I Can’t Paint with Fat Paintbrushes

Helgi Tomasson, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet, was quoted in Dance Magazine saying this many years ago. The external pressure exerted on dancers to look a certain way and the resultant frailty of a dancer’s relationship to her body has been well documented by scientists (the female athlete triad of ammenorhea, anorexia, high-energy exercise). It has also been told countless times in stories and folklore passed on in the aural tradition, how all dance ephemera continue in the dance consciousness.

In an American company dancers would hide rolls of quarters in their buns for the weekly weigh-in. This way they could continue to starve themselves while staying above minimum weight. In another German company dancers put cotton in their jello, helping their stomachs feel full while depriving their bodies of nutritive value.

One famous ballerina limited herself to one apple only a day while unable to dance from injury, maintaining her weight of 90 lbs. She was also so weak, she was forced to alter choreography–no longer having the stamina to perform the famous 32 fouettes in the Don Quixote pas, she instead did a series of pique turns.

The scientific facts along with this tiny fragment of the folklore being passed down is alarming and horrific. But dancers continue to feel the pressure to be thin to the point of being too weak to move. Just a few years ago an etoile of the Paris Opera Ballet was fired because she was considered too heavy. She was 110 lbs.

This weekend I was approached by my artistic director. He told me to lose weight, or he would not create a pas de deux on me and also not send me on tour to New York. I felt deeply ashamed of my body, its imperfections, its quirks and changes. I felt incompetant and unworthy. Then I remembered myself. I went back to him the following day. I said no.

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