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