Weight for it
What does it mean to "look like a ballerina"?
Hello, good readers —
Turning Pointe has nine chapters, seven of which are of roughly equal length. Two of them, however, went long. Really, really long.
The first of these is the chapter about injuries. There was so much to cover: toes, feet, ankles, Achilles, hips, spines, hips again, pelvic floor, and so on. I got to go deep on ballet’s long history of privileging beauty over safety, and I got to talk to one of the best hip surgeons in the country. He’s operated on dancers who are still in their teens and whose hips are already wrecked.
The other chapter that went long was the mental health chapter. These chapters are intimately connected, partly because dancers are so intimately connected with their own bodies. When your body is your tool, your instrument, your medium of self-expression, and your livelihood, a physical injury is a mental health event. The other reason this chapter had so much to say is that, well, there’s a lot to say about what the ballet world does to your mental health.
So I got to write about depression and anxiety, which are not the mental health conditions most associated with ballet, and I got to write about eating disorders, which are. I wrote about perfectionism, too. And, I got to write about the ways in which ballet gatekeepers have had to update their language for talking about dancers’ bodies, without meaningfully changing their ideas about what those bodies should look like. Strong is the new skinny, remember?
In this chapter, I featured Kathryn Morgan, a dancer in her early thirties who began her career at New York City Ballet before being sidelined by a chronic illness that left her exhausted and caused her to gain a great deal of weight that she couldn’t dance off or starve away (she tried). She was repeatedly misdiagnosed, as so many women with chronic illnesses are, and eventually she left City Ballet and stopped dancing entirely. Once she had an accurate diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, she was able to get healthy and strong enough to dance. She got her technique back, lost a lot of the weight she’d gained, and last year she announced her triumphant return to professional ballet: she’d been hired as a soloist at Miami City Ballet.
That was last summer. But by this February, when I interviewed her again, that unlikely happy ending was looking a little more complicated. She had been cast in plenty of ballets, she told me, and had been fitted for costumes to perform those ballets, but she kept being pulled out of those performances, sometimes at the very last minute. By the time the pandemic forced the company to suspend their spring season, she had only appeared on stage four times since joining Miami the previous summer.
As Morgan told it, there wasn’t any confusion about why she’d been kept off stage: management didn’t think she was skinny enough.
In a video she released this week, Morgan announced that she has left Miami City Ballet. She reiterated a lot of what she told me in February: that she’d been told repeatedly that she didn’t “look like a ballerina,” that she was an “embarrassment” to the company at the weight she was, and that she wouldn’t show the company “in its best light.” The day before she was meant to perform the title role in Firebird, she told me, she was pulled from the cast because she was not “presentable.” Miami City Ballet hasn’t commented on Morgan’s most recent video or on her departure from the company.
There’s much more about Morgan and her experience — and about other dancers who’ve had similar experiences — in the book itself. There are also interviews with artistic directors who are very frank about firing dancers for not being “in shape,” that is, for being too fat. One of the reasons the chapter on mental health ran so long is that there’s so much to say about the ways in which ballet gatekeepers, teachers and artistic directors in particular, enforce a rigid body standard that has very little to do with a dancer’s technical ability or health, and everything to do with what those people think a “good” ballet body looks like.
It’s a standard, or an aesthetic, that has kept out Black dancers, and fat dancers, and dancers with disabilities, and dancers who, like Kathryn Morgan, have committed the appalling sin of only being a size 2.
In her new video, and in her interview with me earlier this year, Morgan stressed that it’s okay for artistic directors to have aesthetic preferences about what their company should look like. “All directors have their aesthetic and ballet is an aesthetic art,” she told me. Which is true, I suppose, but imagine what ballet could be if that aesthetic didn’t disdain all but the skinniest — I’m sorry, all but the “strongest” — dancers. Imagine what we’re missing. Imagine who we’re excluding. Imagine something better than this.
That’s it from me this week. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Chloe.