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Overview
"An inspiring and powerful book"--Booklist
"A genuinely absorbing read"--Kirkus
"Revelatory, honest, and wondrous."--Chanel Miller, author of Know My Name
A lyrical and meditative memoir on the damage we inflict in the pursuit of perfection, the pain of losing our dreams, and the power of letting go of both.
With a promising career in classical ballet ahead of her, Ellen O'Connell Whittet was devastated when a misstep in rehearsal caused a career-ending injury. Ballet was the love of her life. She lived for her moments under the glare of the stage-lights--gliding through the air, pretending however fleetingly to effortlessly defy gravity.
Yet with a debilitating injury forcing her to reconsider her future, she also began to reconsider what she had taken for granted in her past. Beneath every perfect arabesque was a foot, disfigured by pointe shoes, stuffed--taped and bleeding--into a pink, silk slipper. Behind her ballerina's body was a young girl starving herself into a fragile collection of limbs. Within her love of ballet was a hatred of herself for struggling to achieve the perfection it demanded of her.
In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina--and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other--only then was it possible to truly take flight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612198330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Melville House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2020 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 765,682 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
It all begins with ballet.
It was nighttime, late winter in California, and I was nineteen years old. That was the winter I decided to stop eating, and began to be noticed.
The ballet we were rehearsing was called Serenade, and I danced it with a tall blond named Peter, who could watch choreography once and memorize exactly what he had to do. It was the kind of ballet I was perfect for, without Martha Graham contractions or Balanchine pirouettes. It was rigid, restrained, correct, viciously classical—a piece that could have been danced in France or Russia in the 1850s. It was something that my grandmother could have seen as a young woman, a way of time-traveling through centuries to watch prima ballerina Marie Taglioni dressed as the sylphide in Victor Hugo’s Paris, clad in white tulle and illuminated by gas lamps.
“You run over to me and I’ll do the rest,” Peter had said to me. “Just leave it to me.” Off to the side of the mirrored studio, I stood in black stirrup tights and pointe shoes and waited. Peter was the poet and I was the muse, appealing to his melancholic nature as a Romantic-era hero. Although my dance held his attention, I existed for his character arc, not my own.
As the piece began, he crossed the stage in a diagonal, walking, reaching, uncoiling from spinning pirouettes into arabesques, landing from the turn with his leg extended behind him in the air. The light string music suggested the quiet regularity of rain just outside. I could almost hum along to it.
I ran forward and stopped, doing the steps Peter was dancing just behind me a few counts before he did them. Peter was close by but didn’t quite touch me unless I leaned so far that he needed to catch me, or I turned so much that his hands would stop my waist, spinning me until I unfolded and caught the music with my body. Though witness to each other, our steps were not the same. Mine were a prologue to his. We were two birds flying next to each other, plunging in a compact series, never wandering apart, or varying our distance from each other, but keeping our place in the sky.
“Stage right!” The choreographer directed. “Downstage! Look at her. Keep your eyes on him as he runs from you. Now run to him.”
As a child, I had felt such joy and freedom when I danced, my limbs loose and always in the habit of pulling up and turning out. Dancing let me say something before I was any good at using words. That night in the studio, I tried to remember that, even though these days there was a tug in my hip flexor and a leg warmer wrapped around my tired left ankle.
I followed the choreographer’s instructions, running on the balls of my pointe shoes. Running in ballet is more like skimming the surface of the stage, the arms still positioned with care, the chest leading. We had been rehearsing this scene all evening, a loop of runs and leaps, and I was feeling tired. Though he didn’t look it, Peter, who had been catching me all night, was also likely exhausted. Still, I ran to him, pushing for energy that would allow me to skitter toward a man who was supposed to catch and lift me.
There was one lift I spent the whole first half of the piece dreading, and the second half giddy from remembering. The lift began with me running toward him, and when he caught me he’d flip me over one shoulder, behind his neck, and I came down over the other shoulder. When the lift went well, we looked at each other afterwards—each of us miracles who had thrown ourselves head-long into a piece of choreography, caring only that we didn’t fall behind the music.
“That was my fault,” he said to the choreographer when it didn’t go as well. He took the blame each time.
This time I came down clumsily, still half caught in his arms. The choreographer stopped the music, and as her back was turned, Peter said to me, “Make sure your rib cage is facing me so I can get my arm underneath and grab you.”
He made a swinging motion with his arms, and I understood that I was the invisible shape he was cradling in his gesture. Time and time again, when a lift went wrong, or our timing was not matched, he called the fault his and then privately told me what I should do differently. We rehearsed together after daily classes, when we were sweaty from grand allegro and warmed up enough to try the lift full out. It required him to catch me in mid-step, lift me upside down and backward all at once. When I was first learning the steps, I would watch videos of other girls who executed it perfectly—the absolute trust they had in their bodies to mold improbably with the male dancer and create a complementary moving shape. I had never been lifted upside down and backwards all at once before, and I did not know that it took two people to let one fall.
In our rehearsal, we did the steps that led me to him. He ran away, he looked back, I ran to him. I would then jump, and he would stop and catch me. That’s what was supposed to happen. And like we had rehearsed so many times, I ran toward him and jumped only to watch him as he continued forward, not stopping, leaving me behind, mid-flight. And then I was falling, a low moving kite of music and bones, of hitched breath.
I held my breath during that moment when I had no control over our movement: everything was up to Peter and the ballet and all the training I had ever had. And the floor grew and grew until my straight arm hit it, then legs, and my hip that jutted from my black tights like some rare bird. As I rolled onto my back, I felt a fate worse than gravity.
•
An essential measure of trust is allowing someone else to carry you. When dancers give ourselves over to gravity, whether in a leap, or falling backwards, or collapsing down on ourselves or a partner, we come to depend that someone will catch us, bringing us safely back to earth. Trust in the choreographer and other dancers in rehearsals and onstage allows abandon. When we dance in tandem, we trust the movements of the other dancer to ensure we won’t crash into one another, and use that trust to push our bravery, committing to the fullest expression of our movement. Dancing requires peripheral vision, but also builds a sixth sense of instinct, so we see each other not with our eyes, but with our own radiating bodies. We learn to read each other until we can predict what another dancer’s body will do just by the taut quivering of a single coiled muscle. Though rehearsals began in a fluorescent-lit studio, when we performed, we took our places in the dark and once the lights rose, we often couldn’t see as we hurtled ourselves towards our partners, who waited in the dark wings. The lights onstage can be disorienting, dizzying, so we had to trust our other dancers to be where we needed them to be.
In 2005, then-soloist at American Ballet Theatre Michele Wiles was making her debut in the ballet Sylvia when her partner lost control and dropped her from an overhead lift. “We fell flat on our faces,” Wiles told The Washington Post. “There’s no blame. Maybe just a lack of rehearsal.” Being underprepared affects the level of freedom dancers allow themselves and each other onstage, certainly. But in my case that breach of trust came during a rehearsal, when we should have been more attentive to our exhaustion and limits, and more highly attuned to each other’s voltage. Not all falls are catastrophic, but all of them could have been prevented. Risks in choreography are calculated—the overhead lift, for example, requires partners in a pas de deux to figure out exactly where each holds the other, where each lands, so that the audience can see the elegance rather than the danger of the choreography.
German contemporary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch asked her dancers to trust each other and the art on stage through extremes. In “The Fall Dance,” a woman falls forward repeatedly, her partner catching her mere inches from the pavement. The dance is an articulation of catch and release, of surrender and salvation, creating unrestraint and at the same time, parsing it. Watching that woman fall is like watching both a beginning and an ending in the same instant. I cannot help but watch it through my fingers, a horror film of possibility. In “Café Müller,” another one of Bausch’s famous pieces, the dancers make their way through a room full of chairs with their eyes closed, relying on each other to move the chairs out of the way so they don’t crash into them. The dance is partially about who has power, who must trust in that power. The bodies magnetize to each other and the stage sets. Watching people put their trust in each other is movingly human—from the audience, we witness the vulnerability and the earned power of saving someone who has set off on a course from which she cannot save herself. We learn the steps before we know what they’re saying because we trust the art as much as we trust each other. In 2002, Bausch talked with The Guardian about creating new work, “I feel my way and try not to be afraid. It is not just that the dancers don’t know where we are going, it is that I don’t know where we are going also. It is not just that they have to trust me, I have to trust myself too.”
These are insights I would gain only after that fall that began the end of my dance career. After her retirement, Martha Graham’s depression led her down a path of alcoholism and multiple suicide attempts. It was only by returning to dance in some capacity that helped her get back on her feet. At ninety-six she wrote her autobiography Blood Memory about her career in dance, and one of her final lines reads, “What is there for me but to go on?”
I wondered if and how I would be able to do something similar. The writing, the documenting of a life beyond dance felt like a way to go on. After all, I didn’t have an injury that could prevent me from writing. But it turned out, learning to become a writer was only a step of many I would need to take in order to discover life beyond dance.
I had been a diarist all through my youth, though my entries were a text written by my body. The text was my body. When I began to write in earnest, it was to understand why I was having difficulty recognizing the world beyond the studio or stage. I felt removed from its concerns. But the deeper I dug, the more I saw a common condition. That dancers are performers and performers inhabit roles. I had been inhabiting the same role, and now I was being challenged to inhabit a different one.
Writing started as a way to trace my origin story in dance, to understand my exodus from the world of ballet, and the stripping of my identity. When I fell in the rehearsal studio that night, I didn’t know I was going to be a writer. I had to relearn how to walk on the ground rather than fly in the air.
•
The music kept playing as I lay there. Its insistence felt unfair, like life continuing when I wished it would stop and wait for me to catch up. Peter and the choreographer and a few others who had been in the room were at my side quickly, but I don’t know how they came so near me, or when. They must have run when they heard the collision between the floor and my small body, falling like a faraway star. Outside the sounds of night neutralized each other, canceling out the wind and fading voices and driving cars.
After I fell, a new story unwound like a spool of runaway thread. I lay on my back with my legs pulled to my chest, and people stood around me and spoke calmly, with wide eyes and forced confidence, the way they do when they try to pretend that everything is just fine. I looked up at the white ceiling and thought about my mother, who had been the first person to ever see me dance. I wouldn’t see her until the next morning, when she and my father made the three-hour drive to pick me up from college and took me home to start the long process of healing from a fractured, ruptured spine. The night I fell, I lay on the floor in that ballet studio, my body lacquered with pain. My back was not the only thing that had splintered. I thought of how when my parents came to get me, they’d see how thin I’d become, and the secret would hang heavy between us. When they’d ask me where it hurt, I’d point to my back because I couldn’t point my finger inside my own hungry heart and say, right here.