I was finishing taking an online exam for my Ballet History class yesterday, when all of a sudden, I got really mad. While this might seem like a premenstrual mood swing, I can assure you I had a good reason for my anger.
I spent my high school years in Avignon, attending the Lycée Frederic Mistral as a full board student, while my parents lived about 5 hrs away. The reason I was enrolled in a high school so far from home was because it was in partnership with the Conservatoire National de Danse d’Avignon, which I was also attending. Our schedule was arranged so we had to go to school in the morning and to the conservatory each afternoon and all day Saturday. When we had to be rehearsing (which was most of the time), academics and dance took about 55 hrs of our schedule a week
While I was attending, the only major that we could select was literature. This is all the conservatory had negotiated with the Lycée. Students who excelled in math and science and would have been better off doing a different major, were just told in essence “too bad”. Our class was also forced to take Chinese even though our Lycée offered other options.
While we received our normal academic education, all we did at the conservatory was dancing. There was no real musical training to speak of, the only art history class we got was an afterthought and lasted only a few months, when rehearsals became more important, and we had NO anatomy training to speak of. I have to laugh now at what I pictured my tendons to be. Everything revolved around being in the studio practicing, rehearsing over and over again.
Well, this made me mightily angry yesterday for several reasons. Let me talk about the first, and maybe the least important one.
My Music Theory teacher at the U once said that in order to be a good performer, one had to understand music theory. At the time, I felt like arguing that, feeling that if one had a natural instinct for music and was a born performer, this knowledge was not needed. Well, I am afraid to admit that he was perfectly right.
As I was writing about Petipa, who I think is responsible in a lot of ways for most of the structure of classical ballets as we know them today, I realized that I had been a stupid dancer. Yes, I knew that a Pas de Deux was composed of an adagio, two variations and a coda… but I knew so because of performing in or attending performances of ballets. That is just the way it was. Just like the fact that Petipa created a structure where a group of steps is repeated three times and then a variant combination is introduced. Yes, I knew that too, it always went: right, left, right, something different, but I never knew why or how it got to be so.
Well, I had never been given the tools to be an intelligent performer by the institution which trained me; an institution which prides itself of forming dancers who are able to apply in some of the major companies in the world. Shame!!! It pains me to learn only now how the danse d’école came to be. How it evolved, how it went from one country to the next, changing, how one thing gave birth to another. It pains me to understand only now the underlying reasons of the structure of ballet; to understand how Giselle or Swan Lake were absolute breakthroughs or even why one of our studios in Avignon was called Bournonville. All we knew how to do was perform the steps and try to add some feeling to our performance without having a clue about the broader meaning of what we were doing. We were nothing more than dancing machines; stupid performers. And that is solely the fault of the Conservatoire.
But as I said, to me this is the least evil of this whole situation. The other two things stem from one philosophy: dance, or die. You think I am being overly dramatic do you not? You’d be surprised. For one, forcing students whose strength lay in math and science to graduate with a Literature/Philosophy major is shameful! Let’s face it, how many of us students were able to make a career of dancing? A few did; Avignon is a good school, but most don’t succeed. And even those who do usually have to end their performing career very young. You see, we were expected to be primed for becoming pros right after high school and we were not expected to go any further with our academic education.I can even tell you of one of the girls in our class, who really was an excellent dancer, so excellent actually that the Conservatoire director, Mme Petracchi talked her into dropping out of High School. While Celine did become a professional dancer, what would happen if she were to injure herself? What will she do once she is too old to perform (which will be happening in the next few years). The only option really becomes teaching, which, the last time I checked, is not a profession with a whole lot of earning potential. The unemployment rate in France being what it is, having only a high school diploma seems to leave little opportunity to cross over into other professions. Again, it was all about dancing, dancing NOW. There was no attention given to a plan B. This was not the philosophy with which they trained and students who tried to think of other options were looked upon as being undedicated.
This brings me to my final point. The Conservatoire had no respect for us as human beings. We were dancers; that’s all. Everything came second to that. Even our health did. Every Wednesday, the scale would be brought up in the main studio and we would line up and be weighed, one by one by our costume maker, in front of the director of the school, and all our peers. Our weight was written down and if we gained any, there was hell to be suffered. Usually we got a dirty look and a mean spirited remark.
But the worse was during rehearsals. It was not unusual to be called a “fat cow”, “ugly”, “stupid” or to be told we would be better off being secretaries. Looking back, I am positive we were the victims of psychological abuse, which we turned into physical abuse against ourselves.
Geraldine was one of the most popular students with our teachers. Even though she was not old enough yet to enter the Conservatoire’s pre-professional division, she was picked to perform with the company during its summer tour and was even given some solo roles. Very popular…until she started gaining weight, that is. While I would never have described her as fat now but Geraldine was a little chubby, by dancer’s standards. She was relegated to Corps de Ballet first, and to nothing at all later on. Upon graduating from high school, she entered the pre-professional division and decided to grab the bull by the horns. She said she was dieting and doing lymph drainage massages, and it was working fantastic. Within a few months, she became skeletal, we could see her ribs in her back and her cheeks looked hollow. She was reinstated as a member of the Corps de Ballet and was even picked for a principal’s role (Grands Cygnes) during our performance of Swan Lake that year. She looked completely anorexic. But this was no concern of the pedagogic team of the dance academy, she looked gorgeous on stage.
This, absolutely, disgusts me. I personally had to work on myself a long time to stop thinking of my body as fat. I was never androgynous enough. I was not planning on having a career as a ballet dancer, I was more inclined towards jazz and modern dance, but that very inclination along with my thin but nevertheless woman’s frame was enough to be looked down on by my teachers. The problem was not just caring enough to teach us basic anatomy (we were athletes after all!) or help us be well rounded performers with plans for the future. It was primarily a complete disregard for our growing bodies and young impressionable minds. Toughen us up, they did indeed. I can recall only of one of my teachers ever caring about us as growing young girls, Mr Escoffier.
I am not pointing my finger solely at the Conservatoire de Danse d’Avignon here, even though I have a personal beef with it. I am blaming the whole dance establishment. I recently saw a PBS special on osteoporosis which focused on ballet dancers. All this dieting is bound to catch up with you at some point. The documentary was stating that the mentalities are changing and showed a nutritionist explaining to the dancers of the New York City Ballet that the signs of unhealthy dieting (aka starving) could be things such as amenorrhea, extreme fatigue, loss of body hair etc. While I think this is a good beginning, I also have to laugh at this because in the end, unless a dancer has this perfect androgynously thin body, she will not be allowed on that stage. And to a dancer, this is all that matters, regardless of the price to pay. Choosing one’s health or mental well being is viewed as a sign of weakness. The philosophy I was taught is that if you cannot handle it, then you are not meant to be a dancer.
Before writing this post, I read on the Avignon State House website that anatomy, art history and basic music were also taught at the Conservatoire. I hope this is not just on paper and mentalities really have changed. Being an artist or an athlete is a sacrifice in and of itself. I think it is one most of us young ones were and are willing to make. I personally do not feel any resentment for spending many hours practicing and rehearsing from the time I was 9 years old; I did what I loved doing. It was my choice.
I think, however, that the people in charge of those prestigious training establishments need to look at the broader picture. Most of their students will not be gold medalists or principal dancers. Most students will not be successful. Those who will be successful will only grace the stage for a decade at most before they are forced into retirement by the demands of the art. It is neither fair nor humane to destroy the future for so many in order to eke a few years out of the few.
The images I uploaded with this post are from actual recent performances by students of the Conservatoire National de Danse d'Avignon. Beautiful, isn't it? Truly, this was a good school, but do you think it is worth it?
