picture credit: https://pixabay.com/de/steampunk-uhr-viktorianischen-zeitmesser-1627660/
Dancers want to do it perfectly. It’s what they live for — nothing else is so beautiful, so demanding, so completely immersive. They know the huge privilege they have (and the huge responsibility).
“There’s just something about dance — it’s like a primal thing in all of us“.
— Patrick Swayze
Dancers have a built-in sense of duty, dedication, a kind of elitism. They love what they do, and they give it their all, going to the limit every time, trying and trying for perfection. This process of exultant self-sacrifice idealises the doomed, Romantic impossibility of their task, reinforced by cultural heritage (Swan Lake, Giselle, La Sylphide, La Bayadère, Petrouchka, Romeo and Juliet, Lilac Garden, Manon, Onegin), based on the poignant aesthetic of self-sacrifice to a hopeless love.
“It’s a goal that you never reach, to do it beautifully, to be as perfect as…. to dance like your image of you dancing. You have an idea of how you should look, how it should be done – and you can never do it, ever.”
— Tanaquil Le Clerq
Wonderful and poetic, and potentially very dangerous.
This idealism runs serious risks. If you try as hard as you can, all your life, and believe you have failed, you can easily become depressed. People grasp for ways to feel better, to cope with distress. Some of these are unsafe, unsuitable, even life-threatening (what scientists call maladaptive coping strategies). Alcohol abuse, excessive fasting, exercise addiction, binge-eating – these habits come with a load of baggage. Injury, eating disorders, self-harm, frequent illness, osteoporosis, performance anxiety and deteriorating mental health are all associated with unhealthy perfectionism. Much better not to go there in the first place. If you hate your reflection, you’re close to the edge.
Instead of lamenting what you’re not, look at the wonderful things you are. That body in the mirror is yours. You’ve worked on it for years and made it capable of amazing feats and moments of breathtaking beauty. Rejoice in it, treasure it, own it and be proud of it. It’s you. Don’t abuse it because it doesn’t fit some superimposed cliché. Why on earth should all dancers stagger through life like consumptive waifs, ill, exhausted and risking appalling injuries? Surely not just to satisfy someone else’s outmoded ideal of the perfect dance body?
Maladaptive perfectionism involves a set of inward-turned attitudes. People in this state don’t allow themselves any credit. They just don’t believe they’re good enough. They judge themselves by inflexible, unachievable criteria, and punish what they see as their inadequacies by despising themselves. People can end up feeling helpless, imprisoned, and powerless to change the thing that’s tormenting them, even to the point where they’re scared to try something in case they fail. For a dancer, that’s not useful.
Don’t mess with this stuff – you can get badly hurt. There are horrid conditions which you don’t want to experience – chronic indigestion, long-term reproductive damage, social phobias, heart trouble, weakened immunity, neuroses, addictions, insomnia, anxiety, stroke, ulcerative colitis, depression – the list goes on and on. We’ve probably all known someone who couldn’t deal with these nightmares.
The Finnish ballerina Sorella Englund suffered a heart attack, terminating her career at thirty-three, following fourteen years of anorexia. Olga Spessivtseva, traumatized by the communist revolution, weighed 44 kilograms at her last performance, had a psychotic episode onstage and spent twenty-two years in New York’s Hudson River Asylum for the Insane. Her partner was Nijinsky, whose career lasted twelve years, ending in insanity. Svetlana Beriosova’s life and career were marred by alcohol abuse, ending in premature death.
There’s a lot of hidden pressure on people to excel, to be aspirational, to be acknowledged as pre-eminent in their field. This is not restricted to dancers. Bankers and balloonists, politicians and pastry-chefs, dentists and deep-sea divers all have the same problem. It comes from the world around us, from advertising, from a society which emphasises success and competitiveness. Get all the way to the top, be better than anyone else! Achieve! Succeed! Get rich! It’s a massive ego trip, and really, it’s not worth the price.
“Someone once said that dancers work as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But see, policemen don’t have to be beautiful at the same time“.
— George Balanchine
Fortunately for all of us, there is also the other perfectionism, a normal, healthy desire to get it right, to do as well as you can. Naturally this has its rewards — people who are good at it feel good about themselves. They’re praised and esteemed, and probably get on well in their careers. This “good” perfectionism is how people develop and progress, and you too can use it. Obviously, you need to maintain consistently high standards and make demands on yourself, and the trick here is to keep all these demands in proportion. You need to maintain a safe, orderly balance within yourself, not to cross the line into that other place where you beat yourself up. This positive perfectionism is about a state of mind, about recognizing and accepting who you are, what you’ve got, and what you can do with it. Naturally you dance as well as you can, always, and that’s precisely the point. It is, literally, the best you can do.
“Dance for yourself. If someone is interested, good. If not, no matter. Go right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting you“.
— Louis Horst
You’re a dancer, you’re not in competition with anyone, and your beloved vocation is not about judging, devaluing or punishing yourself. The delight you feel in dancing is just that – delight in dancing, and it is your most precious possession. Of course you want to do it well – you love it. Loving the thing itself and trying to do it right is what positive perfectionism is all about.
“The real beauty is that beauty can sometimes occur“.
— Colum McCann
And here’s the vital difference. Negative or maladaptive perfectionism is all ego-oriented and competitive, focused on you and what you see as your failings. It’s not constructive. Positive perfectionism, by contrast, is not just about you and whether you measure up, it’s a celebration of what you do. It’s task-oriented, concentrating on the best way for you to do the job you love. Forget the mirror, forget the value judgements. Positive perfectionism opens the door for you to explore, with delight and discovery, myriad possibilities to develop the way you dance. You can use all those wonderful abilities which got you here in the first place; your perseverance, willingness to accept a challenge, optimism, inventiveness, curiosity, common sense, courage, all the good stuff about you. You’ll dance better, you’ll have fewer injuries and illnesses, you’ll eat better, sleep better and feel better. It’s all up to you. This is how you as a dancer can regain yourself. This is your key to freedom.
“Life is short, and there will always be dirty dishes, so let’s dance“.
— James Howe, Totally Joe
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If you’re affected by any of the problems we’ve discussed in this post, please talk to a professional therapist and get help. It’s never too late, but the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll recover.
Also, there’s a lot of fascinating and first-class science writing which covers this area. If you’re interested in finding out more, you should subscribe to the Newsletter — I’ll be happy to send you the reading-list.
© Jeremy Leslie-Spinks
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An important post, especially for young women navigating the massive changes of puberty. Their bodies swell out in new places, and take on bulk that does not respond as expected to class exercises. These transformative events often start just as dance training is moving into a more demanding phase.
In non-dancing life, they may be called on to display themselves for judgement by both male and female observers. They can become the focus of a lot of confusing attention, and feel required to measure up to prevailing marketing images of female perfection. Whatever their career or personal hopes, they may also increasingly be presented with their “biological obligations” to step away from career and into motherhood. On top of these private pressures, they encounter the deeply rooted sexism in the whole ballet repertoire. Do they have the right bodies to be sylphs? princesses? The studio mirror will be called on for the answer. Can they imagine themselves as jilted lovers? madwomen? dolls? Do they want to be heroines instead? These are big pressures that can easily play out in self hatred.