S2:Ep 10 - Révérence

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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

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.

For my heart, podcasts and Rococoa punch. This is the turning room of mirrors. I'm Erica Lance, Part ten Reverence.

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.

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 while we all watched in the corner. She started to cry, but the teacher kept having her comeback and start again.

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 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

Yeah, that's such a good point too, Like people do know that points 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?

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 a balid answer, you think of a woman. But in most of the professional ballet world, at least men are

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 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 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

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 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 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

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 lot of the 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.

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.

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 they can to make sure their dancers are healthy, and they really try and 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

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 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 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 what do 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 effects of dancing on young bodies. I mean, I really it was like, Oh, what.

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 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 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, 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 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 in kids who are still developing. That can make them more vulnerable to broken bones and ascrirporosis later

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 breeds reverence, reverence for tradition, reverence for authority. It just breeds reverence. Let's be a little 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 annoyed that I didn't notice that it's like right there, bowing and the curtsy.

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 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. And it's just a to me, it feels like a reminder that this art 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 in ballet, we often look to balancing. What are some of the main effects of balancing that you see in 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 Stow Balancing, ballets, Jules is spectacular, Sarahnad is beautiful, Which is why when 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? How do you? You can't?

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.

Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know where to begin. No God, but balancing.

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.

It's always been interesting to me how we assign the moniker of genius to balanching, which I think he is, But I find it interesting that 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 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.

Theresa has noticed that Arthur Mitchell often gets criticized for a leadership style. She thinks he learned from Balannging.

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 balancing in his own context, but it's perceived much differently than balancing. We don't call them 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 the term applied to women. I'd be happy to throw out the label genius altogether, precisely because of who it leaves out. People use the word genius like it's a fact, when really,

I think if you think about, you know, what kind of role model do you want balanching 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 he said, and if you did that, everything would be all right.

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.

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 have this myth 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.

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 emphasize his genius, but other than that, they felt like they knew hardly anything about him.

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.

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.

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.

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 airing dirty laundry when you're talking about someone you see as your father, your mother, your everything. I think some

We're mythologizing trauma for the art.

Theresa 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 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 the legacy and lift it 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 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 that language but it is a behave sort of way of being. There can be values around the body, there

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 Atashola Acinley 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. 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

Oh.

I can't even begin to touch how rich that culture is and was.

Stephanies A Land says her ballet self was hard to shed.

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 take me about two years to come down from that pitch, that energetic pitch 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 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 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. 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 Court of Ballet are

Your responses are somewhat thwarted and childlike, and you got to catch up.

How do you get a job? And who are you?

I 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.

You may remember Sophie Flack danced with New York City Ballet, and then in the economic downturn of 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 the world, she hardly knew where to begin. Eventually, she decided the first step would

When I went to Columbia, it felt like I 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 this intense job at one of the most elite art institutions in the world.

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, had traveled. So I went in being 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

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.

I couldn't participate in a lot of social things after school things, nor multildhood 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 own head. Like even these friendships, these bonds

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 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

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.

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 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.

Oh no, no, okay, stupid free.

Oh ouch.

Sounded like.

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, can we dance sticking?

Well?

Well, give, I think mostly I'm just gonna talk and not dance. But if you wanted to dance, you could.

You could do that.

Wow.

I'm not really a dancing mood right now. I'm more in a talking mood.

I'm eating it, I know with 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 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'm very conflicted. I mean, I'm conflicted about all the things, Like you know, I 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 to like really say it fully. Actually, yeah, I always have this like flip side of like love for this art forum, and it was a really great 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. But I don't wear it. It's not a badge.

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.

And I passed a room where somebody was rehearsing some Chopin and a lot of the robins ballets had Chopin 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. 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 the pirouet, I just stay balanced on point. I don't come down. I just hover. Ugh. 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,

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 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 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 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

Dear?

The Turning is a production of Rocco, 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.