The Over-Glorification of Adult Ballet and Why I Decided to Break Free From It

Not me, but mood. Pic by via https://unsplash.com/@fabecollage

The Narrative

When you’ve been around adult ballet for a while, and its social media communities, when you had conversations with other adult ballet students, you start noticing a common narrative. It’s like an unspoken bond between all those who dare to take the plunge into this complex art form at an advanced age.

I am not talking about the “it’s never too late” and “yes, you can overcome your limitations”, or technique-related themes.

I am talking about how starting ballet as an adult is being elevated to something larger than life: How ballet is not just a physical activity and an artistic way of self-expression, but instead it is EVERYTHING: It’s a meditation. It’s a calling. It’s the main unfulfilled childhood dream come true. It’s an identity. It changes who you are. It improves how confident you show up in life. It helps you deal with any kind of problem that you have out there. It makes you more courageous. It gives your life purpose. It heals this and that in your body. Every class is a lesson in a major existential life question. By stepping through the gate of our first ballet class ever - at an age where everyone else goes for a mundane run or to the generic gym - we enter sacred space that will leave no stone unturned in the depth of our psyche.

How I would know about all this? Well, I am a sucker for over-glorifying ballet :-D Yes, I was the one googling professional opportunities in the first year of starting ballet at age 37. I thought deeply and wrote about the calling to become a late and paid ballerina. I was into performing, started pointe work at 39, and I get to train in a pre-professional setting. I started a blog and business around adult ballet. I have taken a ballet class pretty much 5-6x/week for the past six years, pandemic times included, and still do. My life pretty much revolves around ballet and my child (often in that order). My friends comment how my posture now looks ballerina-like or how I don’t bend my knees when picking something up from the floor.

And that is all great. That’s why we love ballet, right? It is powerful and transformative and can do a lot for body and mind.

And yet, over the past year, while things didn’t change that much on the outside, something shifted for me internally. I guess it was a long time coming, then accelerated by the cathartic psychological effect that the pandemic had on so many of us.

The Problem of Over-Glorifying Ballet

Because there was something about this glorification of adult ballet that started to bother, or quite frankly, bore me a bit. Maybe it was the fact that such an over-identification can bring about rigidity and one-sided thinking. That it can a source of self-imposed pressure, frustration and self-loathing when you don’t meet your own expectations. Or make you feel small, tense, and intimidated in class, instead of just letting it roll. And if I was really honest with myself, I did not want my life to revolve only around ballet. And in truth it didn’t. There are so many other beautful areas in my life that I honor and enjoy and don’t want to cut short. Also, with an equally honest look, ballet is great for the body but it is not a miracle cure. In fact, it is a very limited movement repertoire that can easily set you up for repetitive stress injuries if that’s the only thing you do. Ballet also carries a lot of traumatic and exploitive history that can still show up in how it is taught and how people - especially women and minorities - are treated, and it takes a lot of awareness to notice in what subtle ways it can show up and to set healthy boundaries. And while I really enjoyed performing, I am also a quite happy person without it.

How I snapped out of it

And then earlier this year, I had two interesting experiences that set my internal shift in motion.

I was training on a pretty intense schedule, usually 3-4 hours per day. At the same time, I wasn’t doing so well. I had a new episode of SI joint issues - nothing too crippling nor painful, but very annoying. The most annoying part of it was that my musculature around one hip would tense up so much that my turnout was partially blocked, so I felt I wasn’t really getting anywhere. My ballet motivation was very volatile - to the point that I was questioning the point of all that work. On a different level, I was struggling with abdominal issues - my digestion was off, I felt bloated, things that I never experienced to this extent, and that made me struggle to feel at home in my body.

Out of the blue, during that time, I got the opportunity to work with a new teacher. It was a bit of a coincidence - the person had known me for a while, watched me work for the past years, and kind of suggested “let’s work on some key foundations in order to help you fix a few things”. I’m like “what? ok sure!”. I didn’t know at all what to expect, but we agreed to try for a couple of months. I cut some of my other classes because I wanted to really focus on the foundational work, and that dramatically lowered my overall training volume. The teacher also suggested that I don’t do any pointe work for a while so that the new movement patterns could kick in.

So when I say “foundational”, it turned out it would be “the mother of all foundational” lol. We ended up spending most of the 1:1 time working in parallel and on transitioning from parallel to turnout. I have never spent so much time on such small things, and I’m saying that as someone who constantly works on small things haha. VERY slow work, and 100% precision. No getting away with anything, and a deep getting-to-know of my hip joints.

At the same time, I made some substantial changes to my eating. I touched on it briefly in my previous article and will share more soon. Suffice to say, the changes were quite outside of my comfort zone and made me realize where I usually choose food comfort over allowing myself to feel the naked, hard truth.

These training and eating changes led to something that was quite remarkable.

Even though we had to cut our work short because my new teacher had to step out for a while, going back to working in parallel, no-pointe, and generally less training was like a deep inhale-exhale for my whole body. It wasn’t so much that I got more rest - it was just incredibly satisfying to work at the very root of all ballet movement. It was an impressive example for how working at the right things can save you hours and months of working on a million of things. Sometimes we would barely work for an hour and I felt like I needed to sleep for two days. My SI joint issues started to heal, and I was able to access my full turnout again.

And my dietary changes surprised the hack out of me. I had always considered myself a healthy eater, no weight problems, haven’t had the slightest cold in several years, and so I thought that my significant changes might be a bit over the top. Or unrealistic. But it turned out that I had hit the nail on the head. Eliminating several food groups and intermittent fasting was not only possible, but another breath of fresh air for my body. It was like a big injection of simplicity into my life. A more intimate connection with nature and my body’s instincts. You mean I can be happy, nourished and satsified without grains, fruits, sugar, a number of vegetables, or breakfast? Ok I’ll take it.

Takeaway for a “Healthy glorification” of Adult ballet

So these experiences helped me feel at home in my body again, with a deeper understanding and better self-connection than before. I felt less trapped, and more room to wiggle when it comes to ballet. Here are my takeaways for a healthy-glorification of adult ballet:

1) I realized that I currently don’t have much desire to perform or “do something” with my ballet - but I want and need quality ballet training in my life, every day. I don’t want to “just take class” - I still have aspirations to get better. Which means that I need to do ballet work outside of a traditional class format - that could be stretching/releasing/mobilizing before and after class, but also movement re-patterning work.

2) I am not losing sleep over a bad ballet day or over not getting something right in class. Ballet is simply not that much of a dealbreaker for me. The things that I prefer to lose sleep over are related to relationships, my business, finances, my son (and I am working on retiring even these areas as a source for sleeplessness haha).

3) Self-discovery, personal growth, and transformation are not limited to ballet. In fact, the other day, I read some website copy from a weightlifting program that talked about the purpose of weightlifting to be self-discovery. I’ve done enough different sports in my life to know that I have always felt this deep connection to each one of them. People resonate with different things in different phases of their lives, and spiritual experiences are possible around any kind of physical activity if done with depth and commitment. But for me, ballet is an excellent vehicle for that right now though; I still think that ballet saved my life, and it can save others’ lives, too. But it’s also ok to have your life saved by something else, for example when you are recovering from an injury, can’t make enough class time for a while, or are just tired of it.

4) I don’t get stressed out when I don’t hit my daily ballet training volume target. On the contrary. Especially in phases in which I focus on technique/movement re-patterning, shorter sessions are way more effective. And sometimes I skip class because it feels better to catch up with my to do list for a full day. Of course you have to put in a lot of work if you want to get better at something, but ballet training culture generally overestimates the need for high-volume training and rehearsals for high-level performance. There is evidence that the high prevalence of injuries among dancers is due to the year-round-always-on training schedule. (I am working on actually not needing a reason to skip class - one step at a time :-D)

5) I still think that adults starters to ballet can reach the sky, and that there is no limit to what one can achieve. But for me, I know I am not willing to put in what would be required for certain goals and I am also careful with putting up with a (to a large extent) unscientifc and sometimes problematic training/teaching culture. Meaning: I don’t want to join a conservatory or similar programs that require a full-on commitment; I never felt the desire to spend ALL DAY in a studio, seeing only teachers and other dancers all the time. I am not so much concerned any more with how far I can get, how good I can become, or if/when I will be performing again, as long as I do my daily ballet work and work towards better and better movement quality.

6) Ballet is an excellent way of learning clean movement patterns and building a base for other dance forms, for other physical activities, and for a healthy and graceful daily life. It’s worth investing a lot of time into that. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that ballet is a limited movement repertoire and to add more movement variety (and outdoor time) outside the many hours spent in a studio. For me that’s definitely the wheelchair hikes I do with my son in nature because they include walking (a highly important and healing activity for humans!), require strength and good coordination in rough terrain. There are many other ways to add movement variety - it’s just important to actually do it.

7) Lifelong working on the “root” of movement is crucial and a must. By that I mean working on foundational movement patterns. Usually these are slow and small-amplitude movements done with high attention and awareness, with the goal of feeling the correct pathway of movements through joints and wiring your brain into the correct movement configuration. Examples are the type of activation work in my Turn On Your Turnout mini course, or Feldenkrais work, some forms of floor barre, or even barre work done in a certain way. The hallmark of this type of work is that you do it on your own speed and your own number of repetitions in order to avoid fatigue. This type of high-quality movement work not only improves technique and movement quality, but it will take your body through aging more gracefully - as I clearly see in the impressive teachers 1.5x my age around me.

8) I am most at home in myself when I move a lot. That doesn’t mean high-intensity stuff - more like 2-4 hours per day spent in intermittent, low-to-moderate intensity activities. Ballet, walking, cleaning, clubbing, biking, carrying groceries, at-home workouts, sprinting to catch a bus….there is just no way I can feel great, healthy, and happy without a substantial part of my day moving around. (Btw, this amount and intensity of moving seems to be in-line with how our ancestors lived, i.e. it is strongly connected to how the human body evolved and therefore what it needs in order to thrive.)

9) You can’t seperate your ballet development from the rest of your life. The way you sleep, what you do throughout the day, your emotional state and the quality of your self-talk, and very much how and what you eat have a tremendous impact on your ability to learn ballet and have consistent energy for it. There are several things that have to come together to really give you that feeling of “home” in your body. One way I have incorporated this realization into my work is the transition from “Late to the Party Ballet” to “Balletic Strength” - i.e. morphing this blog from adult-ballet-stuff-only to topics related to eating and daily habits.

Letting go of Idolizing ballet allows for better progress

In essence: Breakting with over-glorifying adult ballet does not mean I have to quit or do it low key. I am not planning to do less of it. In fact, if anything came out of all this, then it’s that ballet is a hugely important building block of my life. I will keep doing it as much as before and my aspirations are still high. But I believe that I have started developing a better, less rigid, less absolute relationship with ballet now. I am taking it more as what it is in the grand scheme of things - an excellent way of developing my body and my movement skills, a way of daily grounding in my body, and a way of playing with self-expression. I worry less about expectations and achievements, which ironically allows for better progress while being way more happy with myself. Giving ballet its rightful place in my life feels liberating and empowering. It also leaves room for changes - there can be phases of more and less training volume and intensity and ambitions; I know I want to return to pointe work soon and my appetite for performing might also come back once things open up after the pandemic.

While this non-glorification might not be so great for highly inspirational adult ballet Instagram posts, I am sure it will still be a rich source for interesting thoughts and conversations!

What about you? Where are you on the spectrum of Not-caring to Idolizing adult ballet? Feel free to share your thoughts!