By Elisa Penha

Editors: Jessica Liu and Alloe Mak

cw: eating disorders, body dysmorphia, harassment

I have been dancing ballet my whole life, and I worry it did me more harm than good.  

I was three when my mother signed me up for preschool ballet lessons, and four when I began training at a Russian ballet school. I was nine when I transferred to a competition school to take jazz, tap, and acrobatics alongside ballet, and ten when I auditioned for and joined Canada’s National Ballet School, where I have been dancing there for seven years now. I am a seasoned ballet dancer. I have also always been the worst in my class. It is not something I say to garner pity or compliments; it is very objective. For starters, I have horrible flexibility, and can hardly sit in any of my splits or stretch my leg far over the barre. I inherited flat feet and turned-in knees from my father, and I’ve needed to wear orthotics in the soles of my shoes for years to keep my toes from pointing inwards while I walk. One of my hips is higher up than the other, so I cannot properly rotate my muscles, and my arms hyper-extend, so my port-de-bras positions always look slightly incorrect.

Despite this, I have persevered. I’m quicker than most to pick up choreography, and my report cards have always said I have an “enhanced sense of musicality”. Whether or not this was just me pulling at straws to find something kind is still up for debate. I don’t think I am pure awful. I wouldn’t have survived for so long at such a prestigious ballet school if I was. But I have never been oblivious to my level of skill—or lack thereof. I meander in the back rows of group dances, and I am never called upon to be used as a positive example by my teachers, but I have made my peace with this. After all, why should I force myself to excel in something if I’m having fun?

I mean . . . I am having fun, aren’t I?

“I hate ballet,” I say often to my friends. “I hate it. It makes me feel horrible.” 

“So why don’t you quit?” they ask me. 

I laugh. Quit ballet? Why would you even suggest something so ridiculous? 

I have always been the biggest girl in my ballet classes. My thighs obscure anybody standing behind me, and I need to hold my breath so that my teachers do not tell me they can see my lunch. I feel their eyes glancing disapprovingly over my stomach which is more pronounced than everybody else’s. I am only eight years old when my teacher tells me to tuck in my backside, and I do not understand what she means, because that’s just the way my body looks. This same teacher tightly wraps cellophane around my midriff to keep my curves flat and composed; the way good ballerinas must hold themselves. 

“You are too big to do the female part,” muses my teacher, finger to her chin. “Dance with the boys instead. They are stocky like you.” 

So I do. I spend much of my early training learning the male part of any given choreography. I curtsey like the boys and I am taught to jump like them, because I do not have the grace of a girl. I am not delicate like a girl. In fact, according to the boys with whom I dance, I am not much of a girl at all, and so they may roughhouse me like a boy. Young boys are incredibly handsy if they are not taught to ask first; this behaviour is not the kind that only flowers in their teenage years. I quickly found that adults didn’t know how to penalize boys when they were so small. He is only eight! they would say to me. He didn’t know not to touch you there, or grab you like that! I think they must have forgotten I was only eight too. But, young me supposes, I guess I shouldn’t hold it against them. 

One of the first lessons ballet taught me is how to be compliant to boys. I think it’s nearly a rite of passage for girls to learn this one way or another. 

In my ballet class, when I am nine, a girl says loudly how she is a food-freak. “I need to stop eating!” she cries, before laughing. “I eat so much, but I never gain any weight! It’s going to catch up to me. I am going to be so fat when I’m older.” She looks at me. “I wish I were chubbier now, how you are, so I could avoid it later on.” 

I wondered if this meant I would be skinny when I grew up. I hoped so. 

I have never not felt guilty while eating at my many ballet schools. 

I was embarrassed, as a child, when my mother packed me snacks to take to class. As if I needed anything more! Was she trying to embarrass me? Did she think I was such a glutton that I needed to take food everywhere I went? None of the other girls brought snacks. Their mothers packed them mineral waters, and see, their legs didn’t expand five sizes when they sat! Even now, at my current ballet school, the receptionist leers at me as I walk through the glass doors with my crumpled paper bag of leftovers from Hero Certified Burgers. I sit in the waiting area outside my studio and shamefully devour my sweet potato fries while the Professional Program girls put away their tutus. They are much thinner than I am. They would never eat something so greasy before dancing, and if they did, they would at least deserve to. But me? What excuse do I have? 

I mean it genuinely: I do not know what I look like. In the ballet world, I am treated like my presence takes up half the room, and not in any way I should feel good about. But the moment I step out of the studio, I am average-sized, if not appealing. I was twelve when a ballet boy, two years my senior, told me: “I think you’re hotter than the other girls. At least you have something. At least you aren’t a stick.” 

I guess this was a compliment. Seventh-grade me sure thought so. He outlined very clearly my enemy in the race for desirability: the other girls. I mean, of course! They were my opposition: other girls. Vapid and too-thin-to-be-pretty ballet girls. It felt better, back then, to shun the other girls and put myself on a pedestal of difference in an attempt to appease the boys than to confront the truth that this vicious ballet beast made up of lean men with sly smiles and old teachers bared its fangs to all of us. Internalized misogyny coiled around me like the wound-up ribbons of my pointe shoes—tight and unlacing around my ankles. If I kept mentally putting them down for the things they had that I wanted so desperately, maybe I wouldn’t feel so horrible about myself. Girls are not meant to be friends in ballet. We are pitted against one another like gladiators, tearing each other down to remain in the good graces of the examination panels. Our friendship threatens them because if we bypass the gladiator ring and begin to support one another, they cannot keep us in isolation with only the worst of ourselves. I was warded off from seeking solace in my fellow ballet girls and decided instead to stomach the purposeful touches of boys as something to take pride in. This is how they wanted me. Walled in and alone, with nothing to turn to save for their advice: bow to the boys, avoid the girls, and for the love of god, get thinner. 

I tried. I really did. I knew I was never going to pursue dance professionally, but why shouldn’t I at least look like I could? Being thirteen, this was all I could think of when I guiltily took seconds at lunch or stole a midnight snack to my bedroom when I wasn’t even that hungry. It took many years of grappling with myself to realize that wishing I had an eating disorder was not something that healthy-minded people did; that this was the eating disorder. I thought I just lacked discipline—at least, that’s what my teachers said. I was beginning to lose track of my thoughts and those embedded in me by ballet. Where did I end, and where did ballet begin? Even after I left the studio for the night, I had to be a dancer. The work didn’t stop. So what if I felt faint? So what if I couldn’t tell the difference between pain from cramping or pain from starving? This was a tired story. Ballerinas with eating disorders are basically an archetype of their own. Who was I to avoid it? I felt like a fraud whenever I ate happily. Would somebody with a real eating disorder be gorging on these chips right now? Would a true ballerina give in to cravings without a second thought? Certainly not. Certainly, thought eighth-grade me, I was just as bad at having an eating disorder as I was at ballet. 

I write this now as I’ve just come home from my last ballet class. I feel I’ve given a false impression, even to myself, of the terror of dance. Because, lo and behold, between all that I suffered, there must have been something that kept me coming back three, or four, or five times every week to the studio. Because ballet was not only pain. Ballet was meeting some of the best people I have ever known. Ballet was falling in love. I danced in the Nutcracker with Canada’s National Ballet, and I remember watching the second act of the show from the wings of the stage at the Four Seasons Centre. My jaw was loose on its hinge as the Sugar Plum Princess and the Nutcracker performed the pas de deux. It was the most marvelous duet I had ever seen. Watching them dance with power and ease while simultaneously knowing that what they were doing was the furthest possible thing from easy reminded me of how I felt: I fucking love ballet. I think ballet is a pinnacle of human achievement; that we have learned to move ourselves and manipulate our bodies in such gorgeous ways, and that we have given names and techniques to all of it is nothing short of magic. It feels like something out of fantasy—dancing schools, dancing lessons, and dancing to tell voiceless stories to live music. A set repertoire of movements that we have composed into endless combinations, each weaving its own tale. Ballet spans countries and cultures and bypasses language. I love to dance, and no matter how much it tears me to shreds, I can never manage to wrench myself away from it. 

And it grieves me how something I love so much has spent so much time hurting me. Why, ballet? I’ve given you everything. I have given you thousands of hours. I have given you my appetite and my body. I have given you my girlhood. And what do you give me in return? Shaming and heartache. Touches I did not want and advice that nearly killed me to heed. Why should I have to be in recovery from one of my greatest passions? These sentiments did not disappear as I got older. Still, in my last year, I avoided standing anywhere at the barre where I might glance at my reflection and I continue to be prodded with redundancies about my weight. But I never quit, for the feeling of the golden stage lights cast over my face never stops being so good. For five choreographed minutes, none of what ballet did or does to me has to matter. 

Despite everything, I don’t regret my ballet career, and I would not take it back. There existed the in-between. The carpooling to class and the suffocating from hairspray in the bathroom before a show. The ugly dog costumes and the saccharine feeling of being complimented on a pirouette. The bliss of dancing. I doubt this will be a part of me I will ever let go. I am already musing on ways for me to continue dancing in university because I do not want to let it go. I am always going to cherish ballet and my time with ballet, even if ballet never did the same for me. But the dread is with me, still, whenever I catch a glimpse of a class of young dancers through their studio windows. They are so small, I think. They are hardly double-digits. This world is going to eat them alive. Maybe it’s already started to. Maybe these elementary schoolers have already been met with the not-so-gentle nagging of holding in their stomachs, or perhaps the unsubtle reminders that other girls are not their friends. I watch them dance carelessly. I wonder if the senior dancers thought the same of me when they watched my rosy-cheeked self take the stage, pleading quietly that I would not be met with their same fates. I try to send them some telepathic strength. Point your toes and don’t let them get to you. Smile wide and stand up for yourself. And most of all, love yourself unapologetically, because ballet isn’t going to.