Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The Keefers, he implies, just want their own way, which they are couching in political terms for the sake of expediency. And this may be so. But his argument (and that of the ballet school) is equally disingenuous. Roca calls the school's strictures against chunky girls "responsible, moral and correct," but a close analysis shows that the school's attitude is not so much elitist as merely hard-boiled.
Surely there are plenty of ballet schools with less-stringent admission policies, where even chunky children are imbued with a love of the art of dance; and where the goal is to help girls reach their own dance potential; but the San Francisco Ballet School does not seem to be on that wavelength. It seems instead to be bent on churning out a line of employable ballerinas, presumably, to its greater glory.
As a former college diver and current high school diving coach, that attitude really offends me. I have been the victim of too many coaches whose job security depended on my performance in the pool not to see through this self-serving attitude; moreover, as the coach of a sport that is just as dependent on height, weight and strength ratios as ballet is, I have my own beautiful theories about the necessity of perfect proportions.
Like ballerinas, divers are entirely at the mercy of the laws of physics, which means that body proportion is a component that can never be ignored. Nevertheless, as a coach, I am constantly confronted with inappropriately proportioned divers: teeny gymnast girls who can't hold the board down long enough to get any spring; heavy girls who fall like bowling balls into the water, and worst of all, my private nemesis, the Tall Skinny Boy.
The Tall Skinny Boy is a menace to any sane diving coach, and yet one year I had five boys pushing 6 feet, each more gawky than the last, including a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2. He had feet like soup tureens, a small pot belly and a center of gravity that I swear was in his butt. Everyone who dropped by the pool always said the same thing when they saw him dive: "Why isn't he going out for basketball?"
I'd sigh. "He did go out for basketball this fall. Diving is his spring sport."
For a long time one boy, Jesse, was my most trying pupil. At first he couldn't walk down the board evenly, point his toes, or get into a proper tuck position, and even his most controlled front jump landed him nearly in the shallow end of the pool. The team I coached was loaded with divers, so I could have pulled the plug on him at any moment, and believe me, the temptation was there.
I thought the case was pretty hopeless, but a few months later Jesse won the JV boys' division of our league. The reason? He was the kid who liked diving best, so he worked the hardest and thought about it the most. In the end, he found ways to defy gravity's pull -- by lengthening his last step and shortening his hurdle, for instance. He did dives the way his body type dictated, not the way I was taught to teach them, and that was perfectly OK with the judges.
Of course, Jesse's progress at diving exactly represents the "recreational department" mentality that the San Francisco Ballet School has such contempt for. Their ruling philosophy is much more reminiscent of the Soviet-era sports programs in which the children of Eastern Bloc nations were screened in nursery school for participation in sports. Parents -- then and now -- may wish their children to take part in the rarefied world of ballet as a reaction to the sort of false glamour that surrounds it -- the hazy, pink illusory force field that the balletic powers-that-be have managed to maintain over many years. Apparently, that very mystique is crucial to ballet's survival, for, in order to snake charm the parents of its new recruits, it must remain unattainable: aloof and exclusive, fixated on an ideal that no one can realistically achieve.
Survival, perhaps, is the ballet's justification for what amounts to preserving itself in aspic. But it is a silly justification, and one that is doing it no darn good, because its "pure" method and exalted standards are not calculated to produce artistic genius. Artistic genius, as dancers like bipolar Nijinski, stocky Anna Pavlova and built-like-Mack-trucks Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris have proven time and again, comes not from a slender physique, but from some inner place of inspiration. It comes from the heart, the brain and the soul.
