Dancers and Why | This Dancing Life

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Most people dance because they have to. Why is that? It’s an exhausting profession, hard to get into and harder to get out of. It’s badly paid, it offers pathetic job security, it hurts, it plays havoc with normal life, it comes with short career expectancy and chronic joint pain. It’s fraught with danger, difficulty and a million ways to break your heart, mind, body and bank balance. Why would you want to be a dancer? Why would anybody dance?

For some, it starts early. Lots (and lots and lots) of little girls wind up in tights because Mummy likes ballet, or at least the idea of it – not allowed to dance herself, perhaps, so inevitably she sends her own children to classes. This may sound shallow, but never underestimate the power of parental obsession. If ballet was a Thing at home, sooner or later some knobbly-kneed infant is going to wind up clutching a barre. Once they get hooked, there’s no easy way back…

I got caught through no fault of my own. When I was around thirteen, we lived in a small city in Western Canada – as Number One Son it was my job to walk my sister to her ballet classes, and predictably the teacher inveigled me into trying a step or two. Out of politeness I gave it a tentative go, and that was it. Nothing in the mundane, locker-slamming-Social-Studies-science-lab- geometry-bound-corridor-mazed-assembly-bell world of normality could compare with the sheer excitement of ballet. Suddenly I was gazing into a whole alternative reality, a virtual universe of adventure, power and enchantment, heroic daring, passion and dazzling, compulsive, irresistible music. There were also pretty and otherwise unattainable girls with whom I got to be on terms of easy intimacy.

All the other guys at school were nervous, tongue-tied, perspiring prisoners of their own shyness and insecurity – faced with the prospect of an actual girl they would melt into spotty agonies of monosyllabic embarrassment and self-loathing. Normally I would have shared their predicament, but because of ballet I had the advantage. I had stood behind this or that particular goddess at the barre — I could partner her in the Mazurka, talk to her, even hold her small, warm, clammy hand, bitten fingernails and all. (It began to be important to wash mine before class, just in case). The fact that I hung out with these glorious creatures was noticed and resented.

Being a ballet boy in Western Canada in the 1960’s wasn’t easy. There were always accusations, sniggers, innuendoes, mobbing. This distressed me at first – to start with, I was English, with a “posh” foreign accent historically intertwined with race memories of colonial oppression. People had points of view about it – so did their fathers. To make matters worse, I got good marks, which deepened their resentment and my isolation. Even when we moved to the larger (but no more cosmopolitan) provincial capital, the bullying went on, the same fists and boots, but with different owners.

Fortunately I was now in a growth phase, and gradually becoming less shrimplike. With this came improved technique, strength and range of movement. On one of the countless track-and-field days I surprised everyone (no-one more so than myself) by winning a couple of sprinting events – it didn’t seem to me that I was moving fast, just that everyone else was so slow. For some reason this, coupled with some minor prowess in swimming, appeared to impress people, and the ambushes happened less frequently. People had begun to notice that I could do things they couldn’t — kick higher, react faster, move better and (this was the best bit) lift girls. You score points for stuff like that.

The ballet school ran an energetic schedule of classes, exams and performances. Several times a year we would be dancing in seriously big theatres before thousands of people, performing in operas or musicals, or our own ballet programmes, frequently on tour. Some of the Canadian companies would come through, as well as wonderful folk-dance troupes from Russia, Poland, Georgia, Ukraine and Scotland. Once we even went on tour with the Bolshoi, who actually came and did class in our studio – we got to train with these huge, bulky guys turning their twelve pirouettes on quarter-pointe. How could we not become addicted?

Kids who regularly experience this degree of stimulation can have a hard time adjusting to what most people consider normality. How do you bend your mind to algebra, when only hours ago you were buffeted by massive waves of applause, onstage in La Traviata, when the heart-rending strains of the Swan Lake Act IV Sarabande are drifting through your head, when your bones are still vibrating to the throb of the tour bus, when your memory is sniffing the smell of the diesel and half-hearing the sleepy murmurs of dancers travelling home from the show? Algebra is undeniably a beautiful thing in itself, but it’s not the same…

You adapt to this life; you’ve got to, or someone in authority will become boring about how you can’t go on dancing because your schoolwork is suffering. Almost without noticing, you find ways to compartmentalise your dual-track existence. You take your homework to the studio, you can do bits of it in the dressing-room, other bits on the bus – there’s usually a way, somehow. The thing is, though, you’re not always sure which half of your two-sided universe is real. School happens daily, you probably have good friends there, and somehow you do seem to have learnt things you didn’t know before.

For some people, though, the real world is the other one, the mysterious, magic, anachronistic world of dance, of music, of emotion and nobility and soaring beauty and poetry. It’s a secret and a sacred place; you can only reach it through superhuman effort, by trying, by doing your best, by keeping faith, by believing in your most precious and shining goals. You’ll do everything you can, always, to get to this place, to live your life in it, to defend it with heart and soul. This is your world, filled with the people and the enchantment which you will always love.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, and if you hang onto your dance thing like grim death because it’s the best thing you’ll ever know, it might happen for you. You might be in the right place at the right time doing the right arabesque, and someone might say, “…that kid there – the third one on the left – that’s a dancer, that’s the right one, that’s the one we need”. I know, it sounds impossible, but it happens to someone, every single season, every single audition. And that’s when you find out the answer to the question.

Why would you want to be a dancer? Because you have to…