Is it possible to tell from a single audition if an 8-year-old -- one who does not conform to the ballet school's strict demand for "a well proportioned body, a straight and supple spine, legs turned out from the hip joint, flexibility, slender legs and torso and correctly arched feet" -- has this extra fire? Perhaps not. Maybe Fredrika Keefer, who recently starred in her modern dance troupe's production of the Nutcracker, has it, and maybe she doesn't. I don't think the ballet school should admit her on that off chance, but I do think their policy of not even auditioning girls with the "wrong" bodies is as shortsighted and as wrong-headed as the East German policy in the early 1970s of feeding female Olympic swimmers loads of steroids to ensure their phenomenal growth in strength and size.

After all, some of those girls won medals, but many others didn't. Win or lose, their health was permanently impaired, their children born with defects, their government and mentors (eventually) covered with shame, and really, all for nothing, for as often as they won, they were beaten just as frequently by athletes who grew up training part-time through the recreation departments of America.

Of course ballet is not a sport, and its performers don't take steroids. (They take laxatives and purgatives and amphetamines, instead.) But if ballet wishes to claim the higher title of Art instead of Athletics, there is even more reason to believe that an unconventional, even oddly shaped practitioner -- a ringer, in fact -- could add some indefinable element of grace or meaning to its annals. The history of art has shown that this is always the case.

Besides, the opposite of uniqueness -- in body type, in technique, in movement and in personality -- is conformity. The San Francisco Ballet School may be well within its rights to exclude Fredrika Keefer from its ranks for not conforming to its ideal, but to the true artist, conformity is sterility, and sterility equals death. Perhaps that's why the public has fallen away from ballet in the last century, turning to warmer and more expressive art forms instead. The public may not know much about dance, but it knows when the starved, disciplined and perfectly plastic motions it is watching are the moves of automatons rather than artists.

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