Bay Area women prove ballet doesn’t have to be torture
What they were seeking to avoid was not the dancing itself but everything that seemed to go with it — the cliquishness, the body dysmorphia, pretty much everything that was shown in the movie “Black Swan.”
“I believe that ballet can be about joy, about feeling beautiful and about making your body healthy,” Carla Escoda told me.
(Misty Copeland, the famous American Ballet Theatre soloist, is one.) Escoda’s stance on ballet is scientific, funny and down to earth — three qualities that are rarely associated with ballet at all.
Escoda’s vision of ballet goes against pretty much everything I learned about it as a young dance student.
Where I learned in class that ballet was about pushing my body, sometimes until it broke, Escoda used ballet to nurse herself back to health after being diagnosed with a severe form of arthritis at the age of 46.
Where I learned in class that I would never be a good ballerina because my body shape wasn’t acceptable, Escoda (who heard the same thing as a student) is allergic to finding perfectionism through destroying people’s self-esteem.
“We didn’t know that you were the reporter,” said Leigh Donlan, a fellow teacher who writes posts for Escoda’s blog.
[...] if they’re surprised by the attention that Ballet to the People has gotten — “We just heard from a reader in South America who says we’re like the Siskel and Ebert of the ballet world,” Donlan marveled — they want to take advantage of the opportunity.