Adult Ballet
A while ago I gave up my dream job, followed by jobs that paid me well, and started to work at our family office while I was figuring things out. And everytime I went to work, in our rented room on the second floor of an old building in the middle of the city, a sign for a ballet and pilates studio across the street called out to me. Maybe it was the picture of little baby ballerinas with their backs to the photographer, doing plies at the barre so you see their various heights, their lack of coordination with each other. Elbow to elbow but just worrying about their own stretch, their bobbing braided hairstyles and buns.
A pretty piece of real estate, even if it was just a billboard, in a post-industrial part of town where roasters of coffee, poppers of kettle corn, and mass producers of cocoa powder contributed to a chocolatey soot in color and smell that clung to the walls of parking lots and compounds left by retiring parents to their heirs. This is exactly the kind of abandoned, promising space I found myself in every day, and so did Elan, the ballet and pilates studio across the street. Instead of just walking in, I went on their website written on the bottom of the billboard, and clicked on a class description for something that caught my attention: Adult ballet.
Weeks later, I found myself in the Black Swan version, that I could cobble together from my closet: a navy blue swimsuit from J. Crew, a black crepe skirt from Marc by Marc Jacobs, and a pair of black patent ballet slippers from APC for the street.
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It was a Wednesday evening when I slowly opened the door into the studio, sticking my head in so as to slip in and to the side to observe the lay of the land before class started. Only to have my eyes meet face to face with the ballet teacher herself. She was standing right by the door, her phone connected to the outlet while cueing piano music for the ballerinas still finishing up the class before us. High school girls, drilling pirouettes into the floor, which was covered in black vinyl taped together in places with electric tape to cover the entire room.
“Are you here for the adult ballet class?” Another woman, a petite lady sitting on the floor, asked.
I said yes.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” She said with big eyes and a big, stage-smile.
As the younger ballerinas filed out, I slipped off my shoes, feeling shame, but not for long, as the ballet teacher praised my arches.
“Look!”
She motioned to the lady on the floor.
“Her arches are so high.”
Wasting no time, she pulled out a barre made out of metal tubes painted nail-polish pink and introduced herself as Joni. “Let’s start at the barre,” she said.
“Just to see where we are.”
A man was already there in a black muscle shirt, tights and socks. Fort the next hour, I glued my eyes to his reflection in the mirror as I tried to copy the exercises that teacher walked us through that evening: plies (deep stretches with your knees out in perfect diamonds over the toes), tendus (pointing the foot to the front, side and back), jetes (like tendus but off the ground), fondues (‘melting’ one leg so it walks up the side of the other leg), grand battements (very high kicks but the rest of the body can’t move). Of course, my street clothes - particularly a tubular lining inside my skirt - limited the potential of my diamonds and kicks. That said, a lot of ballet is just about standing right.
Taking the class the next week, and some 52 weeks after that, I learned to:
Notes I filed, typed after class, thinking I could master.
I think I wanted to be like the lady on the floor of the studio, who I would see in the parking lot in the mornings, waddling with her long hair blowing in the wind behind her, like a very graceful cyborg that has learned to walk from watching many videos of humans walking but was accidentally fed, in its limbic stream, some videos of ducks.
I learned that she was the owner, a prima ballerina named Cathee who married a Russian ballet dancer, was acquainted with Sascha Radetsky from Centerstage, and now taught Pilates classes in a corner of the studio with Cadillacs and Reformers. I, seduced by the elements of her character, also signed up, and at one point I was doing classical ballet on Wednesdays, contemporary ballet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Pilates on another free day.
One day, Cathee eyed my feet while we were getting ready to go into a pose on the carriage, and she said - are your ballet shoes too small? Immediately I complained about the place where I bought it from, mumbled something about how the saleslady insisted on sizing down — even if I had been wearing that pair for a year.
I didn’t have it for myself then, but the thing I appreciated most about my ballet and pilates was that honesty. The specificity in the instruction leads to total alignment in the Vitruvian sense, which comes off as beauty.
Joni was the best at that, so patient. She attempted to fix my hamburger hands (“Anna, hide your thumbs. Hide your thumbs. But stretch your other fingers, like someone’s pulling your hands) and break down, for the class of thirtysomethings, a move as gravity-defying as a pirouette - those turns on one foot that the younger, advanced students were doing. She just said ‘Don't think “turn”, think “balance”’. For the hands: Hug a tree. Then hold a bouquet of flowers.
I never did get very good, but one evening, Joni called me out in class, your body’s changed. From her place near the electrical outlet, she made a motion wrapping around her own thigh in demonstration, as if it was now a leaner piece of ham.
And it’s true. Ballet made me carry myself with more delicacy. I started to sit up in the office during the day; and fill my brain with ballet sequences on my phone till I fell asleep. My idol was a young danseur in Uganda who spun around on wet concrete making perfect, even pirouettes in the rain. I would even drive myself to ballets at the CCP to watch matinees with students in the cheap seats, cross the street to the studio on twinkle-toes, performing for oncoming traffic, or swan into bars for drinks after class, either with my newly found ballet-friend, Mika, a closet hater like me, or with my own old social groups, excusing myself in my leotards and jeans for not having showered. I would say “sorry, I just came from ballet” as I presented my faintly glowing cheek to be kissed. I liked that ballet only ever gave me a thin film of sweat.
Of course it’s different now. Without in-person classes, I’ve lost 90% of the experience for me: getting to dance in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, drawing from the muscle memory of (and being able to copy the sequence of steps from) a bunch of strangers, and laughing at how bad we all are. Instead of looking straight ahead, finding my own eyes in the mirror, I have to look at a laptop screen, which tips the neck down and ruins the line.
I’ve stopped going and am holding out for the return to the studio. But I do break into some classical ballet inspirations every once in a while, when a good song comes on. Or hard rain. In July of 2020, when people didn’t know what to do with their bodies yet, I ran down to the garden of my sister’s house in the forest and started to pirouette in the mud in my bare feet. Perfect straight broken lines, and patter. And I never felt so released. Just think of it as a balance. Hug a tree, then quickly, quickly, hold a bunch of flowers.
a playlist to stretch to:
photo by Sarah Canlas