Adult Ballet Lessons Transformed The Way I Feel About My Body

I grew up during the golden age of the Canada Fitness Test, a government program designed in the early 1970s to promote and encourage physical activity among seven- to 18-year-olds. Noble intentions, certainly, but the result, for me—a bookish kid with a low-grade fear of gym class and team sports—was damaging. To this day, I remain traumatized by the mere mention of the “flexed-arm hang” and the shame of coming in last after panting through the distance run. Though the gold and silver badges were well beyond my reach, I still fantasized about bringing home the bronze. Yet every year, my results—no matter how hard I tried—left me squarely in the range of the participation pin.  

It wasn’t just that I developed a deep aversion to anything fitness-adjacent. The test made me feel that I had a flawed body that didn’t live up to a metric. I coped by immersing myself in my studies and shutting myself off from my body; eventually, we became two entities dwelling in the same edifice, but wholly disconnected. Later in life, I tried to reconnect with my body. When I moved to Missouri for a job in my early 30s, I joined a cycling group called the Sleasy (slow and easy) Riders with the hope of making friends outside of work. When the riding turned out to be neither slow nor easy, the gruelling rolling hills unmanageable without a kind soul pushing me from behind, I gave up. The group had promised me a riders’ high after our excursions, but all I felt was exhaustion coupled with shame.

And then midlife hit. I began to feel my lower back, and then stiffness in my neck. This body I’d spent years ignoring suddenly developed a voice that demanded to be heard. I tried to placate my muscles by adding yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais and even something called conscious movement (during which I mostly lay on the floor and visualized my body performing magical contortions to my previously non-existent fitness routine). And though the stretching helped, I came away from each class frustrated by my weak back, my lack of flexibility, my inability to hold a downward dog position or be anything remotely resembling a cobra. 

I kept auditioning physical fitness activities that looked good on paper—badminton, jogging—but no matter what I tried, the exertion felt pointless. It wasn’t that I was lazy exactly; it’s that I wanted the exercise to pay off aesthetically, in the form of something approximating grace. 

And so, at the age of 41, I signed up for an adult ballet class at Toronto’s National Ballet School out of desperation. I almost quit before I started. When I walked into the studio and realized the extent to which my body would be on full display, I panicked. Not only had I never worn body-hugging yoga clothes in public, but I had never stood in a room with mirrors that exposed my corporal infelicities from multiple angles at once. Just when I was about to bid adieu to this space where yet again my body would fail me, the teacher called us “dancers” for the first time. How could I be a dancer when I couldn’t raise my leg higher than 45 degrees nor  hold a plank for longer than 10 seconds? 

Yet something happened during our first attempt at a beginner-appropriate waltz step across the diagonal of the studio. Our teacher, a former dancer in his 50s whose spine was so deftly elongated that he floated on air as he walked, took one look at us and screamed, “Travel! Bigger! Move!” and suddenly here I was gliding through space with abandon, to the accompaniment of a regal Viennese grand waltz. For the first time in my life, I was flying, no longer wishing to escape my body, but moving in concert with it. 

I fell in love with our exercises at the barre—pliés, tendus, rond de jambe, frappe, grand battement—and felt that I was learning a new language that put me in communion with the daily ritual of dancers around the world. As I worked through a gruelling 45-minute barre sequence, I was reminded to pay attention to my plumb line, which runs from the top of my head to my toes, and without expressly trying, I found myself standing taller. I sweat through the leg extensions—encouraged to move only so far and high as my body allowed—both from the exertion and the mental workout of memorizing the steps and their attendant arm movements (port de bras). By the time we were jumping in the centre, with my muscles and joints engaged, I was red-faced. I felt pleasantly exhausted, as if I had just finished a colossal cardio workout. 

We end class in a reverence—a curtsy that transforms from a formal, modest leave-taking into a grand gesture of thanks to our teacher, our pianist and also, I like to think, to our own bodies, for travelling with us and more importantly, letting us soar. 

I never expected to make peace with my aging body in ballet class. As an art form, ballet has a reputation for body surveillance and exacting physical requirements. But the adult ballet studio is a different space entirely. Nobody will pay to watch us perform. In class, I’m surrounded by women—and the occasional man—of all body shapes and ages. I’ve stood next to a pastry chef, a lawyer, a doctor, an IT manager and a high school teacher; some danced as teenagers, some are ballet aficionados and wanted to try the art form for themselves, some are ballet moms and some came for the workout and unexpectedly found grace in the beauty of balletic lines.

It’s now been nine years since I first walked into the adult ballet studio. I’m still a beginner—and likely will be forever. There will always be a disconnect between how I feel when I’m waltzing and pirouetting, and the way I look in the mirror, no matter how hard I work (reader, I’m 50). And yet I keep coming back to the studio because it’s the hour and a half of my week where I feel most alive, where I’m able to shed the internalized assessment of the dreaded fitness test and the belief in my body’s deficiency. It isn’t just my feet that are turned out in ballet class; the turnout reverberates through my entire body and I instinctively relax my back, grow taller and find my chest and shoulders reaching outward to meet the world with more openness and awe.