A Dancer Dies Twice
Leila Lois on Writing Dance
Suffering untreated pneumonia and exhaustion, Anna Pavlova’s last words were ‘get my swan costume ready’. Dancers should never have to annihilate themselves to perform, and yet the ideal persists. Over the past few years, there has been an influx of memoirs and poems written by dancers. Many tell cautionary tales of the pain and unrealistic standards that haunt the ballet world. As choreographer Martha Graham notes—‘a dancer dies twice, once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.’ In writing, dancers are beginning to reckon with the great illusory beauty of the performance world, coupled with the pain and subterfuge many of us underwent to be part of it.
So haunted by the phantoms of shame and repression, the ballet world may take a long time to find other modalities of being. It appears that some of this work lies in exposing the tales that have been told for decades about the ‘perfect’ ballet body—one defined by heterosexual white men—and the narrative that comes with this—of the feeble, pretty, damsel in distress. When training in ballet, we learn to compare our bodies unfavourably with those of others, to scrutinise our every part and push ourselves toward an ever evasive ideal of ‘perfection’: more turned out, thinner, higher leg extensions. For me, that was complicated with an awareness that I had a darker skin tone than many of the other dancers at my ballet school, being of Kurdish heritage. Some of these pressures to adhere to this ideal of an unattainable perfection were unspoken, and others we were made to feel. In ballet companies, who gets hired and promoted often sits within these ideals, and any undesired changes in physicality, punished with demotion.
In recent years, many dancers have begun to excavate this graveyard of discrimination and harm, speaking out about abuse within the industry; Georgina Pazcoguin’s Swan Dive comes to mind. As Pazcoguin notes, ‘Ballet is at a watershed moment’. With such ghostly metaphors, I am, of course, referencing one of the most revered ballets: Giselle, a ballet I have loved all my life. Deceived by a reckless man, the lead ballerina spirals into a depression, taking her own life with his sword. Tragedy turns into rage as she comes back to haunt him, accompanied by an army of undead coryphées. First performed in the eighteenth century, Giselle has recently been marked the perfect ballet for the ‘#MeToo’ generation, with her passionate plan of vengeance against patriarchy. At the age of seventeen, I descended into my own experience of grief and madness, as I struggled with an eating disorder until I couldn’t dance anymore. Thankfully, with the support of loved ones, I was able to recover before it consumed me; I was able to reclaim my health and my sanity, despite being surrounded by damaging ideals from a young age. The process of reclamation is messy, painful, and it is here—haunted and haunting—that we must begin.
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Disassembling a Dancer (2021), a collection of poems by Kyeren Regehr, a Canadian-Australian dancer, has a corporeal power and presence. Wielding the nonfiction poetry form, Regehr uses the space of the page to write her body back into being; her poems dance with the dissonance of the ballet world, challenging both the form and her warped perceptions of herself at each turn. Regehr paints the landscape of a dancer’s body, the struggle and passion, drawing her reader into the seductions and complexities of the ballet world. The inclusion of illustrations and photography by Monica Piloni and Lindsay Beal, alongside a hand-woven ballet ribbon for binding, also make this book a visual work of art, an act of reverence to the devotion of dancers.
The cover image, Ballerine (2007) by Piloni, shows an impossibly contorted ballet dancer lying on a bed, eyes wide and glazed, a blank expression on their face. The mutilation and twisting of their body, combined with the calm demeanour echoes the sense of disassociation explored in Regehr’s opening poem, ‘Inventory After Showering’, a devastating and exhausting list of self-scrutinisation. Regehr is a master of the list poem, as she writes:
…Begin
again
with your hair: a platinum tutu of satin straw,
dripping. Down your swan of sylph-skin, your symphony
of visible bones, vibrating. Vertebrae. Scapula. Clavicle.
Sternum. Whipthe towel around your
neck, cup each breast (with carpal claws, phalanges) a shade
innocent for the sought after champagne glass, but not too
far gone.
Internalised shame is depicted through a of potent intoxication of the mind and disassociation with the body: with ‘sylph-skin’, ‘a platinum tutu’ for hair and ‘claws’ for fingers. The dancer’s experience of their own body becomes otherworldly, alien, and almost repulsive. This poem is a concise and complex nod to the violence that the ballet industry has historically enacted upon the bodies of dancers. As with several of Regehr’s poems, intoxicating substances—champagne, anxiety pills, pain injections, brandy—intimate the seduction of the ballet world, where a ‘dedication to hunger’ and ‘craving acceptance’ become dogma. Regehr also exposes power abuse at play—a male choreographer who harasses the dancers in one poem, a narcissistic lover in another. The collection is permeated with an unending obsession with perfect, nubile bodies. But Regehr does not leave us here. The poem ‘Tonight she is the red carpet’ is perhaps the pivotal poem of the collection, exploring the severance of the dancer from themselves:
…Craving the warm
darkness of the wings,
or the brilliant shield of footlights,
of gels overhead, craving
acceptance— when she dances
there is no I.
The bravery and grace with which Regehr confronts the dark recesses of her memory communicates the practice of healing. ‘When she dances/there is no I–’ hints again at the dissociation when exposed under bright lights, on a pedestal and (perhaps from hunger and fatigue) desperate, ‘craving acceptance’. At variance with this desire is the speaker’s craving for the ‘warm/ darkness of the wings’ and the ‘brilliant shield of footlights’, desiring a place to hide, or even erasure. Regehr brilliantly captures the cognitive dissonance of her experience as a professional ballet dancer: both elevated on the stage and yet crushed by internalised high expectations of the ballet. ‘Disassembled Ballerina’ explores the suffocating entrapment of this with the lines:
The mirror captures the almost/ imperceptible bounce of your breasts, holds them hostage in/ all four walls of its doppelgänger prison. Your hands (up to the/ elbows.)
Mirrors are a familiar, repeated motif, the internalisation of shame repeated ad infinitum. The power of the poems lie in the exposure of this gaze. Regehr’s collection is a feminist document, a collection of poems that explore abuse of power, while still leaving space to explore her love for dance. This tension is held within the title, for to disassemble is to pull apart—and perhaps be pulled apart. Once disassembled, what is a dancer? Regehr challenges an insidious culture of silence and abuse, while assembling a text that celebrates the possibilities of dance, of disclosure, of acceptance.
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In her essay ‘Five Positions’, Renee K. Nicholson discusses the sexism of ballet’s most famous repetiteur, George Balanchine. Nicholson writes:
Balanchine’s philosophy: God creates. Woman inspires. Man assembles. He said, ‘The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.’
Oh really, Mr. B., God had nothing to do with it.
Nicholson explores her own experience training in Russian ballet before she was forced to retire early, due to injury. Alluding to the disappointment and disillusionment contained in the essay, she begins ‘Five Positions’ with the fateful line, ‘I was once a ballet dancer.’ Throughout, she described people she once admired doing cruel and inhumane things to other dancers. One such person was Balanchine, the choreographer of New York City Ballet “If old Hollywood immortalized the sexy, curvy blonde, Balanchine created a new fetish: the sleek brunette. Of course, when I was seven and first stepped into a ballet class, I had no idea about any of this.” Balanchine reputedly propositioned female ballet dancers and allegedly ended their careers when they were not compliant. In her memoir Once a Dancer (1996) Allegra Kent, principal dancer of New York City Ballet in the 1960s, discussed repeated inappropriate comments of the ‘esteemed’ ballet maestro. Widely regarded as a seminal ballet choreographer, of the ’accent on line’ and physically demanding movement, the price to be Balanchine’s favourite ballerina was a heavy one. ‘Each of his major romances lasted for about seven years…,’ Kent notes, adding that Balanchine ‘usually married the women in question when they turned twenty-one.’
Jessica L. Wilkinson’s collection, Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond Press, 2020) finds Balanchine a complex subject. Drawing on archival research to bring Balanchine to life, Wilkinson herself terms the collection a ‘poetic choreography’, the poems becoming ‘ballets’ which unfold from Balanchine’s life in St. Petersberg to his co-founding and the development of the New York City Ballet. One may excavate Balanchine’s power over his dancers’ bodies within Wilkinson’s poem ‘La Nuit (Romance)’:
Never saw such a lift
Nor balance—mouth to mouth so young
her hair restrained with a ribbon
and he: a way to express
<taps forehead> not a soul but bonevulgar, blossoming night lyre-firm
at the breast. Plucked manifold.
In partial view, we realise Romance-time
as bodied arpeggio, and moving-time
through deep muscle gesture netting air.
This imagery of restraint, captured immediately in the dancer’s ribbon, and in descriptions of ‘bone/vulgar’ and the gesture ‘Plucked manifold’, hints at Balanchine’s power. Such uneven dynamics are also at play in Regehr’s poem ‘The Artistic Director’:
It’s only pain, little girl, / he says. Get up! Up! My patience/ shrinks to skinny of your wrist. /You not strong anymore. You/ last year firebird ready to fly/ in flame, now I make you/ coryphée and you fragile/flitty finch.
As such, Regehr shows the other side of Wilkinson’s ‘partial view’, where pain is dismissed within a culture of punishment. Where Wilkinson’s subject is ‘blossoming’, presumably for Balanchine, Regehr’s subject is a ‘fragile/flitty finch’, reranked from the titular role of Giselle to coryphée. In the poem ‘Pas de Trois’, Wilkinson echos: ‘Balanchine says that ballet is woman and he has no space for stars.’ The poem continues: ‘…Mr B./ has one eye roving for the next muse; he gets huffy if they pas de chat, pas de chat, pas de chat off stage’. The pas de chat is a playful jump step that literally translates as the ‘dance of a cat’, a feline stealthiness sitting in the demeaning tradition of associating the animal with the female body. The ‘roving eye’ of Mr B. is predatory and threatening, always hinting for his ‘next muse.’ The setting of the studio and conservatoire for dance in both these collections is menaced by patriarchal threat. This patriarchal threat cannot be denied, and has caused a ‘culture war’ in ballet that demands urgent attention.
Poetry can help us to express the machinations of structural violence, but I also wonder, how might it be able to help us to find a way out of it. With a dark history of patriarchal figures directing, choreographing and circumscribing of the female body in ballet, ballet is now at a tipping point. We have reached a juncture where exposure of the control and harm that the modus operandi of the ballet industry has perpetuated can— and should— no longer be ignored. As Cixous writes in The Laugh of the Medusa: ‘Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.’
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As a woman of Kurdish-Celtic origin performing ballet for the last three decades, I seek to imagine a softer realm. Cixous, again:
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.
We may tear our experiences apart in disgust, but can we put them tenderly back together, through writing ourselves back into the story and our bodies back into the world, through movement and memoir? Like Cixous, I believe the future must not be determined by the past; that we can refuse to strengthen them by repeating them’. These dancer-poets acknowledge the shortcomings of ballet orthodoxy. They find a way to move into the light— if not on the stage, then the studio—to shift one’s own dance practice towards a world no longer entrapped by impossible body ideals and silence. But the picture they paint of the tortured ballerina—dancing within a world which Adrienne McLean describes as ‘dying swans and madmen’—can become a bind. Ballet dancers of my generation are moving towards approaching their dance practice on their own terms, towards a more welcoming practice, one which makes space for full and autonomous expression. I am thinking here of Ava Holloway and Kennedy George, two young dancers of colour who danced in front of Richmond, Virginia’s Robert E. Lee monument. Writing oneself out of silence becomes vital to this moment. As Deborah Brown notes, ‘dance is breaking traditional moulds: exploring realities and narratives of diverse female artists through their own voices and bodies, in contrast to traditional ballets which have master narratives of fairy-tale female characters who struggle against a preordained fate.’ It is about time.
As a dancer myself, I know that we don’t stop dancing when we leave the realm of performance. Perhaps we write about our dancing, or we choreograph–the etymology of the word meaning ‘dance/writing’. But we don’t stop doing or loving dance simply because the performance realm is unforgiving. Dance is a transformative artform when the agency of the dancer is nurtured and respected, as ballet dancer Marianela Nuñez says, ‘is always there to hold me.’ By exposing the industry in poetry like Regehr’s and Wilkinson’s, we open the space for dialogue and throw light on the dark recesses where dancers might have been silenced or disappeared.
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Leila Lois is a writer & dancer of Kurdish- Celtic origin. She has been published in journals & collections in Australia, NZ, USA & Canada.