S2:Ep 7- The Line

issue to tackle in the world of ballet? Fat phobiod I firmly believe that ballet culture in general will compromise on basically everything else before it compromises on the body ideal. Chloe Agel is a journalist and she's interviewed dozens of dancers about what happens in the classroom. She wrote a book called Turning Point, How a new generation of dancers is saving ballet from itself. In her book, Chloe explores an idea dancers of any generation will recognize. It's this

concept of the line. Dancers talk about lines, or their line or the line all the time. It can mean slightly different things in different contexts, but basically, from outstretched fingertip to pointed toe, dancers strive for a long, slender shape with their body uninterrupted by what are seen as extraneous angles or curves. I'm curious what you think of the idea of the dancers line and what is why

does that make you laugh? Because so much harm has been done in the name of the line, and it came up all the time when I was reporting turning Point, mostly in young people who had been told they needed to work on their lines, which is usually code for you need to lose weight. They just can't say it out loud anymore. So many people have been encouraged to starve themselves and done so. So many people have shoved their feet under couches so that they can get the

foot arch that they know they're supposed to have. So many people have developed a really dysfunctional relationship with exercise and with food, simply because most people in the ballet world, I'm more interested in their experience of watching it than in the dances experience of executing it. You're there to see the movement be executed in And I'm going to start using problematic words that I can unpack in a little bit in the cleanest, purest, most undistracting way possible.

Breast are unclean, butts are impure, and hips are distracting. That's the way we talk about lines, clean lines, long lines, pure movement, which implies that people who are not incredibly slender with a prepubescent body for girls and women, not for boys, they're allowed to hit puberty and become men. People who don't look like that are somehow unclean, impure and distracting. And it's incredibly damaging, and it's incredibly pervasive, and a lot of those assumptions never get unpacked, never

get made explicit. And I mean that stays with you forever. If you don't unpack it, if you don't face it, if you don't think about what it really means, that shit stays with you forever. Ballerina is starving themselves is practically a tired troupe at this point. Everyone's heard about it, everyone agrees it's not healthy. Dancers have poshed for change, and how they're by these are discussed and considered. But

that's why, in a way it's so surprising. It's still a prevalent problem, and it's kind of a mystery exactly where and how this standard unfurled itself and crept its way into the back of almost every ballet dancer's mind. As I spoke with Chloe, I wanted to understand where these strict standards came from. It's a complicated question. There's definitely not one person or one company who decided it

had to be this way. Ballet evolved over the course of centuries as it moved from France to Russia to America. And there are many people who have nourished and spread the thin ideal in ballet. Sometimes I almost wonder if it's a force that at times has taken on a life of its own, powered by culture and implicit social pressures, like a weed you can't get rid of. At the same time, there are some people who had more influence on the culture of ballet than others. Balancing reshaped American ballet.

He is understood to be the father of American ballet. That's what they call him. And he was not the first person to bring ballet to America. He was not the first person to try and impose his vision of ballet on America. But his stuck. Why do you say that One of the things that he modeled in his company in New York City Ballet was the unquestionable or powerful artistic director boss. They loved him, they worshiped him, they desired his approval and his affection, and that model

is so damaging. It is so ripe for abuse and mistreatment and a general feeling of powerlessness in the workplace and obedience to hierarchical authority that did not begin with him. As he became sort of synonymous with American ballet, lots of people replicated because it quote worked. And the other thing that he left us with is his bodily ideal, particularly for women dances, and that is long legs, long neck, long thin everything that is part of his legacy from

iHeart Podcasts and Rococo Punch. This is the turning room of Mirrors America Lance, Part seven. The line as toxic encoded as invoking the line can be. When I watch a balancing ballet, I'm overcome by beauty, and I find it hard to divorce the line from what makes it beautiful. Like in Balancing's Tchaikovsky Patada, a lonely violin's bittersweet melody is embodied by a dancer in her partner. The ballerina

flits across the stage. She takes her partner's hand gently, and he lifts her over his head while she extends one leg in the air like a thin arrow. Then she reverses direction midair. She stretches her legs apart so they're almost parallel to the floor. Her arms lift to a delicate v, like the outline of a swan's outstretched wings. She's floating. It draws me in, and it did the same thing for Sophie Fleck the first time she saw it. It seemed like it was almost ridiculous, how big she

was moving. It was like almost funny. Sophie Flack saw Balancie's choreography for the first time in the mid nineteen nineties. She was around ten years old. Balancine had been long gone from New York City ballet. He died a decade earlier, but Sophie found herself in a ballet class, huddled in front of a TV screen next to her peers, watching a woman who had been molded by Balanchine himself. The woman was Patricia McBride, and she was dancing the Tchaikovsky Patada,

and literally I was floored. I remember at some point I saw something with a core to ballet. The core de ballet as a group of dancers that typically serves as a backdrop to the soloists, but in Balanchine ballets, the core is often more active and focal. In a piece, he might have dozens of dancers move in unison, dashing across the stage and speedy twirls or dramatic jumps, and I was like, oh my god, that looks so fun.

Like it all just looks so fun. I think for me it was the music, though, you become the music, as George Ballancheen once said, see the music here the dance. Katherine Morgan also discovered Balancheen when she was about ten. It was when she saw the New York City Ballet performed The Nutcracker. Like Sophie, Katherine fell in love with the excitement and the dynamic movement she was seeing from all the dancers on the stage. I remember walking out of there and going, I'm going to be up there

one day. That's where I want to dance. I came home and I was like, I want to dance in New York City Ballet. I want to dance balancing. And then my mom did the research. Katherine and Sophie both started to dream about entering Balancian's world. One day, these two young girls, a few years apart, each started to work on that goal, one in Massachusetts, the other in Alabama.

As they rose through ballet school levels, they each got a with the language and the ways of ballet, how to tie a bun in their hair, how to point their toes, and along with that they began to learn about expectations for their bodies. Because I was never the smallest one. You know, teachers who are trying to be helpful would pull me aside and be like, you know, you're talented enough for this, but you're always going to have to watch your weight. You're gonna have to be careful.

You're not the thinnest one, so you're gonna have to work twice as hard because you're not skinny. You just need to be careful. At like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, it was always a thing in the back of my head that was put there. I remember thinking, well, I'm not worth anything until i'm skinny. I mean, also, you're just I feel like groomed is a very charged word, but I don't know what else to use, but like groomed to accept like a very specific ideal from a very

young age. So it's not even really something you have to talk about a lot. It's like your front should be completely flat with your hips and your stomach and your chest. If there's something jutting out, it ruins the line. I remember people talking about my body like there was a physical therapist I saw regularly, just sort of like to check that I was developing well as a dancer.

And my mother asked, like if she thought that I had like a appropriate body for ballet, like in front of me, and she was like, yes, it's like ideal or something. And my mom was like, do you think like it will change over time, like with puberty, And the woman was like, no, I think like if you know her thighs aren't overdeveloped now, like it would probably just stay that way. Like they were talking about me as if I wasn't there, So I mean that messaging

is like, okay, my thighs like can't get bigger. Basically, how old do you think you were? Then? Oh, you know under ten? For sure you were under ten And they're like talking about the size of your thighs. Yeah. Katherine and Sophie both still aimed to dance balancing's choreography, so on their own timelines. They each audition for the School of American Ballet. The feeder school to the ballet

company founded by balancing. I also remember at the SAB audition School of American Ballet this particular one, before we did anything, the teacher went around and checked our feet, so we each had to point our foot so she could see what our arches were like. So it just shows like, if you have a really pretty foot, it's good for ballet. Katherine had been to so many auditions for ballet schools that they all seemed to blend together, but she says very close examination of the body was

part of it. When you show up for an audition, they'll look at the parents because they'll go, what is this kid going to turn into? What are the genetics? Oh, well, her mom's a little bit curvy, so we'll have to see what happened with that. Oh, her mom has hips. My mom remembers at many auditions being given the full body scan to see what I was going to turn into.

And funnily enough, I'm adopted, so it's irrelevant. So in their auditions, both Katherine and Sophie were evaluated and they both got into the School of American Ballet SAB for short. About two thousand had auditioned just a couple hundred made it so my mom and I made plans with my father, and that's when we decided that she would move up with me because she didn't want her fifteen year old southern girl because I was from Alabama staying in the dorms by herself in New York City. That would not

have gone well. I would have been just lost in a hole somewhere, honestly. Unlike Katherine, Sophie left her family and moved into the arms three floors in a New York Hi rise just below the Juilliard Dorm an elevator ride down from the kid's dorm rooms was the studio, and then the cafeteria was on the bottom floor. So

your whole world is in this one building. You had to check in and out by writing your name and the time, and you had like a certain amount of time I think that you had you could be out before coming back. In the lounge, we would watch sex in the city. The person at the desk would like throw a movie night or something once a week where you'd have like all this junk food laid out, and we would use the stairs for exercise for burning calories. We'd run up and down them we got really competitive

about burning calories. In between ballet classes. Sophie went to Professional Children's School in New York. It's a school for kids pursuing careers like actors, dancers, musicians. A lot of movie stars go there. Each day, Sophie would have to hurry back for ballet class. We literally run along Columbus Avenue, racing the other girls in my class to get a good spot near the teacher or at the skinny mirror.

And then we'd go back again for another class. And like our meals were eaten while walking, and I remember noting to myself, I am doing this like I'm going to give it my all or I'm going to go home, like that kind of thing. I really worked hard every day. When Sophie went down to the SAB studios, she passed a giant bust of balancing. It reminded her who this was all for. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion, Like this is bigger than you.

I was serving something larger than myself. If it's not God, then it's the art form or balancing. For me, it felt like it's like balancing's ghosts or something Balancine's ghosts loomed large at SAB, but to progress, Sophie and Catherine had to grab the attention of a mortal man, the head of the New York City Ballet who had final say in their futures, the artistic director of the company at the time, Peter Martin's. When Sophie Flack was a teenager at SAB, it was still years before an internal

investigation would take place and Peter Martins would resign. To Sophie, all that mattered was if Peter liked her. He held a lot of power, but it also was very apparent in his body, just the way that he moved through space and the way he regarded people. He spoke with this light, sophisticated Danish accent. He was quite tall, sort of like Ramrod posture, so when you enter a room, it's not just like a pedestrian walking into a room.

You're making an entrance. He seemed very aware of his presence. He was like a figure, not a person. Later, when Sophie was in the company, she says dancers would point out the cameras that monitored the stage and joke there were cameras everywhere with a live fee to Peter's office. It felt like he was always watching, like you were always on display. He never spoke to us. He had like a very small circle of people who he seemed

to know or gap with a little bit. That seems sort of like on the inside, or like knew a secret that no one else knew. I didn't quite understand how one gained entry to that. It's very small social circle. They definitely existed on a higher plane. I'll just say that. And like, you know, we're in charge of our everything,

our lives, our roles, validation, you know everything. Sophie knew she had to please Peter's inner circle, but ultimately Peter made all the decisions about who would join the company. He would observe class at the school and occasionally teach, which was terrifying. The balancing technique is like the whole idea was to push yourself off balance, to reach beyond what you thought you could, so there's never quite an

end to it. Sophie worked harder than she ever had, but it wasn't enough to execute a certain number of flats or drill hundreds of perfectly formed tondus to gain entry into that inner world. She felt she'd have to do something more. I think I started developing like an eating disorder actually when I was about twelve, because I started developing breasts and I didn't want to because I was concerned they were too big for the company. Sophie wanted to look like a balancing dancer. She had four

tapes of balancing repertoire. She watched them on repeat. She studied the movement and the dancers, and she noticed a pattern. Everybody was completely flat chested in the videos that I was watching. I'm not talking about like small boobs. I'm talking about like like almost like a man. And then I started getting little boobs and they just kept getting a little bigger, like and I that was not okay, And like the only way I knew how to control

it was through diet. So yeah, you definitely aren't allowed to grow up. Do you know with women in ballet, when they naturally become what they're supposed to become, which is a woman, it's like, you know, oh, she's getting hips. Oh she's starting to look like a woman. Oh she's in and you're like, um, that's what's supposed to happen. Whereas with men it's the opposite. Oh, he's so scrawny. Oh, he's becoming a man. Finally he looks like a man. And for us, it's the flip side. They want us

to stay looking prepubescent. Yeah, it's weird that the look they're going for is a grown man partnering, dancing with a child, a child, a young girl. So when Sophie was about fifteen, she even saw a surgeon about her body. She hoped her breasts could be reduced. They didn't have enough fat in my boobs to like reduce them, and he's so he was like, well, I could just lose weight sort of nonchalantly, and I put myself on a diet. After that, it took over me. It got out of control.

After all of the years of pressure to be than, something started to happen to Sophie where her eating behaviors took on a life of their own. It was like a force beyond her control, a force she couldn't stop. While recovering from an injury, Sophie says she lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time. I got a lot of praise from the boys in the school in partnering class to the school's credit, Sophie says, her teachers pulled her aside because they were concerned about

her weight loss. They referred her to a nutritionist which I saw, which I basically laughed off. I remember she said I had to eat two thousand, five hundred calories a day, and I literally laughed when she said that because I was sustaining myself on so little that amount seemed ridiculous. Instead of talking myself out of eating, in my technique which I won't share, I made myself eat like one bad food a day, and after the intervention, I bottom muffin from the bake sale at my school.

It was a mini muffin, and I was really proud of myself. I eat half of it. I couldn't eat the other half. I was scared for myself. I don't want to underplay the severity of this. Eating disorders can lead to heart failure, neurological problems, structural brain changes like the brain shrinking in size, intense emotional turmoil, and death. Anorexia is the most lethal mental health condition there is. It has suicide rates sixty times that of the general population.

That's also higher than for depression or bipole her disorder or schizophrenia, but from Sophie's perspective, being thin would help her achieve her goal. I got a ton of attention from Peter Martin's that year. I remember him holding my hand as I demonstrated in front of room. I felt like I had a real shot at being in the company. It seemed to be a good thing. But the problem was I didn't know how to maintain it. I only knew how to keep going. I never learned how to

eat properly at all. It was like binging or extraditing. One day, a ballet mistress, the person who led company rehearsals, pulled Sophie and a couple other students into an office. She closed the door and there was like three of us in the room or something, and she said, so you probably know you've accepted. She said, Peter would like you to join as an apprentice. That's the first step towards gaining a permanent position in the company. It was almost like I should have known it the way she

said it. The way she spoke was in the speak of the theater. Basically, like nothing was direct, ever or explicit. Every kind of communication was like sort of an afterthought, and it was sort of a power that they held over us. Maybe Sophie didn't get the praise or warmth she'd craved, but at least she was going to be an apprentice. At age seventeen, she'd given everything, her family, her home, her body to this cause and she'd been accepted.

Like Sophie, Katherine Morgan was also seventeen years old when she got her apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet. An apprenticeship is a huge deal, but it's still nerve racking because there's no guarantee you'll become a full time higher at the end of the year. It could be the end of the road after years of work. So two weeks in we're in company class. I'm doing Swan

Lake rehearsals. I'm Swan number seventeen on the left, you know nobody and one of the principal dancers tears her calf muscle in class and literally falls has to be carried out of the room. Is very scary. A few days later, Peter Martin shows up to teach class, and whenever the director teaches, it's sort of a mini audition because the director doesn't always teach, especially Peter. He wouldn't

teach weekly. He would just show up on the schedule, and so when Peter Martin's shows up on the schedule, the entire company is there. So you're in this room of like ninety something people, and I remember just not being able to do anything that day, Like I fell out of every turn. I couldn't stay balanced to save my life because I was still a baby. I had been in the company maybe a week at this point, and I thought any moment I could be fired, any moment.

After rehearsal, the ballet mistress beckoned Catherine over with a curled finger. Catherine froze. She was like, Sean wants to talk to you. Sean was like number two in command to Peter, and he comes. Everybody says, so, as you know, a couple days ago, the principal got hurt and I was like, uh huh, and he said, you know, well she's supposed to dance Juliette and Saratoga. Uh huh. Well, we'd very much like for you to replace her. And it was one of those like are you talking to me?

Did you see the rehearsal I just had? Did you see me fall on my face? She'd just been given the part of Juliette in Romeo and Juliette, and then Peters comes running over like, did you tell her? Did you tell her? Catherine was the only apprentice who was being asked to this type of solo role. She was being singled out. It could be that moment when she would turn into a star. Opening day finally came. It was held in an outdoor Amphitheater in Saratoga, New York,

where the New York City Ballet performs every year. It's a company's summer residency where Peter Martin's tries dancers in different roles and make some of the critical decisions on which dancers will make it. I remember being really nervous because this was sort of do or die for me. The stage wings were full of company dancers waiting to see how she would do. And I just remember doing my turn and all of a sudden seeing blood on

my costume and thinking, oh dear, what happened. And then all of a sudden Tyler glaring at me, wiping blood off his nose. He's halfway staying as we're dancing, you actually in the face, but just keep going. But the people she needed to impress didn't seem to mind. Peter was pleased, and I remember one of the other ballet masters who was very difficult to please, coming up to me, going that was beautiful. That was beautiful. That's when I

knew I had it. After that, Catherine quickly moved through the ranks from a core member to soloist, landing role after role. It's funny because Peter Martins told me exactly what it was. He. I know a lot of dancers had issues with him. He was nothing but lovely to me. I can't speak for anybody else, but he was always very encouraging and mentoring to me. He said, you know, you're not the technician, but you tell the story. You're the artist. Your artistry is going to give you a career.

When Sophie, the other young dancer, joined the company, she was just focused on how grateful she was to be there. I felt like I just won the jackpot, you know, being accepted. I was very proud because I was very aware of the prestige of being a part of it. One day, after rehearsal, the ballet mistress kept her late. You know, my heart stopped. I was, you know, really worried I was gonna lose my job. First because I was still a new core member. She told Sophie, Peter says,

he notices you've gained weight. It's what Sophie calls her first fat talk. A lot of professional dancers use the term fat talk because they're so common. As a soloist in the company, Catherine wasn't a mune either. It's never we need you to lose weight, because they can get in a lot of trouble saying that kind of stuff. So there's different phrases. You need to get in shape. Get in shape is the phrase. It's code for lose weight.

I don't think you're in your best shape. I think I said I just got my period or something, and she took that to mean that I had gotten it for the first time recently, and I let her believe that. But I thought that was really interesting that at nineteen she thought it was normal for a dancer to have her period for the first time. I mean, she's a woman, like she knows that around the time of your period, your body, you know, gets bloated, whatever, So she seemed

to have some understanding. I didn't feel like it. I really didn't feel like it was coming from her. Actually, she was the messager. I don't blame her. It's like, I bet she didn't want to have those conversations. She might not have agreed, but that was her job. The same institution that had an intervention to address her severe eating disorder only a few years prior was now telling her she needed to lose weight. Everyone at the theater was very cold emotionally, so I didn't expect any warmth.

I think I probably started crying and just sort of really worried, and that was the first thought. I think, like, I'm screwing this up, this is this is not good. Catherine Morgan, the dancer cast as Juliet, was twenty one when she landed another major role, this time Aurora and Sleeping Beauty and Princess. Aurora is not only the crown jewel role of ballet, but it is, in my opinion, the hardest one. It is the most technically demanding, the

most physically demanding. You feel like you've run six marathons by the time you're done with this ballet. And I remember all the other Auroras were like, oh, I lose like five pounds a show, and I'm like, so skinny and Navada, and I remember thinking I'm kind of starting to gain weight doing this bat it's really odd. I just thought, okay, well, I don't lose five pounds a show. I'd like gained a pound a show. I hadn't changed my diet. But I started ballooning up and then I

started to get really, really tired. And Peter Martins was doing a new ballet at the time, and we were in the studio eight hours a day choreographing this thing, and so I just thought, I don't have time to eat. I can't get through this ballet, like what is happening to me? And balot masters had started pulling me aside, going are you aware that you are putting on weight? And I wanted to go No. I had no idea. You know, it's my job to stare at myself in

the mirror twenty four seven. But no, not a clue. Of course I was aware, and then I would go up to point or go up to balance, and my muscles would give out. So it was like my body was just starting to collapse. And I gained forty five pounds in six weeks, barely eating anything, and people were going, what is happening? Catherine says doctors were confused about her weight. Complaints.

Even after the weight gain, she was in a normal weight range, but her standards as a ballerina were totally different. She couldn't fit into the costumes and she struggled to get through rehearsals and she didn't know why. So eight doctors later and two years of battling this, I was so miserable. So finally I was cast as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is one of the two lovers, as they say in Midsummer and Peter came to watch my rehearsal and he said nothing, and he said, let's go.

Let's go talk. So we went to his office and he was just like, how are you feeling? And I had lost it. I just burst into tears and I was like, I can't do this anymore. I'm so ill and sick and huge. And I said, Peter, I think I need to like not come back next year. I think I need to let my contract run out, go home and get well. Because the pressure of trying to be in the New York City Ballet and I was now a soloist by this point, I was like, I

can't do this anymore. I'm on this hamster wheel of misery, and he just gave me a huge hugg and he was like, I knew you were smart. Put your health first. There'll always be a place for you here. But in the ballet world, as health ever first, Catherine would have to make a choice. She went home to her parents' house, but things would never be the same again. Year after year, Sophie worked diligently as a core to ballet ballerina, but as time We're on, she wanted more opportunities to stretch

herself creatively. She kept being put in more traditional ballets when she created something else. She wanted to dance Balancie's angular abstract works as Vinsky ballets, where movement and music ruled what they referred to as the black and white ballets, less story, more abstraction. She scheduled a meeting with Peter Martin's to ask if she could study some of those roles. She might never perform them, but at least she could learn. Even like walking down the hallway to his office, you

know made you like stressed out. You know, it's like going to see the wizard. I know. Peter's office was like a relic. It's like a tiny built in sofa that looked like it had been built in like the seventies, and it probably had been. And Gold's carpet, the whole theater was that way, like it hadn't been touched since Balanchine's era. Peter walked out from behind his desk. He was fairly warm, and he came like physically closer to me, and I felt heard, and you know, I was terrified

and really nervous and stuff. But I said the things and he responded to it like okay, like why don't you come back with like some specific roles and ideas? And I felt very encouraged. But when the casting and rehearsal schedule for the next Black and White ballet was posted, Sophie didn't make the list. I wasn't even called to understudy,

as if we hadn't ever spoken. Then, in the economic downturn of two thousand and nine, there was buzz about a possible mass layoff, and there was a lot of anxiety. I didn't want to believe that it was true. One afternoon, Sophie was hanging out with her boyfriend on the Lower east Side, Sophie's stomping grounds on her days off. She was walking down the sidewalk When she got a call from Peter's personal assistant. She didn't say what it was.

She just said, Peter would like to meet with you, and he I never had a meeting where Peter called the meeting before, so I knew exactly what it was about. I knew that I was going to be laid off, and I literally fell to the pavement. I was just completely distraught. I felt like I'd just been diagnosed with some terminal illness. It felt like, you know, there was an end to the sidewalk. Basically, I just remember cars going by, people going on with their lives, and this

abyss that opened up before me. It felt like facing death. I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's really what it felt like. I didn't know another way to live. I didn't know what was next at all. I didn't ever consider a life after dance. That's what we were sort of taught to do, because how could you possibly give yourself completely if you're always looking ahead. They had the meeting, Peter stuck to his line. They didn't have the funds, so if he danced several more months until

her contract ran out, which was really really difficult. I was just sort of like went through the motions and did as little as possible. I was extremely upset and mad. It was hard to like look people in the eyes, hard to like just navigate the day in the theater. I just want to stop. You know, people are surprised why I didn't want to continue dancing after all that. Why would I want to continue dancing in the company or at all at all? Sophie would never dance professionally again.

She left the company with lots of questions, but there was one she couldn't ask, too afraid to make it explicit. Was it my body? You know? I blamed myself. I felt like a failure because I thought it was my fault. After Catherine Morgan left the company to focus on her health and these mysterious symptoms and weight gain she'd been experiencing, she went home to her parents house and alab Amma.

She still felt tired all of the time, the symptoms hadn't subsided, hair loss, weight gain, and still no answers. Part of your identity is a dancers how you look in the mirror, and it's also how what makes you feel good about yourself or not. It's what gets you roles or not. And usually your job as a dancer is to be criticized. To fix it. Nope, your knees not straight, Nope, put your feet. So you get into this mentality that everything is fixable. I just have to

do my part. If it's not right, it's because I'm not doing it right. And she had no fix for the body she saw staring back at her in the mirror. My only definition of success was being a skinny ballerina on the stage of New York City Ballet, and so once that was taken from me, I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing. I lost completely who I was, I had no outside life. I felt totally worthless because it was my identity. I committed to it at fifteen and

I knew nothing else. And this I felt like, Oh, I'm letting my younger self down because I sacrificed so much in my childhood to do this, you know, like I didn't go to prom, I didn't go to high school graduation, I didn't go to sleepovers, I didn't get you know, because I was so committed to this and then to have it fall apart, I felt like I was letting myself down. One day, she stood at the top of her parents' stairs on the second floor, and

a thought flew through her mind. I had that flash moment of what would happen if I just threw myself down the stairs and ended this? Because it was it was, I was so unhappy. There wasn't one thing that helped her get beyond the pain and depression or filled the void that ballet left in her life. She got a counselor a dog, and finally a diagnosis how she motos thyroid itis, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid, which helped her manager symptoms, but what really helped the most

was distant. For nine years, she stayed away from the stage. So with ballet, I was literally in a twenty four to seven until my illness hit, and then I got out of the system for a long time. And then suddenly you're like, oh, I was able to see the kind of weird quirks of the ballet world that I had never seen before because I was just in it and didn't know of any other way. You hear from the people who were not in the professional ballet world, and I remember a couple of people being like, well,

why why is it like that? And then you start to go well, I don't know why, and it was being out of the professional company world for a while started me to question things. You start to realize tho, oh, these people are brainwashed. What are the points of brainwashing that ballet dancer's experience that you have to starve and that you have to have a certain look to you. Another one is that you must push through an injury.

I see so many danswers push through injuries because they are so terrified to say something, because they don't want to get in trouble, or they don't want to be deemed as lazy, or they don't want to lose a spot. So many teachers again operate on scare tactic and well, if you can't do it, someone else will. We have four more people in line. I'll put your understudy on. I think it's also this thing of the person in the front of the room is the do or die dictator.

The teacher of the director is literally God, and you must do what they say at all times without question, even if the step is being taught wrong or the choreography is wrong. You're scared to speak up out of fear of your job. It's sometimes like well, you know, you should be grateful to be here, be seen and not heard. So dancers have no say, no control. And really it's a career based on other people's opinions, literally

other people opinions, and that's why it's so hard. It's not the Olympics that's decided by who ran the fastest, you know, it is one hundred percent someone else's opinion, which means then that you have to constantly please yep. Gradually, Catherine got back into the studio, this time on her own terms. Suddenly, when I wasn't trying to impress anybody being served to work, that's when I could finally like dance again. And when she learned Miami City Ballet was

looking for dancers, she auditioned. It was in her wheelhouse because the company was founded by a balanching dancer. They frequently perform his choreography. After four days of auditions, Catherine was offered a soloist position with the company. She was frank with the director, I'm never going to be the thinnest one in the room, and I was told, oh, well, don't worry about it. You look absolutely beautiful. We liked that you're different. She thought, maybe this time, she wouldn't

have to choose between health and ballet. Her first performance back was in a balanching ballet called Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which was so much fun. I've never had more fun on stage. You play a nineteen twenties strip tease girl and you're on you know, it's just it's just so much fun. Catherine was dancing every day. She'd reclaimed her identity. She had left the pain of disappointment behind. It felt amazing.

But at a half hour call to one of my shows, I was called in and I was the whole spiel again. You're not looking as you should, you're not in shape, have a good show. It was became very apparent to me that the ballet world had not changed. So at that point I was like, all right, I'm going to show them stupid. Went back to seventeen year old brain. After having worked through, you know, a decade of what I worked through, I stopped eating and as you can imagine,

that didn't go well. Three days later I strained my calf muscle in a knockcracker rehearsal, which can happen when you're under fed. Then I was very quickly taken out of every ballet I was learning for the rest of the season, and it just sort of spiraled and wasn't good. Then all of her old autoimmune condition symptoms flared up. The line that was said to me that I will

never forget as long as I live. I know you're supposedly this inspiration to all these people, but I don't think you can be a true inspiration until you're back on the stage looking like a ballerina in point shoes. And I was just like hump. At that point, I knew I was done, and she left all the things that had been said to me. I was back in that place of I literally couldn't look at myself in the mirror. Hi, everybody, So I have a bit of a more serious video for you guys today, as you

can probably tell. Rather than spiral again, she went public with her story on her YouTube channel along when I kind of don't even know how I'm gonna go about this, to be honest, it's a bit daunting to me, as a lot of you have done yours. The author we talked to earlier, Chloe Angel, heard about it and it was a huge deal. I mean, she'd been out of professional ballet for years and there was a lot of fanfare, there was a lot of publicity around it, and then

they wouldn't put her on stage. To Chloe, it confirmed what she already knew. The problem runs deep. There is this suite of euphemisms and code words that is being delivered to dances, and most of them understand what it means. But it's being couched in terms of health and length and getting fit and getting in shape and getting toned. But what you're asking is for most dances is not a healthy outcome. And it's a mind fuck. Who decided this? Who decided you know that you have to have twig

like arms or legs? Did the skies open up and the ballet god said this is how it host to be. No, it's just what we've all been programmed. I didn't understand that you're worthy because you're a human first, not because you're a dancer. Instead of having a full time company job, Catherine found another way to dance. She freelances as a soloist, teaches ballet and coaches dancers, and when our videos came out in twenty twenty, dancer after dancer told her they

had similar experiences. Other dancers have also gone public, like a New York City Ballet principle and an Instagram live last year, or another soloist who wrote that Peter Martin's pointed from her knee to her butt and said she didn't fit in from there to there. She'd struggled with bulimia, and she ended up getting liposuction on her thighs. And it's not just scrutiny from within the company, it's everywhere.

Critics set the tone too. For example, a dance critic at The New York Times mocked the weight of a principal dancer in a review after she'd been open about her eating disorder. He said she'd had one sugar plum too many. He defended himself afterward, he said, quote, ballet demands sacrifice in its pursuit of widely accepted ideals of beauty. If you want to make your appearance irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career. I am severe,

but ballet, as dancers know, is more so. End quote. The idea that you want really a ballet dancer until you look like a ballet dancer is really pervasive. You know, if you are uncomfortable watching at us bigger than standard ballet. Dancer,

do ballet. If it doesn't look right to you, that is something that you need to sit with and think about and think about why, and think about the cost, the human cost, the physical, psychological, emotional cost of that kind of gate keeping of who doesn't get to dance, of who has to suffer in order to dance. It's so deep seated, it's so harmful, and it's just completely unjustifiable. So often the idea of the line is talked about like this geometrical fact, like an artistic truth that can't

be argued with. But the older I get, the more I question that, I start to think, Yeah, I have been brainwashed. I've been so inundated with images of thin bodies dancing ballet that I eventually believed that that was objectively better. On a gut level, I've been programmed to think certain body, these make lines that are more beautiful than others, that a flowing arm that curves is beautiful,

but a curvy body is not. I don't believe that anymore, because I've been working to deprogram myself for more than a decade. Is the idea of the line, I mean, how real is it? Even? I mean is the line better? And my answer is who cares? Because people are suffering.

The audience having a good experience of ballet and enjoying what they see on stage is dependent on that line, and that line is dependent on people starving and people collapsing in the wings from exhaustion, and people getting early on set austerea porosis and bone fractures and long term muscles skills will damage, rexia and body dysmorphia, and a permanently messed up relationship with food and with exercise and early retirement and the kind of disillusionment that a lot

of former dances feel. Who gives a shit about the line? Next time? On the Turning? Imagine as a black ballet student at the time, hearing that that was the thought a ballerina should be the color of appealed apple, and I remember thinking, well, if you leave a peeled apple out on the counter four minute, it turns brown anyway, So what does that mean? The Turning is a production of Rococo 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 Carissa is our assistant producer. Andrea Swahe is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special thanks to Chloe Angel, who you heard from today. Her incredible book about the world of ballet is called Turning Point, How a new

generation of dancers is saving Ballet from itself. Our executive producers are John Paratti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch and I Get Trina Norbelle and Nikki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on the series, follow us Ongram at Rococo Punch and you can reach out via email the Turning at Rococo Punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.