Ballet and body image

I've decided this week, now that I'm living near a dance studio, that I should start dancing again. So I took a ballet class on Wednesday, a barre workout yesterday, and another ballet class today.

Ouch.

There is nothing more humbling than going back to ballet when you've been away from it for over two years. I felt like an elephant, like a bull in a china shop, like all the most ungraceful metaphors in the world all at once. My body has lost all the nuanced movement that characterizes ballet. It felt so easy when I did it all the time, but now I feel like I'm as far from that level of nuance as I am from the moon or a six-figure paycheck. My brain still remembers it all, remembers that the hand goes here and the feet turn out like so and you lift and tuck and tendu and plie and make it all look beautiful and effortless. My brain remembers. But my body doesn't. And therein lies the problem. Because my brain remembers exactly what it all looks like, and how I should look in the mirror when I do each move. But the figure in the mirror looks nothing like how it should be.

In the mirror, I have no alignment. My toes point, but not as far as they should. My feet turn out, but not as far, my legs lift up, but not as high, I jump, I turn, I extend, I pose...but none of it looks like it should. Part of it is that I'm horrendously out of practice. And part of it is that I'm at least 25 pounds heavier than I was in high school, the last time I seriously did ballet. Now, I was never a stick figure, and I never cultivated my anorexic tendencies to a point where they were relevant, but still. I was relatively thin. In the mirror now, I see every inch of my added padding as larger-than-life, an exaggerated caricature of my actual shape. And I know, intellectually, that my weight is actually just fine and my proportions are fairly normal. But you can't say that to a ballet school mirror. They're designed to make you want to become thin.

The funny thing is, I never really paid that much attention to the mirror in high school. I knew what I looked like and that I looked good, so besides the occasional alignment check it was never really relevant. I only started to get self-conscious in college, when I started gaining weight and taking different dance techniques that I didn't know as well. I learned to ignore the mirrors then, because if I focused only on what I was doing and didn't look, I didn't have to fight myself or the movement nearly as hard. And when I got good enough, I didn't have to ignore the mirror. It became irrelevant again. I'll get to that point again here inshallah, probably just in time for me to start traveling again and lose it all. Which means I'll fight the same battle through again when I get back.

Even though it's a Sisyphus-ian effort, though, I'll still do it. I love dance too much to let myself stay out of shape, and I know that in another week or two the mirror gremlins won't seem as bad. You have to wonder what's in an art form to make people stay with it despite the fact that it tends to foster self-hatred. And the answer is this: once you get past that point of self-hatred and focus on the dance, it becomes magic. Once you truly focus on the dance and attain the technique to take you farther, you can suspend normal reality. You can experience total freedom in movement. You can fly.

Which means I'll deal with the mirror gremlins until I reach that point again.