Ballerina

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Ballerina Page 12

by Deirdre Kelly


  Becoming a Balanchine ballerina meant learning not only a whole new repertoire of complex and difficult moves but also how to subordinate her will to the dictates of the master machinist, the guy tightening the screws, so to speak, on the art of classical dance. The choreographer preferred this image of himself as a manual laborer who tinkered with the female body to create ballets universally celebrated for their clockwork precision and locomotive speed. People who called him a genius were soon set straight: “I am not a genius, I am a craftsman,” Balanchine said. He was equally disparaging of being called an artist: “Only God creates; I assemble.”25

  Balanchine’s so-called blue-collar approach to ballet reduced the ballerina to the status of a mechanical appendage that could be manipulated to drive the art form forward. It perhaps explains how a celebrated Balanchine ballerina like Patricia McBride, when she was at the height of her powers as a dancer with New York City Ballet, ended up being (unironically) described by a leading New York critic as “having dispensed with all angles in her body” to the point that she appeared “to be dispensing with her body as well, with recalcitrant flesh.”26 Shy of calling them robots, such Balanchine ballerinas appeared more like widgets than flesh-and-blood women, a product of the assembly line. It’s an interpretation supported by dance anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna, who calls modern ballet as interpreted by Balanchine “protechnology in its emulation of the machine’s precision, economy, and speed.”27

  Balanchine emphasized the technical in his ballets, telling his ballerinas not to feel, just dance his steps without question. Many dancers who worked under Balanchine report that he was succinct about what he wanted: “Don’t think, dear, do.”28 The movement, he said, would be its own source of emotion, according to Balanchine ballerina Sara Leland in a 1972 interview: “Mr. B. depends on the movement itself to bring out the quality he wants in a ballet, he does not try to develop ‘expression’ in the dancers. It is there, he tells us, in the choreography—we have only to dance the choreography to express it.”29 His ballerinas mostly did as they were told. “First of all, dancers are very obedient,” remarked Vera Zorina (1917–2003), the Ballets Russes dancer who was Balanchine’s wife, his second, and the star of the commercial dance spectaculars Balanchine created for Broadway in the 1930s.30 “Dancers don’t go about making a fuss.”31

  Balanchine might have believed himself to be acting in accordance with his times in creating works stripped to their essence, but his notion of the ballerina as a selfless being in servitude to her art was more a recasting of the nineteenth-century Romantic ideal that modern ballet was said to have moved away from; the identity of the ballerina in the twentieth century was predicated on a deep-rooted notion of self-sacrifice: “A great modernist artist, Balanchine created his art on the bodies of his ballerinas, whom he convinced to starve themselves toward his own vision of beauty,”32 observed one ballet scholar. Emaciation and enslavement to an ideal were the methods by which the ballerina would succeed under his watch. In this regard, Balanchine’s modern ballerina was no different from the fragile heroine of Giselle, the fluttering Sylph in La Sylphide, or Emma Livry’s combustible butterfly in Le Papillon: she was equally meant to be an ethereal and ephemeral being, an object of unrequited desire.

  “As dancers we spent enormous amounts of time working in front of mirrored walls in brightly lit studios where our physiques were on constant public display,” said ballerina-turned-scholar Susan Young. “Relentless critical self-assessment of the body and a concomitant drive to suppress the physical evidence of female maturation—breasts, hips, fleshy curves—were not only tolerated but professional requirements. In this context, remaining physically prepubescent fed into the practical, that is, biomechanical—requirements of the female dancer. This is because a ballerina seeks to present the illusion of weightlessness, of occupying as little space as possible in order to suggest a chaste and unattainable woman-child. She is a creature of the air, not the earth.”33

  Creating that illusion of weightlessness during the Balanchine era was not just a matter of technique but of extreme thinness. While he liked women of all shapes and sizes—from the diminutive Japanese-Canadian soloist Sono Osato to the statuesque Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief (another of his four dancer wives)—Balanchine felt no shame in describing his ideal female body as “like toothpick.”34 He made thinness a visible marker of the moral worth of the modern ballerina and seemed most to admire those ballerinas who could conform to his exacting principle—“that long-legged thing,” as Zorina called it.35

  On the surface, Balanchine’s ballet appeared female centered, but it was, in fact, responsible for institutionalizing an image of the female dancer achievable only through the utmost deprivation, bordering on torture. Ballerinas routinely went under the knife to enhance their onstage line. Gelsey Kirkland had her earlobes trimmed and her nose tweaked; she also had silicone implants inserted into her lips, breasts, and ankles, the latter to enhance her onstage line. Ballet is a visual art, and dancers are always made aware of how they look, practicing before mirrors all day long, a habit that makes them hyperaware of their bodies and also hypercritical. Dancers often experience pressure to conform to a certain look, especially when the right body gets the right roles, a truism as valid in Balanchine’s time as it is today.

  But more prevalent than plastic surgery in emulating the Balanchine ideal is self-starvation in the form of eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, which ballerinas routinely engage in to bring themselves down in size. Dancers have been known to subsist on coffee and soft drinks, amphetamines and lettuce. If they eat anything more substantial, they stick their fingers down their throats to make themselves disgorge their food. Self-induced vomiting introduces a host of other problems: corrosive stomach acids that eat away at the esophagus and the enamel of the teeth, weakened bones that make dancers prone to stress fractures and other injuries. Still, some dancers think it’s better to eat nothing at all: “We don’t eat food,” says Bentley in her ballet memoir, A Winter Season. “We eat music.”36

  How small did the Balanchine dancer need to go to make herself favorably noticed? Kirkland, one of the greatest American dancers of her generation, makes it explicit in her explosive memoir, Dancing on My Grave (1986), in which she discusses Balanchine’s demand for an emaciated aesthetic:

  He halted class and approached me for a kind of physical inspection. With his knuckles, he thumped on my sternum and down my rib cage, clucking his tongue and remarking, “Must see the bones.” I was less than 100 pounds even then. Mr. B did not seem to consider beauty a quality that must develop from within the artist; rather, he was concerned with outward signs such as body weight. His emphasis was responsible in part for setting the style that led to some of the current extremes of American ballet. I allowed him to use me to that end by trusting his advice. He did not merely say, “Eat less.” He repeatedly said, “Eat nothing.”37

  Many dancers have since willingly followed that dictate, sparking an epidemic of eating disorders in ballet that continues to rage today. “Anorexia nervosa is believed to have increased in the past several decades, due to the new cultural ideal of the angular thin woman,” reports one medical study, based on data collected by experts in the field of eating disorders over the last twenty-five years.38 “This has been attributed to the marked influence of the choreographer, George Balanchine.”39

  Test cases involving ballet students since the 1970s, when the Balanchine effect on the health of ballet dancers first started being recorded by the medical establishment, show that female ballet dancers generally ingest fewer calories than controls of the same age, height, and weight: average intakes of 1,000 calories have been reported, though some highly active female ballet dancers have been known to consume as few as 600 calories a day.40 The recommended daily intake for people four years or older is 2,000 calories, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.


  Ongoing research on female ballet dancers and eating disorders shows that professional female ballet dancers today are “at a much higher risk for reporting eating disorders than are non-athletic women or even adolescent dance students.”41 The prevalence of anorexia nervosa in ballet dancers is significantly higher than in the normal population.42 On average, professional female ballet dancers weigh more than 20 percent below their ideal weight for their height.43 The demand for dieting and slimness is more intense for them than for “other females in a western cultural environment.”44 Ballet school students are seen as “a population at high risk” and “an endangered group,”45 who often cannot even recognize that they are ill.

  This goal of thinness, this skeletal ideal, was and continues to be exceedingly harmful to ballerinas’ health. Poor nutrition creates brittle bones, which can lead to injuries, the bane of a ballerina’s existence, and possibly early retirement. It also diminishes dancers, stunting their development as women and turning them into sexless waifs. “If you take a girl at twelve years of age and keep her below about 17 percent body fat,” observed Dr. Lawrence M. Vincent, a physician and former dancer who studied anorexia in student ballerinas in New York, “she won’t menstruate. Puberty is arrested, her hypothalamic function is suppressed, and she has low estrogen levels. Estrogen, of course, affects breast and hip development. These girls go into a puberty-holding pattern. The claims of ballet mistresses that they can pick out a future ballet body are false; they’re simply selecting late developers and, with the help of poor nutrition, keeping them that way. It’s almost as if ballet had created a new species of woman: low estrogen and androgynous.”46

  The emphasis on thinness in female ballet dancers was an artistic imperative that penetrated the ballet world with alarming ferocity, producing underfed dancers with jutting hip bones and prominent clavicles everywhere classical ballet is practiced. Balanchine’s acolytes helped institutionalize the ideal and the eating disorders that are the direct result of its pursuit. “In the first half of the century, ballet dancers were not especially thin, although they certainly were athletic,” observes dance scholar Wendy Oliver, a specialist in dance and women’s studies. “Since the advent of George Balanchine’s company, the New York City Ballet, the American female ballet dancer has been slimmer than ever before. As is now legend, Balanchine favored a slim-hipped, long-legged look that has since become the standard for ballerinas in most companies.”47

  Dancers who never even danced with Balanchine have ended up suffering the consequences of Balanchine’s impact on twentieth-century ballet, though few are willing to talk about it. The point is driven home by Deborah Bull’s 2011 book, The Everyday Dancer, a first-person account of the author’s former life as a principal ballerina with the Royal Ballet. Now creative director of the Royal Opera House, Bull devotes only one page to an eating disorder “that affected half of my career” but seven to the rituals used in preparing her toe shoes. “The art of ballet, so predicated on physical denial,” writes a reviewer, “is described here by a writer whose loyalty to its customs operates as a kind of veil over its everyday pain.”48

  Eating disorders are linked to mental illness, which might explain why dancers are generally reluctant to speak openly about their own experiences, fearing further stigmatization by their art. But the problem is real. A dancer like Kirkland, among the first to sound the alarm back in the 1980s, is more the rule than the exception. What marks her as different is her bravery in going public with what, to a large extent, remains a forbidden topic, especially in ballet itself. It is only very recently that the subject of anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders in ballet is being publicly aired. A Dance U.K. conference on eating disorders that took place in London in April 2012 was pronounced by the press as radical for just that reason. Attending the conference was the Royal Ballet’s outgoing artistic director, Monica Mason, who underscored the prevalence of the disease in ballet today: “Any director who said they have never had an anorexic dancer,” she told the BBC, “would have to be lying.”49

  One of those anorexics was Rachel Peppin, a former principal dancer with Birmingham Royal Ballet, who suffered from an eating disorder for twenty years. To keep her weight down, she over-exercised, strictly monitored her daily caloric intake, and ingested the occasional laxative to maintain what one critic gushingly called her waif-like appearance. She equated extreme thinness with success in ballet until company doctor, Victor Cross, did a series of body scans as part of his 1993 research into the bone density of ballet dancers with eating disorders. They revealed that she had the spine of a seventy-year-old woman, even though, at the time, she was just twenty-three. “I always thought osteoporosis was something that happened to elderly women,” she told an interviewer.50 But after seeing for herself how her eating disorder was ravaging her body, she entered into a rehabilitation program and today, almost twenty-years later, is a recovered anorexic with healthy bones.

  A more poignant example of the debilitating effects of eating disorders on ballerinas is South African ballerina Beverly Bagg, who won a scholarship to study at the Royal Ballet School in England. When she first moved to London in 1975 at age seventeen, she had never been away from home before. She was on her own in a new city in a new country, not even sure of how to cook for herself. “So I gained a little weight, and I was thrown out of the pas de deux class and wasn’t allowed to come back until I slimmed down,” she says, thirty-six years later.51 But Bagg wasn’t given any guidelines. After putting herself on a self-devised diet of chewing gum and coffee, she winnowed her weight down and then down some more. She stands five feet two inches inches tall, and her ideal performing weight is 115 pounds. But she had starved herself down to 81 pounds and was sure she would die: “It was very scary,” Bagg says.

  A friend in the school called her parents in South Africa and told them to take her home. With their help, Bagg slowly recovered her body mass and went on to dance with the Frankfurt Ballet and with South Africa’s Pact Ballet, a prominent sixty-member troupe, where, in 1984, she became a principal dancer, performing all the lead roles in classics like Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. By all appearances, she was a ballerina at the top of her profession, luxuriating in its benefits. But, inside, Bagg never stopped feeling like that ballet student of old, continually punishing herself for not being perfect.

  “The general view is that it is so glamorous being a ballerina. You’re so lucky, people used to tell me. It’s such a gorgeous profession. It looks so easy. And yet, there is a dark side to being a dancer that people don’t see, and it’s nurtured and perpetuated by history,” Bagg says. “It’s hard to explain to people how much I suffered as a dancer. Even though I was a ballerina, a principal dancer in a major company, I don’t remember ever being happy. I always felt this pressure to be better than I was. I never felt good enough. I believed that I didn’t dance well at all, and that I was totally unworthy being a ballerina.”

  Bagg’s dancing career lasted fifteen years before she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. She was put on medication and released, somewhat wobbly but no longer in danger of hurting herself. She quit dancing professionally soon after.

  If these stories look as if they belong to another era, it is sobering to note that today’s blogosphere is clogged with the angst-ridden confessions of young ballet dancers tormented by the ideal of extreme thinness—thirty years after Balanchine’s death in 1983 of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a neurological ailment said to have been triggered by rejuvenation treatments featuring animal glandular products. “I just want to be thin, fragile, weightless. I’m 17 and fat. Disgusting. I’m trying to change all that. Heres [sic] to being the thin girl in ballet,” writes one typical ballet blogger.52 Another young ballerina blogger obsessively lists all the food she eats, together with its calorie count, and posts downloaded images of skeletally thin professional ballerinas who inspire her, among them the Russian-born Alina Somova of the Ma
riinsky (or Kirov) Ballet.53

  The young American dancer Heidi Guenther was also afflicted by eating disorders but did not live to write about them. In June 1997, the twenty-two-year-old corps de ballet dancer employed by the Boston Ballet suffered a fatal heart attack after developing an eating disorder. She was five feet three inches tall and weighed ninety-three pounds when she died, a well-liked dancer whom no one seemed capable of helping, even as they saw her withering away before their eyes: “I don’t think they could have helped her,” said former ballerina Traci Hennessey at the time. “Once someone says they want to lose weight its set in their minds. When people tell them, ‘You’re too thin,’ that feels good to them because they’re achieving their goal... To tell you the truth, I’m surprised there haven’t been more deaths.”54

  The problem started when then artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes told Guenther she should lose some weight because she was looking “a little pudgy.”55 Allegedly, she had been five pounds over her ideal dancer’s weight.56 Guenther embarked on a series of ruthless diets that blossomed into an eating disorder, which Holmes became aware of. She asked Guenther to stop and eventually offered her professional help, but Guenther refused. The family later sued the Boston Ballet and its artistic director, claiming that their daughter had died after she was threatened with non-renewal of her contract if she did not slim down. But the courts dismissed the claim when an autopsy ruled the cause of death to be an irregular heartbeat with no known link to anorexia.57

 

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