Thinness in the Ballet World

Ballet is hard but those that love it really don’t care much about the cost or the sacrifice. We are seekers of beauty and subtle nuance. We desire to embody grace and emit a type of ethereal elegance with our movements.
The lines and angles of ballet are very specific and seeing the curvature of the individual muscles as they move in the legs, back and arms requires a sinewy almost anatomical presentation.
In other words, it requires one to be very thin. Now, there is healthy thin and there is scary thin.
People used to ask us in interviews, how we stayed so thin. The answer is simple. You try doing 8 aerobics classes a day and you too would be thin. Anyone exercising that much in a day is bound to be thinner than the average person.
People used to ask my mother, “Do you feed your child?”
And her answer was an exhausted, “All the time!”
While my achilles heel was Diet Dr. Pepper! (I was raised in Texas remember?). I would add too that two sets of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups after ballet when I lived in Dallas.
I would wake up starving first thing in the morning at 5 am and I would be stuffing my face with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by 5:05 am with a tall glass of milk.
In my generation of ballet dancers, many saw food as the enemy. I loved food! I could not wait for food to arrive. The strain of so much physical exercise on the body would make me hypoglycemic and if that was allowed to go too far, I would start shaking, and my mood would noticeably sour.
My ballet teachers in Dallas noticed the strain I was experiencing and Mr. Bill began bringing me power smoothies to keep my energy up and stable.
I grew a lot in my early teenage years. By the time I was 13 years old I was a head taller than anyone in 7^th grade. Fortunately, my friends in school, Ellen Bandy and Patti Skurla were also tall so when we were together we did not notice it that much.
I was my full height by the time I was 15 years old and that rapid growth made me feel gangly like a young colt trying to figure out its legs and balance.
I prayed that I would not get any taller by the time I was five foot seven inches. But I did make it to five feet nine and a half inches.
The height limit for most ballet auditions at that time, was 5 ft 7 in.
It is very discouraging to be cut and asked to leave before one has even taken the barre in class.
I am grateful that my mother was an excellent cook and it always seemed that there was food around. She would even put my dinner in the oven for me when I got back from ballet class and rehearsal with the Dallas Metropolitan Ballet.
That second cycle in New York City, I was staying in the Swiss Townhouse close to the studios. As it was an old style boarding house, the Swiss ladies (sisters) would give us breakfast and dinner. That simplified many things. That made me only responsible for lunch and I loved bagels and cream cheese with the salmon. I always had a stash of food under my bed. Just to be on the safe side. Food was like gold to me.
I loved the Entenmanns Bakery goods. They could always be found under my bed as well.
But we were not quite yet understanding the challenges and pressures that being thin had on the young dancers. While I was rail thin, I was not trying to be that thin. I had a high metabolism at that young age, and I was a very nervous and tension filled young girl. I wanted to do everything right and my mind was constantly analyzing everything in my environment. Awareness and anxiety running together burns a lot of calories.
I never thought about trying to be thin. I had so much nervousness inside that I was constantly moving and trying to maintain my external calm, emotional state. I was not calm. I was anything but calm but ballet is an illusion and learning to be aware while showing external self-assurance takes a tremendous amount of mental control.
As I have a Leo sun (called the good father) and a Cancer ascendant (called the good mother) in astrology, no one around me would starve. I would share food if anyone asked.
Once I got to the Berlin Ballet, the dancers always brought things to share to the theater as a gift for the performance. Often, they were chocolates, cakes, and goodies to give the dancers energy before the show. Most dancers have a stash of crackers or some favorite snack that they keep on their dressing table for last minute energy.
When I went to Frankfurt to see Marcia Haydee dance in the Lady of the Camellias, I had a friend dancing there and I brought a “Merde” gift for the dancers. I brought a cake. When I brought it into the dressing room the girls all had a fit and told me to get it out of the dressing room because if Marcia Haydee saw it, she would throw a fit.
Stunned I took it outside and gave it to the stage crew. That was when I noticed that the dancers at the Stuttgart Ballet were a serious degree thinner than the dancers in Berlin. Clearly there were stricter rules for being in Stuttgart Ballet. Because of that severity and rigid adherence to such a scary level of thinness, I never even tried to audition for Stuttgart Ballet.
In SAB, there were those occasional dancers that seemed just too thin. The problem in our generation was that dancers would be there and then they would not. Often, we were so self-focused that we either never noticed or never questioned. We were fixated on what we needed to do and I know for myself that demanded all my concentration.
People asked if I dated much, and the answer was no. In fact as a young girl I never dated at all really.
By the end of my school day, my ballet school day, my rehearsal day, doing homework, the pressure to make straight A’s by my father (0therwise I could not go to New York or go to ballet class), I would have nothing left to give anyone.
I would watch others date, and I did not have the leftover energy to cope with the needs and the demands of another person. That is why I really did not date until I was in my 20s. Honestly, it never crossed my mind. I had way more important things on my plate. I had watched my mother make my father her priority her whole life often sacrificing her own needs in the process. I knew I was too selfish at that point to become a “we” before I learned how to first be a “me”.
That part had always been crystal clear. I knew the life of a dancer was short. I knew that any small thing could pull me off the path and I might inadvertently miss something important. I was not willing to take that risk.
I am sure to men I probably felt prickly and hard to get close too. I did not mean to be that way, but I just did not have the time or the desire to get pulled into any emotional drama. My life and the ballet was more than enough drama for me at that time.
In New York, pressures were everywhere. It is sort of that type of city. One does not go to New York City, (Manhatten) and not recognize that the best artists in the world were trying to get there “break” there. Most dancers that I knew that were attempting to get into Broadway were waiting tables and teaching yoga classes to survive.
To this day, I always tip outrageously because I knew how hard it was for them to make it and keep trying and auditioning until they got their big break.
I at least got to be on scholarship and so some things got handled and the rest I was very frugal and careful. After all, my mother would hand me an envelope as I was leaving and tell me that this was all she could manage to get and I had to make it last.
So while other girls are going to “Tavern on the Green” for lunch, I am in the park eating bagels and trying to avoid the pimps and the predatory men from approaching and trying to talk to me.
My father’s rules were very clear. I had to make good grades or I could not go to New York.
While my sister saw me as the “good daughter”, honestly, I just wanted to dance. And whatever it took for me to get to go to New York I was willing to pay that price.
Even now, people say to me, “Was it worth it!”
And I say, “I would do it all over again tomorrow!”
The feelings of movement and freedom that dance invoked in me was something that nothing else even came close to offering. While nature and adventures in nature were a close second, they still did not allow me to feel as if I had the power to create the magic from within my own being.
In nature, magic organically just happens. Rainbows appear in response to an internal question. Animals come to give affirmation to my desires and wants. But it was always nature responding to me.
Ballet felt like me creating the magic from within and riding the waves of my own creation whether they were chaotic or peaceful. I felt the power from within, ignite to the call of my own heart and soul to express deeply personal, and intimate moments and that desire to share them with an audience allowed them to flow outside of my body and impact others. It was a delicious feeling. It felt like I was the food from the Gods delivering sustenance and energy to those that were open and ready to receive.
Dancing to me was deeply personal and was the highest form of my souls expression of what I contained in that moment. It asked all of me and I gave all I had in those precious moments.
That is why as a dancer I really don’t have regrets.
That does not mean that every moment was perfect. Far from it!
I have slipped and fallen hard. I have fallen from lifts and made audiences gasp in fear for my safety. I have missed entrances, and forgotten which wing I was to go out. I have had dance partners forget where they were in a moment in time and had to adlib to connect choreography and get back on track. I am been horribly embarrassed and ashamed of my performance and had to talk myself off cliffs.
But I would do it all again.
I learned a lot about myself that way. One thinks that I would remember the perfect moments in a performance. And I do remember those. But the moments that taught me the most were those that required me to adapt suddenly and quickly figure out how to make something that failed into the next pattern to redeem myself. That takes guts and courage. And I am the most proud of those moments.
New York was a type of beginning. But the end would be trying and emotionally difficult. We do not always get what we want. But we do always get what we need.
I needed New York to set the stage for my life (literally). It was just that this stage was next going to be a long way away in a different country fraught by war and surrounded by a wall.
I love New York. I will always love New York. I grew up a lot in being in New York. And New York would call me back to perform on one of the greatest stages in the world, The Metropolitan Opera House. Little did I know how much was still yet to come.
Leaving New York City at 17 felt like I was dying and leaving the greatest artistic city in the world.
But I was young and naïve. Great cities in Europe were going to teach me even more. I would learn things about art and music, dance and ballet that I never dreamed were even possible. I would get to be on a stage with some of the greatest dancers in history at that time. And I would discover how much I still had to learn. The path ahead was going to be long but filled with wonder and delights. The path ahead would be convoluted and twisted but I realize that I like the unusual and I love things that challenge me. The path ahead while unclear was already defined. The next test was to see if I had the courage to trust the flow and let the universe show me who I really was.

~Suzanne Wagner~