it's never going back. And why does
that matter? It matters because you won't be a dancer forever,
(17:23):
and unless you maintain the strength to match that flexibility,
you're going to have real instability and real problems 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. There
(17:44):
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 bone density,
(18:06):
and 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 that they
(18:26):
will be rewarded for ignoring their own instincts and their
own experience of their own body. Like I'm not 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
(18:48):
being like, okay, so we change it. So what one
of the physical therapists I talked to said, we should
not be putting goals on point until they're fifteen, to
which a lot of people in the valley will We're like, oh,
that would fundamentally change training, and when people could stop
their career isn't okay? And so like change it. See
(19:08):
what happens. I mean, I don't think it can be
worse than what we have now, which is like permanent
skeletal and ligament damage in twelve and thirteen and fourteen
year olds. Chloe says maybe dancers could have longer careers
if they had fewer injuries as kids. And I would
say it requires a certain level of irreverence, and ballet
(19:29):
breeds reverence, reverence for tradition, reverence for authority. It just
breeds reverence. Let's be a little lit irreverent and see
what happens. Literally, at the end of every class, you
have reverence. You know, it's like literally reverence is built
into the class structure. That's such a good point. I'm
(19:50):
annoyed that I didn't notice that it's like right there,
bowing and the curtaining. It's right there 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
(20:12):
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. And it's also a reinforcement of authority
and of the hierarchy, bowing and curtsying to the teacher.
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And it's just a to me, it feels like a
reminder that this odd form has some very strange rules.
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
(20:56):
in ballet, we often looked at balancing. What are some
of the main effects of balancing that you see in
(21:17):
the world of ballet? What comes to mind? 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 still balancing ballets. Jules is spectacular,
Saranad is beautiful, which is why when people asked me
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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? How do you?
You can't? He's you know, in the a, in the water,
in the soil. He's like, he's the ecosystem of ballet
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is sort of suffused with this and shaped by this,
And even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know where
to begin. No God, but balancing. A lot of people
call balanchean a genius. To me, that word is charged.
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It's hard for me to hear it without bristling. Teresa
Ruth Howard says, we need to think about who we
give that label too. It's always been interesting to me
how we assigned the moniker of genius to balancing, which
I think he is, But I find it interesting that
(22:50):
the same title is not applied to Arthur Mitchell. 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.
Arthur Mitchell may not be a choreographic genius, but I
think that where his genius lay is in the idea
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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
looked like. Teresa has noticed that Arthur Mitchell often gets
criticized for a leadership style she thinks he learned from balancing.
(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,
vilified for those same characteristics. So Arthur Mitchell is creating
the same culture as a balancing in his own context,
(23:58):
but it's perceived much differently than balancing. We don't call
him a genius. 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
(24:19):
the term applied to women. I'd be happy to throw
out the labeled genius altogether precisely because of who it
leaves out. People 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.
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We like to bestow it upon people. Maybe it's a comfort.
It feels good to think somebody knows better, someone can
lead me. Once you've been dubbed a genius, I think
there are a 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
(25:05):
worth it for the output. When you hear someone as
a genius, you feel this magic. You fall in line.
I think if you think about, you know, what kind
of role model do you want Balanching to be for
people who are gonna be the future of ballet? Do
you want him to be this godlike figure who had
(25:28):
everything figured out and had all the answers, and you
had to obey and believe him and do what he said,
and if you did that, everything would be all right.
Jim Steigen's the author who studied Balanching's early years in
the US, and like Chloe, he sees how Balanching is
viewed in an almost religious way. I don't think we
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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 balancing in a more down to earth humane
way and not have this myth of the lone male
(26:14):
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. 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
(26:37):
helped them learn the choreography or that emphasize his genius,
but other than that, they felt like they knew hardly
anything about him. When you're in the balancing system, he's
like the unspoken for lack of far better charm of God.
It was ingrained in our brains to respect and idolize him.
(26:58):
Catherine Morgan says that I'm like with a lot of choreographers,
Balancing is never called George. Everyone calls him by his
last name, Balancing or mister balancing, or mister b 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
(27:23):
of him, any of that. It's just it's not talked about,
so I don't actually know. 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.
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One former dancer said, he gave me my life. It
feels like airing dirty laundry when you're talking about someone
you see as your father, your mother, you're everything. But
I think some pressure also stems from fear. There's a
strong perception that if you speak ill of balancing, even now,
(28:07):
it will harm your career. And then there's this fear
that admitting to flaws in the past will tarnish an
art form 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. We're mythologizing trauma for the art.
(28:35):
Teresa Ruth Howard sometimes gets frustrated by how dancers remember balancing.
It's like his memory gets mingled with these romanticized clouds
of perfume. 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
(29:00):
that they actually, like French, press down to not feel
or think about 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
(29:21):
the legacy and lifted up in a way. When you
say generational trauma, do you feel like that's affecting ballet
students today like children today. 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
Balanchine because he held women in a very particular space.
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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 that language, but it is
a behaved sort of way of being. There's can be
values around the body, there can be values around behavior.
(30:08):
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. Imagine that ballet is
(30:31):
an old English manor house. It's full of rooms, and
in every room people are dancing. That's how choreographer and
scholar Addashola Ackinlay talks about ballet, and I can't stop
thinking about it. They say, one room in the manor
house is the Grand Hall. Everyone looks at the Grand Hall.
(30:55):
It's full of an audience. It's where the attention is,
the buzz and the lights. The Grand Hall is where
people like balancing live, or people who've been permitted to
enter balancing's world. But ballet is vast. There are many
rooms in the manor house. There are many rooms of ballet.
So many people are dancing it in their own companies,
(31:17):
their own choreography, their own way. We've been looking at
just this one room. It's privilege and its restrictions, because
this room is still allowed to dictate how dancers should be.
(31:37):
If you're 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
(31:58):
you have to retire from stage, leave the ground hall behind.
Oh my god, I can't even begin to touch how
rich that culture is and was. Stephanize Land says her
ballet self was hard to shed, and there is an
addiction to being on stage, to having certain rhythms of
(32:23):
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 take me about two
years to come down from that pitch, that energetic pitch
(32:47):
of preparation physiologically literally physiological chemical. 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
(33:10):
ten years on average to function in the normal world.
Wilhelmina Frankfurt says, part of the adjustment is realizing how
abnormal your life has been. For decades, people have been
making decisions for you about you, and your life has
(33:34):
been determined by a daily schedule. It's almost military in
a way. You know, the bugle blows, that's class. 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.
(33:57):
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 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 quarterballet are often called kids.
(34:20):
Coaches yell out to dancers in rehearsal. Good girl, good girl,
your responses are somewhat thwarted and childlike, and you got
to catch up. How do you get a job? And
who are you? I like catched myself doing a thing
(34:59):
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. You may remember Sophie Flack danced with
New York City Ballet, and then in the economic downturn
(35:21):
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 determine her every step in
(35:47):
the world, she hardly knew where to begin. Eventually, she
decided the first step would be education, to go to college.
She picked Columbia. When I went to Columbia, I felt
like I had just exited a bunker. 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
(36:08):
this intense job at one of the most elite art
institutions in the world. I kind of walked onto 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, had traveled. So I went in being
(36:29):
kind of snooty and like 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.
(36:51):
My mind was freaking blown, how little I knew, how
much there was to learn. And I was an expert
at everything that happened in the Leader, 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
(37:13):
people of authority even had to talk to them, because
we didn't talk to our superiors 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. Sophie
(37:37):
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. I couldn't participate in a lot of
social things after school things, norm multichildhood things and I
would sort of reframe them in my head, like, oh,
(37:59):
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 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
(38:20):
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. And I'm kind of
weird and screwed up because I missed them. What makes
you say that? I mean, I imagine a child separated
(38:46):
from her peer group to join a cult, and it's
taught a different culture, a different way of looking at things,
things like if it's not uncomfortable, you're not doing it right.
Being uncomfortable is normal. Do you bury your feelings and
(39:10):
you're never good enough? I mean, these things are different
than the things that you're normally taught. I hope. I
have two kids, and a person's childhood is extremely important,
(39:32):
important the whole rest of your life. Your personality out
us you the world. I spent so much time trying
to learn everything I was wrong. Those dumb things really matter,
They're really important. Even if the activity seems dumb, You're
(39:57):
missing out on experiences and memory that sheep who people are.
And I feel like I'm doing a lot of ketchup
now and after I left the ballet world at twenty five,
which for me felt very young at the time, but
now that I'm on the outside, that was a long time.
(40:21):
That was twenty years in the ballet world that shaped
me a lot. Sophie Flack says she had to unlearned 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. The biggest
(40:43):
lesson 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 the self and
(41:08):
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 a psychotic. This was like real next level
and I was having whatever suicidal ideation and there's more
(41:34):
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 knees. I'm
still learning how to do that better, because there is
life after dance. Oh no, no, ye have oh ouch
(42:27):
sounded like a well. 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. Mom, yes, tid me dance sticking what gifts
to get? I think mostly I'm just gonna talk and
(42:49):
not dance. But if you wanted to dance, you could
could do that. Oh wow, because I'm not really in
dancing mood right now. More in a talking mood, I
go it, I know with for me, Eleanor started a
creative ballet class this year, a room of three and
four year olds. When you're thinking back to your childhood
(43:12):
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 herself. I am
very conflicted. I mean, I'm conflicted about all the things.
Like you know, I'm trying to recount as truthfully as
(43:33):
I hand 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 to like really say it fully. Actually, yeah,
I always have this like flip side of like love
for this art form, and it was a really great
(43:55):
way for me to live. It gave me something to
live for. 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.
(44:17):
But I don't wear it. It's not a badge. But
Stephanie's the land still feels ballet in her. There are
times it 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,
and I passed a room where somebody was rehearsing some
Chopin and a lot of the Robins ballets at Chopin
(44:39):
on stage, 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.
It's so disceral, and I was so jarred because I
didn't know about this, but it was literally like being
(45:04):
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
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
(45:25):
people doing it. I can actually feel the heat of
the stage lights and the warmth of the wings. This morning,
I was driving and the music for Diamonds from Jewels
came on and I started welling up. Driving in the car,
(45:45):
listening to that, seeing Susan and Farrell and Peter Martin's
in front of the screen of my mind and thanking them.
Be so grateful for having witnessed that and having that
part of a life. Every time I hear a piece
(46:06):
of music, something is evoked and provoked and the relationship
to it is so deep, and what what gratitude for that.
(46:38):
We've been talking a lot about these dark sides of ballet.
Is it worth it? Why ballet? The feeling that you
get as an audience member, which is like complete or
at what humans can do when they work together in
(46:59):
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 everything lines up and
you're like spinning perfectly in a pirouette and you know
you're going to land it cleanly, and then you do.
(47:22):
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. My most recurring dream
is a pirouette on point on point, and I spin
(47:46):
and I spin, and 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 the pirouette,
I just stay balanced on point. I don't come down.
I just hover. And it is that feeling in your
(48:06):
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
(48:29):
my body 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. And that is why ballet matters, Because you
(48:50):
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. It matters that we
get this right. This is something all ballet teachers know.
(49:12):
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 comes to ballet. With
(49:40):
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 get rid of bad habits dance.
(50:01):
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 plea, a knee bend,
then the port de bra, move your arms, and then
(50:22):
TANDU you slide your leg out so it's stretched and pointed.
Once you do, you realize it's the base of most steps.
Almost all ballet steps are modified tandus tandus in different
forms balancing understood this, and he loved his tandus. He
(50:46):
had his dancers drill them, not just eight tan dus,
not sixteen, not thirty two, not sixty four. They did
hundreds at all speeds, front side back. He'd prod them,
I saying, what are you saving it for? A deer?
Then he'd say faster. You drill until it's automatic, until
(51:15):
it's etched neurologically in your brain. When culture is drilled,
culture becomes automatic too. We need to look at the
TANDU 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. Balancine 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 to 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? Dear? The Turning is a
(52:35):
production of Our Coco 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 Carrissa is our assistant producer. Andrea Aswahe is our
digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. So many
(52:59):
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 Grizzant, Lisa Zagarmi,
John Frishcoff, Zach Smith, Jacob Smith, Courtney Smith, Weasmore, Erica Berger,
Paul English, Betsy McMillan, Holly Palandro, Matt Silverman, and Andrew Lesser.
(53:26):
Special thanks to Bethan Macaluso, Kate Osborne, Christine Rigassa, Travis Dunlap,
Elizabeth Wachtel, Brianna Hill, Simon Pullman, Nancy Wolf, Alison Cantor,
and the wonderful teams at Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts
for their support. Our executive producers are John Parratti and
(53:52):
Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, and Katrina Norvelle and Nicky
Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on
the series, follow us on Instagram at Prococo Punch, and
you can reach out via email The Turning at Prococo
punch dot com. I'm Erica Lanz. Thanks for listening.
You started your book in the classroom. Why was that
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
(00:26):
you're absorbing all kinds of lessons about your place in
the world and how you are or are not valued
simply by who the teacher pays attention to, how the
classroom is structured. When I think about what it felt
(00:48):
like to go to ballet class every day as a kid,
it feels routine. I spend 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 bar that lined the wall. Our point
(01:11):
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 smelled like satin, sweat
and sweet glue. I might chat with my friends while
I stretched, but mostly I was silent until a class began.
(01:33):
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 new generation of dancers is saving
(01:55):
ballet from itself. Chloe interviewed a hundred people to analyze
ballet culture today. When I read it, I got to
this section about Ballet's hidden curriculum, the thing's children learned
by accident, the unintended lessons I pick up in the classroom.
I underlined line after line. Chloe wrote, in this hidden curriculum,
(02:16):
the ideal 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,
(02:38):
It's like this light bulb went off, This realization like
dawned 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
(03:02):
a ballet class as a kid. It just like really
got me questioning all kinds of things about myself. Did
you have that experience? 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
(03:25):
that I wasn't good both actually and fictionally at ballet,
and I realized 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
(03:47):
is what a good woman looks like, how you're supposed
to look, how you're supposed to move, how you're supposed
to be hay, how you're supposed tolerate pain, how you're
supposed to conceal labor, who you're supposed to obey, who
(04:08):
you get to have power over. You've learned all that
in the ballet studio. But the reward for all that
is accomplishing this very particular kind of femininity. I spent
(04:28):
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, 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.
(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 me, that shit stays with you forever.
(05:23):
From my Heart, podcasts and Rococo Punch. This is the
turning room of mirrors. I'm Erica Llance, Part ten Reverence.
I think ballet in a lot of ways benefits from
the perception that it is a world apart, that it's
(05:46):
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. In the classroom,
teachers drilled us on the same steps over and over.
They yelled above the music while we danced, shouted corrections
(06:07):
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 while we
all watched in the corner. She started to cry, but
the teacher kept having her comeback and start again. We
(06:29):
were trained to make impossible things look easy, and I
became attached to the facade of perfection. 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 in the audience
(07:00):
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 show the work,
(07:22):
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 men friends and peers were
(07:45):
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're encouraged to
let people know how much it You actually get rewarded
for flopping on the ground and making a scene and
showing the work. But in this hyper feminine activity, you
(08:09):
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 and that contradiction is part of the
appeal of ballet. It's part of the mystique of ballet,
which is profoundly messed up. Yeah, that's such a good
(08:35):
point too, Like people do know that point shoes 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? And something that I think
people should really sit with and think, should we really
(08:56):
be applauding people for being able to conceal their pain
as well as they do? Is at really a skill
that we want young people, 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 a ballot answer, you think
(09:16):
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, but behind the scenes controlling the
(09:40):
loves of powers a women. Now, 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. You know,
there are all these to try and get more boys
(10:01):
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 are. Lots
(10:21):
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 feel comfortable
(10:44):
in the leotard and the tights, 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. They treated
(11:08):
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, 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 have any
(11:28):
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 and compliant, and
(11:49):
to tolerate pain and discomfort and things that cross boundaries.
(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. I started
calling it a ballet brain because it would happen a lot.
And I really noticed when I started observing ballet classes
(12:38):
for field work and for reporting, was that I could
not take my eyes off the teacher. I 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
(13:01):
when I was supposed to be reporting on these girls
and their transition from flat to point. And I just
remember noticing that about myself and thinking, oh boy, it's
really in me, because that's the other point of reference,
because you're constantly checking the teacher, either because they are
demonstrating an exercise or because you're checking you. Are they
(13:25):
watching me? Do they like what they see? Do they
not like what they see? Am I worthless? Today? 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
(13:45):
lot of their assumptions and sort of taken for granted
ideas that I did. And so having to explain 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.
(14:08):
Do you remember some other instances like that moment in
the studio when you are like, wait a minute, I'm
doing X or I'm assuming why. 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
(14:30):
a dancer who he didn't think was in good enough
shape it was too fat. And he explained it to
me that, you know, they do everything they can to
make sure their dances 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,
(14:53):
if the dance is not willing to put in the work,
and then he has to think about, you know, the
long term spinal health of the men who are lifting them.
And he said something to me like, 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
(15:14):
I walked out into my kitchen and I recounted a
lot of the interaction to my then fiance, who did
not rob in Vallet and you basically nothing about Valley
until he started dating me, and he was like, yeah,
that sounds pretty messed up. My instinct was to defend
it and to say, no, this is why it has
to be this way. That was my reaction too. Of course,
(15:37):
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 the 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
(15:58):
if we did value the health of the women as
much as we value the health of the men. 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
(16:18):
and wait that she is and still have a job.
I mean when you actually think about it, because it's
not rocket science. It's just a question of deciding, like
what are we value and what are we willing to
change in order to actually act on those values. I
was surprised reading your book about some of the physical
(16:42):
effects of dancing on young bodies. I mean, I really
it was like, Oh, what what I learned researching the
book that I'd never learned is that once you stretch
a ligament, it never contracts back. It's like a muscle.
A muscle you can stretch and it can return to
(17:02):
its its old shape. Ligaments can't do that. And you know,
so many of the places that we stretch as dances
were stretching ligaments, and you know, you stretch that out
at seven eight, it's never going back. And why does
that matter? It matters because you won't be a dancer forever,
(17:23):
and unless you maintain the strength to match that flexibility,
you're going to have real instability and real problems 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. There
(17:44):
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 bone density,
(18:06):
and 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 that they
(18:26):
will be rewarded for ignoring their own instincts and their
own experience of their own body. Like I'm not 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
(18:48):
being like, okay, so we change it. So what one
of the physical therapists I talked to said, we should
not be putting goals on point until they're fifteen, to
which a lot of people in the valley will We're like, oh,
that would fundamentally change training, and when people could stop
their career isn't okay? And so like change it. See
(19:08):
what happens. I mean, I don't think it can be
worse than what we have now, which is like permanent
skeletal and ligament damage in twelve and thirteen and fourteen
year olds. Chloe says maybe dancers could have longer careers
if they had fewer injuries as kids. And I would
say it requires a certain level of irreverence, and ballet
(19:29):
breeds reverence, reverence for tradition, reverence for authority. It just
breeds reverence. Let's be a little lit irreverent and see
what happens. Literally, at the end of every class, you
have reverence. You know, it's like literally reverence is built
into the class structure. That's such a good point. I'm
(19:50):
annoyed that I didn't notice that it's like right there,
bowing and the curtaining. It's right there 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
(20:12):
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. And it's also a reinforcement of authority
and of the hierarchy, bowing and curtsying to the teacher.
(20:34):
And it's just a to me, it feels like a
reminder that this odd form has some very strange rules.
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
(20:56):
in ballet, we often looked at balancing. What are some
of the main effects of balancing that you see in
(21:17):
the world of ballet? What comes to mind? 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 still balancing ballets. Jules is spectacular,
Saranad is beautiful, which is why when people asked me
(21:42):
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? How do you?
You can't? He's you know, in the a, in the water,
in the soil. He's like, he's the ecosystem of ballet
(22:07):
is sort of suffused with this and shaped by this,
And even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know where
to begin. No God, but balancing. A lot of people
call balanchean a genius. To me, that word is charged.
(22:29):
It's hard for me to hear it without bristling. Teresa
Ruth Howard says, we need to think about who we
give that label too. It's always been interesting to me
how we assigned the moniker of genius to balancing, which
I think he is, But I find it interesting that
(22:50):
the same title is not applied to Arthur Mitchell. 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.
Arthur Mitchell may not be a choreographic genius, but I
think that where his genius lay is in the idea
(23:12):
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
looked like. Teresa has noticed that Arthur Mitchell often gets
criticized for a leadership style she thinks he learned from balancing.
(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,
vilified for those same characteristics. So Arthur Mitchell is creating
the same culture as a balancing in his own context,
(23:58):
but it's perceived much differently than balancing. We don't call
him a genius. 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
(24:19):
the term applied to women. I'd be happy to throw
out the labeled genius altogether precisely because of who it
leaves out. People 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.
(24:41):
We like to bestow it upon people. Maybe it's a comfort.
It feels good to think somebody knows better, someone can
lead me. Once you've been dubbed a genius, I think
there are a 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
(25:05):
worth it for the output. When you hear someone as
a genius, you feel this magic. You fall in line.
I think if you think about, you know, what kind
of role model do you want Balanching to be for
people who are gonna be the future of ballet? Do
you want him to be this godlike figure who had
(25:28):
everything figured out and had all the answers, and you
had to obey and believe him and do what he said,
and if you did that, everything would be all right.
Jim Steigen's the author who studied Balanching's early years in
the US, and like Chloe, he sees how Balanching is
viewed in an almost religious way. I don't think we
(25:49):
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 balancing in a more down to earth humane
way and not have this myth of the lone male
(26:14):
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. 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
(26:37):
helped them learn the choreography or that emphasize his genius,
but other than that, they felt like they knew hardly
anything about him. When you're in the balancing system, he's
like the unspoken for lack of far better charm of God.
It was ingrained in our brains to respect and idolize him.
(26:58):
Catherine Morgan says that I'm like with a lot of choreographers,
Balancing is never called George. Everyone calls him by his
last name, Balancing or mister balancing, or mister b 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
(27:23):
of him, any of that. It's just it's not talked about,
so I don't actually know. 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.
(27:47):
One former dancer said, he gave me my life. It
feels like airing dirty laundry when you're talking about someone
you see as your father, your mother, you're everything. But
I think some pressure also stems from fear. There's a
strong perception that if you speak ill of balancing, even now,
(28:07):
it will harm your career. And then there's this fear
that admitting to flaws in the past will tarnish an
art form 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. We're mythologizing trauma for the art.
(28:35):
Teresa Ruth Howard sometimes gets frustrated by how dancers remember balancing.
It's like his memory gets mingled with these romanticized clouds
of perfume. 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
(29:00):
that they actually, like French, press down to not feel
or think about 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
(29:21):
the legacy and lifted up in a way. When you
say generational trauma, do you feel like that's affecting ballet
students today like children today. 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
Balanchine because he held women in a very particular space.
(29:47):
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 that language, but it is
a behaved sort of way of being. There's can be
values around the body, there can be values around behavior.
(30:08):
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. Imagine that ballet is
(30:31):
an old English manor house. It's full of rooms, and
in every room people are dancing. That's how choreographer and
scholar Addashola Ackinlay talks about ballet, and I can't stop
thinking about it. They say, one room in the manor
house is the Grand Hall. Everyone looks at the Grand Hall.
(30:55):
It's full of an audience. It's where the attention is,
the buzz and the lights. The Grand Hall is where
people like balancing live, or people who've been permitted to
enter balancing's world. But ballet is vast. There are many
rooms in the manor house. There are many rooms of ballet.
So many people are dancing it in their own companies,
(31:17):
their own choreography, their own way. We've been looking at
just this one room. It's privilege and its restrictions, because
this room is still allowed to dictate how dancers should be.
(31:37):
If you're 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
(31:58):
you have to retire from stage, leave the ground hall behind.
Oh my god, I can't even begin to touch how
rich that culture is and was. Stephanize Land says her
ballet self was hard to shed, and there is an
addiction to being on stage, to having certain rhythms of
(32:23):
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 take me about two
years to come down from that pitch, that energetic pitch
(32:47):
of preparation physiologically literally physiological chemical. 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
(33:10):
ten years on average to function in the normal world.
Wilhelmina Frankfurt says, part of the adjustment is realizing how
abnormal your life has been. For decades, people have been
making decisions for you about you, and your life has
(33:34):
been determined by a daily schedule. It's almost military in
a way. You know, the bugle blows, that's class. 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.
(33:57):
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 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 quarterballet are often called kids.
(34:20):
Coaches yell out to dancers in rehearsal. Good girl, good girl,
your responses are somewhat thwarted and childlike, and you got
to catch up. How do you get a job? And
who are you? I like catched myself doing a thing
(34:59):
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. You may remember Sophie Flack danced with
New York City Ballet, and then in the economic downturn
(35:21):
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 determine her every step in
(35:47):
the world, she hardly knew where to begin. Eventually, she
decided the first step would be education, to go to college.
She picked Columbia. When I went to Columbia, I felt
like I had just exited a bunker. 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
(36:08):
this intense job at one of the most elite art
institutions in the world. I kind of walked onto 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, had traveled. So I went in being
(36:29):
kind of snooty and like 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.
(36:51):
My mind was freaking blown, how little I knew, how
much there was to learn. And I was an expert
at everything that happened in the Leader, 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
(37:13):
people of authority even had to talk to them, because
we didn't talk to our superiors 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. Sophie
(37:37):
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. I couldn't participate in a lot of
social things after school things, norm multichildhood things and I
would sort of reframe them in my head, like, oh,
(37:59):
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 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
(38:20):
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. And I'm kind of
weird and screwed up because I missed them. What makes
you say that? I mean, I imagine a child separated
(38:46):
from her peer group to join a cult, and it's
taught a different culture, a different way of looking at things,
things like if it's not uncomfortable, you're not doing it right.
Being uncomfortable is normal. Do you bury your feelings and
(39:10):
you're never good enough? I mean, these things are different
than the things that you're normally taught. I hope. I
have two kids, and a person's childhood is extremely important,
(39:32):
important the whole rest of your life. Your personality out
us you the world. I spent so much time trying
to learn everything I was wrong. Those dumb things really matter,
They're really important. Even if the activity seems dumb, You're
(39:57):
missing out on experiences and memory that sheep who people are.
And I feel like I'm doing a lot of ketchup
now and after I left the ballet world at twenty five,
which for me felt very young at the time, but
now that I'm on the outside, that was a long time.
(40:21):
That was twenty years in the ballet world that shaped
me a lot. Sophie Flack says she had to unlearned 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. The biggest
(40:43):
lesson 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 the self and
(41:08):
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 a psychotic. This was like real next level
and I was having whatever suicidal ideation and there's more
(41:34):
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 knees. I'm
still learning how to do that better, because there is
life after dance. Oh no, no, ye have oh ouch
(42:27):
sounded like a well. 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. Mom, yes, tid me dance sticking what gifts
to get? I think mostly I'm just gonna talk and
(42:49):
not dance. But if you wanted to dance, you could
could do that. Oh wow, because I'm not really in
dancing mood right now. More in a talking mood, I
go it, I know with for me, Eleanor started a
creative ballet class this year, a room of three and
four year olds. When you're thinking back to your childhood
(43:12):
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 herself. I am
very conflicted. I mean, I'm conflicted about all the things.
Like you know, I'm trying to recount as truthfully as
(43:33):
I hand 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 to like really say it fully. Actually, yeah,
I always have this like flip side of like love
for this art form, and it was a really great
(43:55):
way for me to live. It gave me something to
live for. 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.
(44:17):
But I don't wear it. It's not a badge. But
Stephanie's the land still feels ballet in her. There are
times it 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,
and I passed a room where somebody was rehearsing some
Chopin and a lot of the Robins ballets at Chopin
(44:39):
on stage, 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.
It's so disceral, and I was so jarred because I
didn't know about this, but it was literally like being
(45:04):
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
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
(45:25):
people doing it. I can actually feel the heat of
the stage lights and the warmth of the wings. This morning,
I was driving and the music for Diamonds from Jewels
came on and I started welling up. Driving in the car,
(45:45):
listening to that, seeing Susan and Farrell and Peter Martin's
in front of the screen of my mind and thanking them.
Be so grateful for having witnessed that and having that
part of a life. Every time I hear a piece
(46:06):
of music, something is evoked and provoked and the relationship
to it is so deep, and what what gratitude for that.
(46:38):
We've been talking a lot about these dark sides of ballet.
Is it worth it? Why ballet? The feeling that you
get as an audience member, which is like complete or
at what humans can do when they work together in
(46:59):
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 everything lines up and
you're like spinning perfectly in a pirouette and you know
you're going to land it cleanly, and then you do.
(47:22):
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. My most recurring dream
is a pirouette on point on point, and I spin
(47:46):
and I spin, and 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 the pirouette,
I just stay balanced on point. I don't come down.
I just hover. And it is that feeling in your
(48:06):
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
(48:29):
my body 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. And that is why ballet matters, Because you
(48:50):
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. It matters that we
get this right. This is something all ballet teachers know.
(49:12):
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 comes to ballet. With
(49:40):
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 get rid of bad habits dance.
(50:01):
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 plea, a knee bend,
then the port de bra, move your arms, and then
(50:22):
TANDU you slide your leg out so it's stretched and pointed.
Once you do, you realize it's the base of most steps.
Almost all ballet steps are modified tandus tandus in different
forms balancing understood this, and he loved his tandus. He
(50:46):
had his dancers drill them, not just eight tan dus,
not sixteen, not thirty two, not sixty four. They did
hundreds at all speeds, front side back. He'd prod them,
I saying, what are you saving it for? A deer?
Then he'd say faster. You drill until it's automatic, until
(51:15):
it's etched neurologically in your brain. When culture is drilled,
culture becomes automatic too. We need to look at the
TANDU 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. Balancine 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 to 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? Dear? The Turning is a
(52:35):
production of Our Coco 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 Carrissa is our assistant producer. Andrea Aswahe is our
digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. So many
(52:59):
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 Grizzant, Lisa Zagarmi,
John Frishcoff, Zach Smith, Jacob Smith, Courtney Smith, Weasmore, Erica Berger,
Paul English, Betsy McMillan, Holly Palandro, Matt Silverman, and Andrew Lesser.
(53:26):
Special thanks to Bethan Macaluso, Kate Osborne, Christine Rigassa, Travis Dunlap,
Elizabeth Wachtel, Brianna Hill, Simon Pullman, Nancy Wolf, Alison Cantor,
and the wonderful teams at Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts
for their support. Our executive producers are John Parratti and
(53:52):
Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, and Katrina Norvelle and Nicky
Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on
the series, follow us on Instagram at Prococo Punch, and
you can reach out via email The Turning at Prococo
punch dot com. I'm Erica Lanz. Thanks for listening.
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