Sometimes, new experiences shed light on past experiences in ways that change how we understand them.

Sometimes, that helps you understand your own journey in ways you didn’t know you needed.

Ballet Trauma: It’s A Thing

As a ballet dancer, I began my career at The Lexington Ballet Company in Lexington, Kentucky.

I will always, always be grateful for the risk LexBallet took in picking me up out of their summer program. At the time, I didn’t have much history as a performer, and I was missing pretty significant chunks of the training that professional ballet dancers are expected to have when we begin our careers.

My first year was rocky, and the source of that rockiness (bullying by a senior company member) wasn’t handled well — but that doesn’t change the fact that, in my time with LexBallet, I learned so much as a dancer that would’ve been difficult to learn if I wasn’t dancing thirty hours per week. I learned how to function in a ballet company, I gained invaluable performing experience, and I eventually began building friendships that remain with me to this day (including AK, who I ran into again at NEBT because the ballet world is terrifyingly small).

I had some great mentors there, and very solid examples both of how to be a sound member of community that is a professional ballet company and, perhaps just as importantly, how not to be.

This isn’t to say that everything was perfect.

It wasn’t. Ballet has historically been sort of infamously problematic, and LexBallet didn’t entirely escape that legacy.

There were problems. Some of them were pretty significant. Some of them were worse than I realized at the time, not least because male ballet dancers are considered magical unicorns that might bolt at any moment and tend to be handled with much greater discretion than are female ballet dancers. Some didn’t fully come to a head until after I had moved away.

When I was there, I often said of LexBallet, “We’re a family — a dysfunctional family, but still a family.”

I still think that’s a pretty apt description: members of dysfunctional families often care deeply about each-other, and they can accomplish amazing things together, but they also share common wounds. Likewise, people within dysfunctional families can care deeply about their fellow family members while still causing them very serious harm.

That said, things were more dysfunctional than I understood at the time (LexBallet is currently in the process of taking some major strides to address those things, by the way, and I think that’s really cool and amazing).

Some of this I just plain didn’t see (again, magical unicorn), and some of it I kind of saw, but didn’t see enough to understand what I was seeing, either because it was consistent with my prior experiences and therefore felt normal-but-not-good, or because I was only witness to parts of what was going on, so I couldn’t get beyond, “This thing I’m witnessing seems kind of wrong but I’m not sure why.”

There were, of course, also the traditional, established traumas of the Ballet Cinematic Universe: though it wasn’t said in so many words, there was still the sense that nobody’s body was right. Some of the artistic staff treated us less as fully-realized artists who were working very hard than as interchangeable Dance Production Units who were never functioning quite as specified. There was, to be honest, kind of a lot of yelling.

We company members sometimes discussed things amongst ourselves, but I don’t think any of us really believed we could do much about it, in no small part because I don’t think we really believed things could actually be different. Things were just as rocky for almost everyone else we knew at other companies.

It turns out, in fact, that there’s a lot of this in the Ballet Cinematic Universe. Is anyone surprised by this?

Not really.

The surprise, I think, is how many of us have felt like things at our own companies are fine, because they’re not as awful as whatever’s happening at some other company.

A Bit of Unpacking

The audience of this blog is basically Bunheads and a few people who’ve been reading my stuff for years, so this might go without saying, but: ballet people kind of live on a different planet. Ballet has its own, deeply-immersive, very powerful culture, and because dancers spend so much of their time immersed in the Ballet Cinematic Universe, we might as well be living in a different country than that in which our next-door neighbors live.

Moreover, the culture in question propagates itself through selection. While ballet is famous for selecting for a very narrow range of body types and excluding everybody else, those outside the artform may not realize that it also selects for a specific temperament — one that is conscientious, cooperative, and obedient.

Historically, ballet has been the most hierarchical of the streams of dance. Its traditions belong to a Europe that has pretty much ceased to exist in every other sphere, and among those traditions, writ large, are hierarchy and obedience.

Ballet students in traditional programs learn from the very beginning to obey those in charge of us. As children between six and eight years old, just beginning serious ballet classes, we’ve historically been expected to place our hands on the barre, close our mouths, and follow instructions.

Those who aren’t naturally inclined to do so tend, very quickly, to drop out of training.

Those of us who continue — even those of us who take a circuitous route out of and back into ballet, as I did — learn both implicitly and explicitly that we should be quiet in class and rehearsal, take instruction obediently, only ask questions for clarification, and accept criticism gladly and quietly.

We also learn that our bodies are instruments on which our teachers and choreographers and directors create art.

We learn that hierarchy is to be respected, even at great cost.

We also tend to learn to internalize responsibility: when things are difficult, we must be the problem; we must be doing something wrong.

We also learn that we are replaceable. That if we don’t like the way things work, there are a thousand other dancers waiting to take our place.

So while the average 21st-century American might find it difficult to understand why we’d put up with a lot of the conditions that are considered pretty normal within the professional ballet world, we have difficulty understanding that other conditions could exist. Most of us are very intelligent, so we can understand that they should, in a philosophical sense, be able to exist: it’s just hard to make the jump to imagining what that would be like.

Likewise, we can find it difficult to imagine that we can pursue those conditions while continuing to work within the artform to which we’ve dedicated our entire lives (see above with regard to believing that we are replaceable).

But Maybe?

I’ve just finished up my first month with New England Ballet Theatre, and it’s wild how different the vibe is than almost anywhere else I’ve worked, including places that weren’t within the Ballet Cinematic Universe.

A part of me is really kind of afraid to keep repeating it out loud, because somewhere deep in my soul I’m extremely superstitious, but NEBT is built different, and it’s built different by design.

I didn’t write much about my audition at NEBT, but the fact that I felt welcome and comfortable during the audition, rather than stressed out and frightened, should really have been my first clue. I assumed that was just because I was auditioning outside of the normal audition season, at the same time as a good friend — but, in retrospect, a lot of it had to do with how both Rachael, our AD, and the existing company members welcomed both T (my friend) and me.

Since then, I’ve been slowly realizing that NEBT feels like home because Rachael is making a concerted effort to build a different kind of company: one in which we dancers are not eternally-malfunctioning Dance Production Units, but in which we are people and artists first.

This, in turn, is helping me to see the scars I carry from earlier experiences. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable, but healing isn’t always comfortable.

Likewise, this isn’t to say that life at NEBT completely stress-free. Ballet, as an artform, is stressful: we live on this knife’s edge, on which we pursue a perfection that we know cannot be achieved, but for which we’re still willing to work our tuchases off.

But I think, maybe, I’m finally beginning to understand how good stress — that is, the kind that facilitates creativity and growth — looks and feels in a work environment.

What feels so unique is that our AD handles that stress in a very different way. I have literally never heard her raise her voice, and when we’re not getting it, she takes a beat to figure out why, instead of just assuming that A] we’re not listening and B] we’re, in the British sense, thick.

We screw up. That’s just part of being human.

But, because the culture of the company has been built with the knowledge that mistakes happen and don’t have to be the end of the world, when someone screws up, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world.

Like, seriously, the first time I was suppose to run my opening solo for The Red Shoes, my brain went blank like 30 seconds in, and rather than screaming at me when I said, “I swear I knew this a second ago!” Rachael said, “Don’t worry, I don’t remember it either right now!” and we laughed about it.

To clarify: Rachael didn’t laugh at me. I laughed because I felt safe, and she laughed with me, because to be honest it really was pretty funny (especially since the first 30 seconds were great). Then I went and glanced at my notes, got my head back together, and ran the piece again.

When an overhead press lift[1] didn’t come off the first or second or fifth time in a rehearsal for an upcoming piece, nobody yelled at me or stomped around looking like they couldn’t believe that any professional dancer could fail so abysmally. Instead, we kept going. Eventually, I got the lift to work during rehearsal. We’re still two weeks out from the show that piece is in, so my partners and I will spend time perfecting the lift itself so we’ll be able to do it reliably by curtain.

1. Overhead press-based lifts are roughly 25% strength and 75% timing, so nailing one down with a new partner almost always takes a minute, in my experience.

What I’m Trying To Say Is…

There’s an immense power in being safe to fail; in knowing that not being perfect the first time (or even the fifth time) won’t lead to a tongue-lashing or worse.

There’s an immense power in being valued as a human being and as an artist.

Largely because of this, we’re managing to carry off successful shows in a timeframe that I would’ve thought impossible when I was dancing at LexBallet — and I’ve turned out to be a more useful dancer than I ever believed I would be.

Four weeks from raw concept to opening night is absolutely wild: even in rep, when you’re dusting off a ballet that everyone already knows, four weeks is a pretty short lead time.

We put The Red Shoes up in a month. The audiences loved it. We got good reviews. The parts I got to watch from the house in Dress and Tech looked great.

More importantly, we’re creating a company where people want to stay.

If things continue in this vein, I can very much imagine remaining with NEBT for the rest of my career.

NEBT looks a lot like what I imagine when I’m imagining the future I want for ballet. The rigor is there; the traditions are respected — but not at the expense of respect for the human beings who are, after all, both medium and artist.

Because we are safe to fail, we are safe to try.

For me, that feels revolutionary. I think a lot of us who’ve lived our lives within the Ballet Cinematic Universe would agree.

The other day, someone drew a diagram on our whiteboard representing the difference between how we imagine skill-building progress — a straight line rising like an arrow along the axis representing time — and how it really works — a jagged zigzag that wiggles crazily around, but with an overall upward trend.

This is, in and of itself, a powerful representation of Rachael’s philosophy. Failures and missteps are expected parts of the process. We are safe to fail, so we’re safe to learn. (We’re also safe to call in sick, to have bad days, and to give injuries time to heal.)

Right now, there are eighteen of us in the company, and we talk regularly about how healing an environment it is.

Part of that healing, sometimes, is recognizing the things that have been harmful, that maybe you didn’t entirely see before. Sometimes that’s difficult in its own way.

But healing is like that, and that’s okay.

I can’t adequately express how much it means to find this oasis; this island of healing. That isn’t to say I expect it to be perfect, of course — ballet companies are run by human beings, and human beings are imperfect — but the atmosphere of grace at NEBT means, I hope, that we’ll also feel safe to work on those things together, too.

For that and for so many reasons, I hope NEBT will succeed and continue to grow. And I hope I’ll be there to be part of it for a very long time.