Tattoos are generally frowned upon in the ballet world. They’re starting to become more accepted, but there’s still a sense of taboo around them. My little Degas ballerina tattoo, all in watercolor blue and faint single-needle beauty, was one of the earlier contenders, at least here.
Nowadays, it seems like almost everyone has tattoos. For a season or so there, more than half the company had tattoos. Does everyone share the same traumas, as well?
You tell me. Look around this studio, full of dancers, and tell me how many of them have disordered eating habits, if not full-fledged eating disorders. I bet you can pick out one of them, at least, but I also bet you’re going to miss some of the others.
I’ll tell you I was bulimic for a few years there. But ask about my eating habits now, and I’ll tell you it’s fine, I’m healthy. I’m not. But I’ll tell you I am. Don’t worry, I won’t risk my heart health by throwing up anymore these days though.
That skinny girl over there, the one that looks more like twigs and bones than human girl? She’ll also tell you she used to have an eating disorder back in her training days. She’ll tell you she’s fine now. She’ll even eat a whole croissant sandwich in front of you, just to prove it. But looking at her right now won’t show you how much weight she has lost over the last year and a half. She has gotten rewarded for it handsomely.
Plenty of these dancers have never known a life outside of ballet. They grew up training, most of them, and still call “home” the place they return to every summer and break, back with their parents. It’s been a very long time since I called that place “home.”
I worry that many of these dancers have Stockholm Syndrome. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Stockholm Syndrome is a “psychological response wherein a captive begins to identify closely with his or her captors, as well as with their agenda and demands.” Some of these dancers don’t know what it’s like to be treated like an actual human being. I watched my husband, now a retired ballet dancer, experience his first job outside of the dance world. He was so incredibly astonished that he could just talk to his bosses and that he didn’t have to be on pins and needles every time he had a conversation with them. He reveled in the fact that he could, and did, receive normal feedback that wasn’t accusatory.
Now, I look at these other young dancers and I hope they understand, down the road, how they should be treated.
Degas, famous impressionist artist that he was, doesn’t hold up very well in the court of treating humans respectfully either. Regardless, I still love his work. His dancer paintings and pastels illuminate, to me, the very essence of what a ballet dancer is, what a ballet dancer should be. His illustrations are the ones I wish to encompass in my own being, my own dancer soul.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason I got a tattoo of his artwork instead of the whale I had for so long envisioned for myself.
Ballet does strange things to the self. It isolates the self and, sometimes, morphs it into something unrecognizable. Something that shrieks out from the dark depths of its heart for love and acceptance, even if they come at the twisted price of eating disorders and self-hatred.
I refuse to give in all the way to these demands. Instead, I’ve been making my own home and place of love. I’ve found a husband who loves me no matter whether I’m skinny or curvy. I have dogs that are thrilled every day when I come home. I have grown my tattoo collection to include the parts of my body that I have always been self-conscious of so that I can love those parts better. Yes, I may have disordered eating right now, but I find that is more of a survival technique than a life-long lesson. You can bet that the moment I retire, I will be indulging in all the almond croissants and matcha lattes that I want.
Degas was right. It’s not about the dancing. It’s about the being and the soul.
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