Dancing by Myself

I gave up ballet as a teenager, when I realized I wouldn't make it professionally. It took covid and cancer to remind me that it might be okay to dance just because I love it.

In Church Cottage, where I used to do ballet during a 2022 writing residency in England, courtesy of Hosking Houses Trust. Just before the cancer diagnosis.

I have something slightly different for you today. I’ve been working like crazy, ran out of time to write a new column, and I am tired of talking about chemotherapy (tomorrow! In case you’re interested). So I want to share with you a piece I wrote about rediscovering ballet during covid and cancer and why that means so much to me. I’ve never published this, so you are my first readers (as you are for everything I post here!) Without further ado:

Dancing By Myself

At a small diplomatic event in Uzbekistan as covid rates descended, the British defense attaché asked me about my favorite ballet. “Mine is Swan Lake,” he said. He loves the music, the birdlike arms.

“Funny you should say that. I’ve been doing a Swan Lake-inspired barre every day this week.”

“You dance?”

“Not in front of anyone. Not very well. But every day. I’m not exactly training for the Bolshoi, so I don’t know why I do it.”

He looked at me in the darkening garden, as if it were all clear to him. “You do it because you love to do it.”

This is true. But my relationship with dance has long been more complicated.

When I was young and full of illusion, I danced.

Most days after school I headed to The Studio School of Dance in Shirley, Massachusetts. I have never been as terrified of anyone as I was of Miss DeDe. Her unsmiling face, her glasses and brown bun, her freckled hand releasing the needle of the record player, return to me in dreams. We were not permitted to speak or to leave class for any reason. As we left, we took her hand and curtsied, saying, “Thank you, Miss DeDe.” There was always someone in tears.

Yet we worshipped her. She was strict, but that was expected. She turned out disciplined, beautiful dancers. She choreographed exceptional performances. Above all, she could transform us into who we wanted to be.

I was a long way away from who I wanted to be. At fifteen, I was an awkward, bookish child. Making friends felt insurmountable. I had no sense of my body outside of ballet; I didn’t notice having a body until I was in class.

It was a bad body for ballet, something of which Miss Dede was fond of reminding me. I was not flexible enough, thin enough, or strong enough. I had terrible turnout and no extension. “If that leg were not so heavy, you could lift it higher,” she told me, prodding my thigh.

With distance, I am aware of the forces that have shaped my relationship with my body, yet when I look in the mirror, I see through Miss Dede’s eyes.

Despite my lack of promise, I couldn’t release the vision of myself as a ballet dancer. My parents, however, never harbored illusions. They knew I didn’t have what it takes, which they tried to gently convey in their unadorned New England way.

I didn’t listen.

Finally, my parents rang Miss DeDe. They knew I had to hear it from her. “No, I don’t think there is any chance,” she told them as I listened in on an extension. “She has lovely arms and strong pointe work, but that’s not enough.” I tried not to cry as she explained—in a voice kinder than I ever heard in class—that my future lay elsewhere.

I gave it up.

When covid struck, my 10-year-old daughter and I were evacuated from our home in Tashkent, leaving my husband behind. A British diplomat, he had to stay to work. We were sent to London, where we scrambled to find a flat during lockdown.

Needing to move, I wondered if I could do ballet again without hating my body for its limits. I tried dozens of online classes: jazz, modern, and Broadway. I enjoyed them, but not enough.

Then one day, I found Kathryn Morgan, a former soloist with the New York City Ballet, and I started working through one of her barres.

I could do it. My body remembered. The steps were just difficult enough to require all of my concentration. I kept from tipping into the abyss yawning before us all by giving my body something complicated to do. Every flex of my toes, every unfolding of a leg returns to me a joy I had forgotten. Why had I given up ballet just because I wasn’t going to make it professionally?

Now I dance only for me. I don’t want to be watched. I want to feel the music move my body. I want the hope of grace.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and forced to live apart from my family for eighteen months. I was treated in London; they had work and school in Uzbekistan. There is no cure for ovarian cancer, only treatments. You are given one after the other, until they stop working.

My husband brought my daughter to me, so I could tell her the news. I gave her scissors to cut off my hip-length hair. Just beforehand, I danced with it loose around me. A swan song.

When they left, I put my head down on the kitchen table and wept. Then I lifted my arms to dance.

Throughout treatment, I was calmest with my hand on a chair, music starting. Trying to remember the steps and follow the music squeezed out the creeping darkness. I danced to prepare for surgery, making my abdomen strong enough to knit itself back together after it was bisected.

After surgery, I was too weak to flush the toilet or lift the teakettle. Yet I could point my toes. Slowly, I learned how to bend again, how to lift a leg.

At the end of the Uzbekistan posting, we moved to our permanent home in France. My husband bought me an actual barre. I’ve worn out three pairs of ballet shoes and my extension is improving.

When my cancer recurred, necessitating a more brutal chemotherapy, I plunged into darkness. Many days I stood in my room and thought, I cannot continue in this body.

My mind was safe only at the barre. I cannot ponder mortality while worrying about my alignment. I cannot fall with the exuberant strains of Coppelia holding me up.

I’m now in remission again. Friends tell me to celebrate, but I don’t know how. All I know to do is to put my hand on the barre, and begin again.