Ballet

I cannot fathom why people think ballerinas are weak. There's always this twang of annoyance and mild disapproval when I see pictures on tumblr with people in tutus slitting their wrists, or in pointe shoes with turned-in/sickled feet.

Okay la I'm bringing this up only because doing the previous post on weakness really riled me up. But this's still something that has bothered me for quite awhile already!

Ballet requires so much discipline. To stand still alone asks for opposing forces to be in balance. Your back has to be open but your ribs cannot stick out. You can't arch your back but you can't sit on your hips. Your legs have to be rotated, starting from the hips, coming from the inner thighs, through your ankles. And you have to do it right, it comes from your inner, not outer thighs. Your arms have to be supported from underneath, and you must have strength to hold it all the way through your elbows and wrists, to your fingers.

Ballet has taught me a lot. It showed me that there are actually benchmarks for perfection, and that perfection is achievable. Being pushed every single lesson by Ms Pang forced me to be disciplined, because it's the right thing to do. Slowly, you start answering to yourself instead of doing it for others; you start being perfect for yourself, not for others.

Ballet has taught me that individuals can have strength alone. Not everything has to be done in a duet or in a corps. And when you're dancing independently, you learn to rely on solely yourself to get you through.

Consequentially, discipline is such an integral part in ballet, that even a ballerina dancing in a corps is perfect. She answers to herself, as well as to the other dancers. She doesn't rely on others to get the show up, she has to put in her bit too. So very admirable, is the absence of people who slack off in a dance company.

Ballerinas are anything but weak. Sure all those exposed napes and fragility is misleading, but the ballerinas move on. They express sorrow, but they don't give up in the middle of acts. They die or sacrifice, but the just keep on going.

Nobody thinks that bodybuilders are weak, and rightly so. Ballerinas are every bit as accomplished as bodybuilders. An effortless act is born only from a concoction of time, effort and energy (as cliche as that sounds).

This opportunity to dance ballet is one of the greatest ones that I've been offered, and one that I treasure the most :)