The Dancer's Body

Lola has an excellent natural physique for dance. I will need to be careful not to push her into it. For those who don't know ballet, and think that the best dance physique is tiny and thin, I'll explain. When I was manager of a dancewear store in Denver, and took notice of such things, the winner of the junior ballet competition (high school age) was a 5'10", strong, long ballerina named Athena (no joke here). Many successful female ballet dancers could have been volleyball players if they had favored a different type of athletic activity. One of the most important things for ballet is to have strongly and precisely built hips, knees, and feet, so that the strain of pushing your body to its limits does not break it. Because I fitted pointe shoes when I worked at that store, I know that Lola also has "good legs and feet." Why is this so important to me? Because I wanted to dance ballet until I was sixteen, and was effectively told (through the results of an audition at my high school) that I would not make it in the ballet world. Could I have danced another style? Possibly, if I had made tremendous adjustments, but what I did not or would not acknowledge to myself at the time was that I was effectively dancing with a handicap (used in the racing sense). Look at the picture below:




This dancer is doing the movement called a "grand jete." When I was sixteen, I was very anxious about my inability to do anything more than 3/5 of a grand jete. All the dancers with as much ambition and experience as I had could do one. Now I know, after training to fit pointe shoes and learning a lot, that I suffered from more than just an almost-flat foot, which in itself would put paid to most professional dancing ambitions. In fact, my entire leg formation below the knee was devastatingly weak and unbalanced. That I looked during my dancing years like I had a halfway decent arch to my foot was, I now know, actually a great testimonial to the amount of work and discipline I put into my dance studies. When I speculate now on the causes of my undoing in the "grand jete," I can say pretty confidently that they were the weak legs, lack of physical training at the level needed to compensate for my physical conformation (weight-lifting would have helped), and, probably, problems with weakness and rigidity in my lower back. To this analysis, readers might respond, "But isn't dancing supposed to be fun, and accessible?" Yes, it is, but in the same way that soccer is fun and accessible. If you want to be a professional soccer player, however, you are likely to have been gifted with certain physical strengths and abilities. With dancing, weaknesses are exacerbated because the standard for dance is to be able to move in any way, with a maximum amount of strength. So if Lola decides that her early ballet classes are fun, but not for later pursuit, I will let her have her way. That doesn't mean I won't feel a huge pang of stage-mother anguish ("so gifted, and throwing it all away!").--K