When I was a full-time dancer, I never thought about the day when I wouldn’t be able to dance anymore. Injuries or illness, or a family vacation, would cause temporary lapses in dance training. But even these never brought me to a complete halt. If I injured my Achilles tendon, for example, I could still stretch and work on my core, porte bras, and quadricep strength training. I could go to a Pilates studio a few blocks north of my usual ballet class and do everything that didn’t hurt my Achilles. I could get a coveted appointment with a well-known dance physical therapist for evaluation of the injury, and she would give me in-the-meantime exercises to do while it rested. Or I could swim at the local Y. On family vacations I could still stretch, do mat exercises on the floor, or jog. Even sleep did not feel like a complete stop but merely a brief halt in the action. My last thought before sleeping was the work of this day and I would plan the work of tomorrow to come. Setting the alarm clock with enough time for pointe work in my room at the barre my father had installed for me before I had to get ready for school cemented that dance would continue.
One day, however, something else besides my body snapped. And in that snap my entire dance life ended. I can lay out the incidents of the months leading up to that day but there are no definitive clues to the cause of the snap in those incidents. In general, the technique I needed to compete at a professional level in ballet was always just a bit out of reach. Recently, I had worked up to being able to do 30 out of consecutive 32 fouetté turns on one side, for example, which is a choreographic element for the Odette/Odile role in Swan Lake. Then I got a small injury somewhere along the standing leg line (I can’t remember if it was my hip, knee, ankle, or foot), and I had to rest and rehabilitate. Once back, I got close to the 32 fouettés again, and then got another small injury on the same side but in one of the surrounding areas that was taking over for the weakened place. The rest and rehab cycle started all over again.
Then I did it. I got to 32 fouettés – in fact I got to 34. This was huge. It meant that I could perform one of the most difficult segments of a principal dancer role. I was feeling so good that I auditioned for a position in a pre-professional company training program. But during the audition I got a third injury on the same side. I wobbled, I fell, and I was not admitted to the program. I eventually got back into the studio, and I did a few things half-heartedly. But I never danced again. Not really. Six months or so later I quit for good.
The story I told for years is that the injury I got during that audition ended my dance career. But that wasn’t true. It was an injury, yes, and a significant one – some stress fractures along my metatarsal joints. But the physical injury wasn’t, by itself, a brutal, career-ending one. The true injury was the snap I felt inside at the exact moment that I felt my foot give way. The injury was the moment of clarity I had when I knew, for sure, that I had lost the fight. My spirit is what broke.
Many years later, before a painful decision to get a divorce, there was a similar snap, where I knew that my marriage was irrevocably and irretrievably over. Everything else I did after both moments of snap, of break, were attempts to test the finality. But both moments were final.
This blog comes nearly 30 years after that day. I now know that even though I did not have the strength and flexibility of body needed to be a high-level professional ballet dancer with a paying career that I did not lose all that dance gave me on that day. I still have a dancer inside me. I know what it feels like when it is the best it can be (see my “on” day post from 1/29/25). I am still stirred to move by music. I can watch dance and be with the dancers onstage and feel, vicariously, their movement in my body. I feel them in my stomach and in my phantom dance limbs. Even with my body still in a seat, fleshy and flaccid and no longer toned or powerful, the dancer inside me remembers. She is alive. She glows.
I know what it is like to have “a dancer within.” When I was in the ninth month of pregnancy, that dancer was doing fouettés, usually to the left, whenever I played Chopin on the piano. She had a childhood in art, taking ballet classes which became a passion, and learned how to move her body to beautiful music , guided by teachers who became co- parents. Later in adolescence, too many injuries made her test the painful reality that her body was not perfectly made for ballet as she had one discouraging injury after another. Her teachers continued to encourage her because of her extraordinarily beautiful quality of movement , always true to the music.
But she finally came to see and feel that ballet as a career was not for her so she went to college where with her brain was able to perform leaps of thought and imagination that eventually led to the honor of being the philosopher who wrote the definition of ballet for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
As for me, I have become a silver swan at my local Y and strive to make whatever movement I am able with my 78 year old body, as beautifully and musically as possible. So my dancer within has returned, transformed and transforming my old age with the joy of moving to the music and the remembrance of times past.
I love this. Thank you so much for sharing these remembrances of times past as well as your experience of a dancer inside today.