Arts Autobiography

I began dance classes at the age of nine. I wanted piano or voice lessons, but those were expensive, and ballet was subsidized by the city, and I also think my parents had the idea that dance would help their supremely bookish and unathletic daughter to get out of her head a little.

Boy, did that backfire. Ballet put me further into the darkest parts of my mind, fuelled by hours in front of a long mirror in a skin-tight leotard, watching my peers develop waists and breasts while I maintained my little girl swayback, round belly, and flat chest. My turnout was horrible, and my memory for sequences worse. It didn’t matter that I actually loved moving to music – that wasn’t ballet.

I quit ballet when I was 16, unable to deal with the constant reminder of not being good enough, but the monster had already been born, and by the end of high school I had a full-blown case of anorexia. In the last few months of high school I began my recovery, and vowed to never dance again. My relationship with the arts was at that point, to put it mildly, strained.

Then, in university, I met a man who talked about dance in a way I’d never heard before. He made it sound so free, and easy, and joyful, and I remembered those few moments when in a jump or a turn I had let go of my self-loathing and enjoyed feeling my body move through space. I joined his dance company, and have been doing modern dance ever since, both as a dancer and a choreographer.

I wrote my MA thesis on philosophy of dance, and I would love to see joyful and unrestricted dance as part of the public school curriculum. It breaks my heart that dance, especially ballet, hurts so many young people, when it has the potential to give them a beautiful perspective on the wonderful things their bodies can do.

I am especially excited by the idea that dance and other arts curricula can be a part of cultivating healthy body image in young people – and even that there can be a logical intersection between arts education and physical education. Making art with one’s own body as the medium can be so empowering, and powerful, and such a good antidote to the idea that only one particular shape and size of body is aesthetically acceptable.

This is a dance piece I choreographed for the Only Human Dance Collective show this year. It is about the dual pressures of the internal drive towards perfection, and the external stresses of teachers (dance and otherwise), media, and impending adulthood.



And for extra bonus dance goodness, this is a 30-second solo of mine from that same show. It is, loosely, about giving birth.