Ballet Bones [2020]

The day that changed my life was the first of May 2019. Many people saw this day coming. I wish I had too because maybe then I could have helped. A close friend of mine and I were eight years into learning ballet. For the sake of her privacy let’s assume her name is Disha. Her dream and her family’s dream were to see her master professional ballet. I was in ballet class because dancing gave me joy however pursuing it professionally was never my aspiration. She was a ballerina tinker bell, and I was there only to move to music.

Our class had a performance coming up in June and we worked hard at our routines. What the audience must see we were told is ten beautiful young ladies telling a story. We were well prepared to tell the story through graceful dance movements, acquired expressions and our exuberance, though controlled. Yet, there was another story that would be told, a story not quite so shiny and desirable. Disha looked perfect and charming in her clothes and her dancing was precise, majestic and everything the junior girls aspired to have. Yes, for the last ten months or so her company had become less enjoyable, and her face look flushed all the time. On the inside, as I would learn later, she was a swirl of emotions unable to contain them but trying constantly. Not the happy kind! She was frustrated sad scared and above all she was extremely lonely, in a world full of people, surrounded by friends. They only symptom of danger might have been her dropping weight and general appearance. In the world of ballet, young girls at told to make themselves smaller to feel their worth. When you’re inside the system it’s hard to believe something, you love with all your heart is so dark and murky in real life. We dismissed the comments made about our bodies as constructive criticism. We justified are guilt towards eating as a feeling that is helpful to us. Ballerinas break their body down and hope that this will bring their life together. Disha was a ballerina who had developed severe anorexia over the past few months, and this might have been due to the persistent badgering of our teacher that she should be smaller to look more appealing and feminine. It was also due to social media pages Disha followed which consistently persuaded her to become more petite than her body would allow. All this hunger for food, for bliss, for validation was eating away at her. The nourishment that should have come from meals was coming at the expense of her spirit and her actual physical structure. Her grades slipped and she cried all the time, shivered through a beach vacation. All I saw was a flustered face and skinny arms. Everyone said she had peaked, that she was at her most beautiful stage, her smile was gorgeous, her movements perfect like that of a prima Donna when she was nearly dead on the inside. We gathered after rehearsal to listen to our rehearsal critiques.

Disha began to sway and suddenly grabbed my arm; I asked her to describe what was happening, but she had collapsed. Calling her name and gently caressing her head had no effect, an ambulance was called, and her parents came to the hospital with our teacher and me. I realised not quickly enough what happened. Everything suddenly became blurry to me, and I wiped my eyes to discover I was in tears. The ordeal that Disha had faced, so many ballerinas consider routine. Shadows of themselves, their bodies strained till they could take no more. Disha’s body had given up. As she lay recovering on the soft hospital mattress after fighting for life, I saw the truth emblazoned in capital letters all over the ballet stage. We were being sold an idea of beauty not just false but also harmful. The people responsible for us were nowhere in sight. We had been coming apart, but no one was willing to help us, in the name of art and the big picture.

In Winston Churchill words, “the truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end there it is”. I now recalled a heart-breaking documentary about the fastest female athlete in America who was given the chance to participate in the training camp of an elite sports company. Under the broad aspect of training, she was forced to lose amounts of weight that can be deemed unhealthy and lost her title eventually because her body could not deliver under the physical and psychological demands placed on her conveying that athletic equivalent to being successful was to be skinny to the bone. The idea of racing weight has long been debunked but only in theory.

What I took away from this day is that your body keeps you alive and that is something for which the gratitude we feel is all too little. We truly are more than numbers on a scale. The moon wanes every month and becomes a crescent to hide her scars and every month she realises that there is no other way but to shine in her full truth. People stare the full moon in all her beauty, but she may be thinking they’re looking at her scars and maybe therefore the cycle repeats. The most accurate description of happiness is peace with yourself because beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and the focus or what our body can do rather than what it looks like is the only way we can live that rhyme we all sang as children ‘when your happy and you know it clap your hands, when your happy and you know it jump about’.

[Teacher’s notes: brilliant articulation. I couldn’t have agreed more about the world of ballet.]