HOW THE BODY STANDARDS OF THE DANCE INDUSTRY KEEP TALENTED DANCERS FROM DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL CAREERS

By Ariana Barrett and Ginny Bixby

Training as a dancer at the same dance studio from age three through high school, Victoria Larimer knew she loved dance more than anything. But she knew from early on that she could never be a professional dancer. It wasn’t because of a lack of talent. It was because she wasn’t thin.

No one had to tell her overtly. She just felt it when a teacher warned her not to get too excited about becoming a dancer when she was older.

“I remember when one teacher told me that I really wasn't ever going to be able to make it far, so unless I was really serious about just doing it for fun, then I should stop dancing,” said Larimer, now 19.

She felt it when she was left out by her peers when they went off to hang out together.

“Cliques developed among some of the skinnier girls, and I was left out of that,” she said. There were some other girls who looked more like Larimer did, but most of them left as they got older and found other hobbies. Larimer was one of the last ones standing as she entered high school.

Costumes never fit her, either. She remembers getting upset when she’d try on costumes and they didn’t fit or look right.

“My mother usually had to alter the costumes with fabric we had at home so they could fit me,” she said. “It was hard because choreographers sometimes didn’t consider body type. I didn’t look the same as the other girls in the costumes.”

Larimer suffers from polycystic ovary syndrome and hypothyroidism, which makes it hard for her to lose weight, since she has insulin resistance and a very low metabolism. But she continued to stick with dancing for fun.

She is one of many dancers with nontraditional body shapes who is calling for the culture of dance to change.

While other industries, such as gymnastics, seem to have started valuing a muscular, strong build over a thin one, the majority of dance companies still tend to value the “Balanchine body”, or tend to emulate the Russian ballet trend that also prefers tall, thin ballerinas that are extremely flexible. A few dance companies have tried to move forward. While petite, renowned ballerina Misty Copeland is known for being more muscular than the typical dancer. While the trend of being emaciated and thin is starting to fade in some sects of the dance industry, it is still standard to be very slim.

There were many points when Larimer became discouraged, and wondered if she should quit dance altogether. “I was constantly being told by one of my teachers and a few of my classmates that I wasn't going to be able to get the roles that I wanted because of the way I looked,” she said, knowing that she didn’t look like the other girls in their costumes and photos.

Larimer said that she never expected to get the roles she wanted in ballet. “It was harder for me to get cast in roles because they constantly told me that I was too short to play a certain role and they told me that I wasn’t allowed to be in any kind of pas de deux pieces because I was too heavy to be lifted.”

Larimer spoke of a rumor that went around her studio: the cast list done before any of the dancers even audition. “They typecast people for certain roles depending on the way that they look ethnically, the way that they look height wise, the way they would look in a costume.”

“You tend to get put into a certain role every single year and there's certain roles that were labeled the roles for the lame people or the bad people,” said Larimer. “They created a role that was never in the original Nutcracker for the people who were injured, or the people who they didn't think were good enough. There were certain people that were posed as favorites because they had that certain ballet look.”

This was crushing for Larimer. “It just really was kind of difficult because you go into the audition being excited for whatever role you've been dreaming since you were a kid,” she said. “Everyone dreams of being Clara in the Nutcracker once in their life but it’s kind of disappointing going into the audition knowing that you're not going to get it, that it's reserved for someone else.”

There were times the pressure of dancing led to much more serious problems for Larimer.

“This all led me to go through certain times in my life where I was anorexic for a while. I went through those battles and it never really changed how I looked, but I was just so unhealthy,” she said. Larimer began her battle with anorexia at just seven years old, when a classmate told her that her mom said ‘fat people were terrible at dancing’.

She began giving away her lunches at school and nibbling on vegetables until her mother and dance teacher noticed and explained to her how she was hurting herself. Although she was able to recover, she still faced struggles. “As I got older, I had a few minor relapses due to pressure to meet certain body standards. Anorexia is really an uphill battle,” said Larimer.

While dance was what prompted her eating disorder, her dance teacher helped her get out of it. “I did have a teacher who was always very supportive of anyone who wanted to dance,” said Larimer. “She realized what was going on and she told me that I didn’t need to look exactly like the other girls. She told me that it’s important to remember that dance is about expressing yourself and telling a story through your movements.”

While Larimer is not studying dance, she is in a dance company at her university.

“Dance is always going to be part of my life,” said Larimer who loves the exercise and destress sessions that come along with dancing. Although she is not pursuing a career in dance, she would like to do public relations for the dance world, “I might not be able to be a dancer, but I could still have dance as part of my career.”

The pressures that Larimer faced are also familiar to Lori Bryant, a high school teacher who teaches dance on the side, who in the summer of 1990 was 16 years old and obsessed with ballet.

When she was given the opportunity to attend the Joffrey Ballet’s intensive program in New York City, she took it with no hesitations. She would live there for two and half months and spend her days dancing. At the end of the summer they put on a showcase where her parents would come to see what she’s been working on. But what they saw was something they weren’t expecting.

Their daughter had drastically dropped weight, weighing only 86 pounds at the age of 16. They told her she was never coming back to New York again.

This was Bryant’s first time at a professional company and she felt she had to keep up with the image of the other girls. She describes herself as short, standing at only 5-foot-2 but curvy, as opposed to the tall, lean build most professional dancers have. Joffrey didn’t care much about the height of the dancers, but they did care about their weight, so Bryant decreased her caloric intake, attempting only to eat fruits and vegetables that didn’t have any fat.

“I can remember one of my coaches saying that she wanted to see our bones. So, when that is the directive you do what you can to show them that and if that means becoming anorexic or bulimic then that's what people do,” said Bryant. Eating disorders are 10 times more likely to occur in dancers as they strive to reach an unhealthy perfection, sometimes resulting in death.

Bryant is now a ballet teacher at the Virginia Beach Conservatory of Dance and she sees a lot less judgment between the girls than how it used to be. “It’s never about the image,” Bryant said when talking about her students, “it’s about flexibility.” She feels that all her students have the potential to succeed in ballet, now that body image is less of a concern.

She is confident that ballet is moving in the right direction. She has enrolled her daughter Kennedy in dance classes since she was three years old, not worried that she will become concerned about her body image. “I think because I went through the experience I would be able to talk to her, particularly about body image and as her dance teacher,” said Bryant.

Bryant spoke of one of her students named Mary, who is 165 pounds: “She is graceful and she works with what she's got and we are really accepting of all body types.”

Bryant was able to trump her insecurities of weight by focusing on her confidence and excellence in the art of ballet.

While dancers throughout history were typically thin, there were a few occasional exceptions, such as celebrated ballerina Maria Taglioni. Taglioni was a dancer for Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and the Paris Opera Ballet among other companies in the mid 19th century. She was short, curvy and muscular. Taglioni has been regarded as one of the greatest dancers of our time.

But in the 20th century, that all changed. Choreographer George Balanchine is largely credited with creating the concept of an ideal body type for a dancer. In the 1960s, he began to only cast extremely thin, tall dancers in his ballets. This especially became true when he began working with dancer Suzanne Farrell and wanted his dancers to emulate her slight, long-legged physique. Balanchine, who founded the New York City Ballet, was such an influential choreographer that his casting choices began to influence other dance companies and choreographers.

In an article called “The Cult Of Thin” written by Deirdre Kelly for Dance Magazine in 2016, Kelly details how when she visited dancers performing a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, she was disturbed by dancers complaining of hunger and feeling that they were going to faint. Former New York City Ballet dancer Gelsey Kirkland blamed Balanchine for her battles with anorexia, bulimia, and drug addiction in her 1996 book “Dancing On My Grave”, saying that she felt intense pressure from the choreographer to become unhealthily thin and that he liked to see their bones.

In 1996, Suzanne Abraham conducted a study comparing characteristics of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa between ballet dancers and their non-dancing peers. She found that the dancers had higher scores on an Eating Attitudes Test and were more likely to have an eating disorder by the standards of the DSM-3-R than their peers. She concluded that dancers were at a higher risk of developing eating disorders than the general population.

More recently, in a 2013 study, John Arcelus, Gemma Whitcomb, and Alex Mitchell found that 12 percent of the dancers they studied had eating disorders, and that number was even higher in ballet dancers specifically- 16.4 percent. They concluded that dancers were at a three times higher risk of suffering from anorexia and other types of eating disorders than the general population.

Jeanette Hiyama first started being noticed for her dancing abilities at the age of four.

“I started dancing at a local studio at the beginning. My teachers said I had potential and they encouraged my mom to have me try out for the Washington School of Ballet which is the school attached to the Washington Ballet,” she recalled.

But her mother thought it was too soon for Hiyama to get so intensely involved in dance at such a young age. When Hiyama was seven, she was studying at a different studio, and the teachers there also thought she should try out for the Washington School of Ballet. So at the age of eight, her mother finally let her audition. She got into the school and danced there through her senior year of high school.

“I started out dancing one day a week and by the time I was at the highest levels of the school I was dancing six or seven days a week for a minimum of three hours a day,” she said. “It was pretty intense but I liked always being busy and it helped me work really hard on my dancing.”

Hiyama was always on the smaller end of her classmates, but it didn’t become an issue until she was older and was able to try out for parts in ballet productions. She never got the parts she wanted even though she was stronger than some of the dancers who were cast in those roles.

“They told me I didn’t have the nice long legs everyone thinks a dancer is supposed to have. I was always told, ‘You can’t dance this role because you’re not this height, you won’t be able to make it as a professional in the dance world,” she said.

She also was held back longer than other dancers from being moved up to the different levels of the school. She was going to be held back in level seven, the last level before the pre-professional program, for a fourth year, and she felt that she was a stronger dancer than some of the students that got bumped ahead of her. She decided to confront her teachers about it.

“I approached two of my teachers and asked why I was being held back. They told me part of it definitely had to do with my height, and they said that even though they knew it was something I couldn’t control, they still take it into consideration.”

Hiyama didn’t really struggle with her weight, but one particular instance stuck with her.

“Once another girl and I had to take turns being lifted by a guy in an audition for the ballet Alice in Wonderland. He couldn’t lift me, and I was upset. After that, I started eating less.”

She said she didn’t think her restriction of her food intake was extreme enough to be considered a full-on eating disorder, but her dad and some of her friends at the studio became worried about her. She felt that she always had to be somewhat conscious about her weight. Her friends actually went to one of the teachers and told her they were worried about Hiyama.

Over time, some of Hiyama’s teachers told her that she might be able to make it as a soloist in a ballet company, but it was still a very slim chance and that she would never be able to perform as part of the ensemble in ballets, called the corps de ballet.

“As I got older, I knew I really wanted to become a professional dancer. The more that people said it was unrealistic for me, the more I felt discouraged from trying to join a company,” she said.

Similarly to Larimer, she also continues to dance for the University of Mary Washington’s Performing Arts Company.

Although Hiyama is no longer a member of the Washington Ballet, she still dances there for fun sometimes, no longer worried about a teacher’s criticism. “I think things need to change because dance is a way of expression and I don’t think at this point that your body has to get in the way of that,” said Hiyama who is looking forward to instilling these ideas in future dancers.

Something else disturbed Hiyama. She noticed the messages the dance world sends to children about body image when she was helping with auditions for the Washington School of Ballet.

“They definitely single out kids as young as five and decide they cannot make it in dance because of their body type. The judges have this weird point system from 1-5, and while they look at lots of different things like technique and feet, if you get a 2 or lower in any category, you’re out.”

She said that she saw children who definitely had potential, and it upset her when they weren’t chosen because of their body type, especially since they were so young. “For these kids, so many things will happen between now and when they hit puberty,” she said. “But I wasn’t in the place where I could say anything, and even if I could, it wouldn’t have swayed anything.”

The day results came out, Jeanette was working in the company’s office when the calls came in.

“So many parents were calling us asking why their kids didn’t get in. Having to explain to a parent why their kid wasn’t chosen was ridiculous. I don’t know what the director really told those parents. I don’t know if she told them if it was because of their kids’ bodies. But I remember thinking, ‘What are we doing? What message are we sending to kids about dance?’”

On a small scale, some studios and companies are moving forward to reinforce the idea of healthy and positive body image and are accepting to many body types, such as the studio Bryant works at. Some have even started requiring a minimum weight if they suspect disordered eating. But the majority of the dance industry still requires a certain height and weight and sometimes even race; often prioritizing certain physical qualities over talent.

The dance industry continues to be controversial in its standards and values in regards to dancers’ bodies, however, if the small amount of change occurring can be magnified and dancers like Larimer, Bryant, and Hiyama keep speaking out, it could spark a revolution in the world of dance.

THE FXBG MAGAZINE

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