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Growing up in the dance world, I learned quickly that you couldn’t force a love for it. Every summer, beginning at the age of nine, I studied at prestigious classical ballet schools around the country, but I was never fulfilled by it. My training boosted my technical skill to nearly flawless levels but my performances remained hollow: I lacked passion for my art. I was often placed into the advanced groups with much older girls but, unlike everyone around me, I never felt happy when I danced. I was trapped in a place where everyone belonged, except for me. My life had been centered around dance for so long that as I got older I felt like I couldn’t do anything else. I longed to love something as much as the ballerinas around me loved ballet. Performing on stage was my calling, but dance would never be my passion.
When I was thirteen I attended Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in New York. Mrs. Kirkland believed that “storytelling” was the heart of ballet and thus we were required to take mime classes twice a day for three weeks. My distaste for ballet was equalled by my classmates disinterest in mime. Yet somehow, I hung on every word, few though they were, that came out of our mime teacher’s mouth. The way I felt in this class was the way my peers felt in ballet. I remember being amazed at how simple expressions could reveal a person’s feelings In that moment I understood why my eyes were always captivated by the older dancers at my home studio who told the story with their faces as well as their bodies.
Eddie Redmayne said it best, “Being an artist is the aspiration for perfection with the acknowledgment that you’ll never attain it.” He obviously didn’t take ballet where I studied it. I was always taught that there was one way to do it and that way was perfectly. There was no ‘coloring outside of the lines’ in classical ballet The fact that you were encouraged to be your true self in theatre is what made me fall in love with it.
The most engaging theatrical performances, happen when the audience can see a person’s humanity on stage as opposed to an actor simply performing. Recently I saw the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and it allowed each audience member to find themselves in the characters on stage. Around me I noticed others were equally moved by the performance. I saw one woman, gently caressing the hand of her teenage son, had tears in her eyes. Everyone watching the show was affected in a different way but most went for the same reason, to escape from everyday life. Ironically, this is essentially what theatre is: everyday people putting themselves in imaginary everyday circumstances.
For an actor to make a fictitious character come to life they must bring themselves to the character. Taped to a wall backstage at the theatre where I performed this summer were the words that have become my performance mantra, “You must have thick skin and thin skin in order to be successful”. An actor has to discover how to be broken, but not shattered. The actor has to be willing to put their most vulnerable self in the spotlight every time they step on the stage, while still being tough enough to deal with the inevitable rejection.
If I had the chance to do things again I wouldn’t change how I found my love for acting. My fifteen years of dance training taught me that for a piece of art to truly mean something to the audience, whether it be Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet, it has to truly mean something to the artist. After the many years of feeling lost on stage as a ballerina, I found myself by being myself instead.
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