Off Balance The Real World Of Ballet

Off Balance: The Real World Of Ballet By Suzanne Gorden Essay, Research Paper

Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet

By Suzanne Gordon

Ballet in the United States thrived in the 1970’s. Ballet dancers like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova were household names. People knew the stories of their defection and the beauty of their performances. Families could watch performances of American Ballet Theatre (ABT) on television, and if you had enough money you could attend the yearly Nutcracker Ball and socialize with the dancers. In 1979, after ABT’s management locked the dancers out of their studios, Suzanne Gordon was asked by Geo magazine to do a story on the changes going on in the world of ballet. Gordon approached the story as a labor problem, but realized that long hours and low wages are only part of the problem. As she discovered the harsh conditions suffered not only by professional dancers, but also by students at the most exclusive ballet schools, she decided to write the book, Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet. While some of the observations made by Gordon are still true today, she, unfortunately, viewed anorexia as an independent problem within the ballet world, rather than a product of the lifestyle. Additionally, Gordon seemed to stereotype and ignore the male dancer in ballet.

Gordon has written articles for the New York Times Magazine, Village Voice, Psychology Today, and in 1979 she was working for Geo magazine. She had never wanted to be a professional ballet dancer, but had taken ballet on and off since she was a child. Her editors at Geo magazine knew this, and offered her the opportunity to do an article about the changing world of ballet. Once she started, she became excited about the project, and was intrigued by the dancer’s technical skill and grace combined with their timidness and lack of confidence. She spent the next two years interviewing hundreds of dancers, students, teachers, choreographers, and doctors. While she is not a professional dancer, psychologist, or sociologist, she received information and advice from each.

Suzanne Gordon’s backstage look at dancers and ballet was the first book to examine the hard realities that lie beneath the glamour of dancers’ lives. Over the last twenty years, not much has changed. Many of the problems experienced by students of the top ballet schools are the same as those experienced by professional dancers. The body aesthetics required by top companies has become even more extreme, while the steps have become increasingly acrobatic. Ballet dancers continue to be paid less than orchestra and stagehands that accompany them, yet their career is one to two decades shorter.

The first part of the audition for the School of American Ballet (SAB), the United States most prestigious ballet school, consists of pointing one foot, doing a Grande plie in second position, and having your leg picked up and pushed by a teacher’s hand to the limit of the student’s flexibility. Following these three examinations, which show the limits of a dancers body, the majority of the auditioners are excused. This is one of the first lessons given to a young student: your body, not your talent, is the most important factor. The idealized ballet body has a high arch in the foot, long thin legs, a small waist, a short torso, a long neck, and a small head. When students receive admission into SAB, averaging between 14 to 18 years of age (online interview), they are probably the best in their local ballet school. After standing out for years, they now must deal with being one of many dancers with a great body for ballet.

Suzanne Gordon heard remarks from girls at SAB such as “I saw her mother, she’ll be out of here in a year”. (Gordon 54) She then noticed that the majority of the girls looked like they had not reached puberty. Very few women actually have a body that remains similar to that which they had before puberty; as a woman’s body reaches sexual maturity, breasts develop, hips widen, and the buttocks get some extra padding. Gordon realized that there is a serious problem when a sixteen year old girl is crying because her breast are developing, but more disconcerting is the fact that there are students who are 18 to 20 years old that have extremely irregular menstruation cycles, and a few that have not even started. Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia, she discovered, were widespread in the ballet world. Eating disorders were not only eating away at the young dancers bodies, but actually stopping the body’s proper development.

Gordon compiled data from a group of doctors that studied anorexia in student ballerinas and found that “as many as 15 percent suffer from true anorexia nervosa syndrome, and many more were borderline cases” (Gordon 147). SAB did not offer any information as to how widespread the problem is today, but considering that the ideal ballet body and other conditions in the ballet world have not changed, one can assume there is little change in the habits of the students.

Current research suggests that approximately one percent of female adolescents and four percent of college age women suffer from anorexia (ANRED). Can the strong correlation between ballet and anorexia be caused purely by the desire for the perfect ballet body. Gordon gives this as the only reason for anorexia in ballet, even though the ballet world she studied seems to be a perfect