Ballet is Just the Beginning
It takes more than strength, stability, agility and grace to be a ballet dancer -- much more. Ballet dancers often spend hours, days, months and years in dance studios learning, practicing and perfecting steps. But what they gain from this dedication is often carried beyond studio walls and benefits them in the ‘real’ world.
This is as true for 3-year-olds just getting their feet wet and tip-toeing in circles, or for 8-year-olds learning proper posture, or for 14-year-olds preparing for end-of-semester recitals or for professional ballerinas.
“The little ones, 3- or 4-year-olds, they learn to respond to what is being asked of them, to listen and to interact with other young children in a shared space,” says Mignon Furman, the founder and director of American Ballet Academy in New York.
“The older ones, 8-year-olds, they learn deportment and how to hold their bodies correctly. You can always tell when a child has a ballet background because they have a certain grace and they also learn to pick up movement and new ideas quickly.”
Furman, originally from South Africa, taught ballet as a high school subject in Cape Town for over a decade. She also ran her own ballet studio for 14 years and taught on the faculty of the University of Cape Town. She thus has had ample opportunity to observe how ballet affects people of all ages. As kids get older, their ballet training colors not only their physical presence, but also their intellectual power.
“I remember the headmistress at one of the schools I worked at said that kids who did ballet were different because they were much more ready to accept discipline and better able to focus,” says Furman. “Even in this day and age, in 2008, you go to any ballet class of a good school and you will see dancers who curtsy to their teachers at the end of class. It’s part of their training. They have the courtesy and training to say thank you and they accept this form of discipline because they love to dance.”
The longer a dancer sticks with the discipline, the deeper the ability to focus takes root and the more this ability can be used to master other challenges. This is as true for amateur and aspiring ballet dancers as for professionals. Emily Coates, a former ballerina with New York City Ballet, began pursuing her undergraduate degree right when she became a full-time dancer with the company at age 18. She, like many other dancers at NYCB, enrolled as a part-time student at Fordham College of Liberal Studies and took one class per semester while also holding down a full-time career in dance. It took focus. It took commitment. It took dedication.
“There were professors at Fordham who would specifically teach on Mondays -- the one day that city ballet dancers had off -- because they loved to teach dancers,” says Coates. “There was a consensus that dancers were the most focused students and loved to learn. They brought a whole other realm to the classroom from the studio and stage.”
There are currently between 15 and 20 city ballet dancers enrolled in Fordham’s part-time undergraduate degree program, according to Glen Redpath, the assistant dean of admission for the program. Although they’re all at different stages of their degrees, they share one commonality.
“They’re not like a regular freshman college crowd because they’re so much more focused, driven and know exactly what they want,” says Redpath. “They don’t like getting Bs; they like getting As. They don’t take things lightly; they’re serious people. They’re already professionals, even the ones who are still apprentices with city ballet, because a lot of them have already made sacrifices to be dancers and gone to professional high schools. They have no problems staying focused on their work.”
Fordham, with its Lincoln Center campus right next to NYCB studios, encourages professional dancers to start pursuing their undergraduate degrees one step at a time while still dancing professionally.
“They give themselves a leg up if they’re interested in a degree and can get some credits underway while still dancing, even if they only dance professionally for three or four years,” says Redpath. “I think they can take the focus from dance and segue it into any other profession, whether psychology, teaching, law, whatever.”
For 11 years, Coates of NYCB focused primarily on her dance career, first with NYCB, then exploring modern dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project and Twyla Tharp, among others. Throughout those 11 years, though, Coates also continued to amass academic credits, one course at a time, because she always knew that dance wouldn’t suffice forever.
“Interestingly, I was never the kind of child who had big huge ballerina dreams,” says Coates, who took her first ballet class at age six in Belgium, where she lived as a child. “I always really loved academics as well as dancing.”
So, after 11 years, at age 28, Coates decided she had explored the dance world enough for a while and wanted to knock out the last two years of her degree as a full-time student. Here, just like in her dance career, her ambitions were high. She applied to Brown, Columbia, Harvard and Yale University, and ended up going to the latter.
Although Coates knew instinctually that it was time to step back from dance temporarily, the jump into full-time academic life was not easy.
“There were many voices and opinions around me of people who may have seen this step as my leaving dance,” says Coates. “But for me it was just stepping back and gaining new skills and resources so that I could then maybe come back to dance. You have to understand that the ballet world is focused on physical prowess and academic schools don’t cultivate that. Historically, ballet and college have been like oil and water. Balanchine, for example, wanted to focus on the studio as the world. But I think that those creative geniuses who really can create a whole, sustaining, nourishing world within a dance studio are few and far between now.”
Her determination helped her trust her own instincts and focus on the goal she had set herself. Once at Yale, the most difficult aspect of going to college full-time, says Coates, wasn’t the content of her classes, but the stillness it demanded.
“It’s very hard to move from full-time performing to full-time studying,” says Coates. “One of the challenges at city ballet was physical exhaustion. We would dance eight hours a day, six days a week. You have to build stamina for that. I think that stamina translated over into the two years I spent on my degree. My ability to dance for eight hours translated into the opposite, my ability to sit still for eight hours and churn out a paper. It took commitment and focus.”
To “preserve her mental health,” Coates says, she continued to take ballet classes and also taught at New Haven Ballet. What made her transition to college somewhat easier was that, at almost 30, she, like many dancers, could pass for 20. At the same time, though, the illusion could also be disconcerting.
“Sitting around a table in an English seminar talking about Milton with people who had no idea that I had a life outside this academic life created a peculiar sense of loss of identity and could be uncomfortable,” says Coates.
But, Coates soon adapted. She now serves as artistic director of Yale’s World Performance Project, which co-presented a Festival of International Dance together with the Yale Repertory Theatre this past November. Additionally, she’s teaching advanced dance repertory within Yale’s Theatre Studies program. With luck and time, Coates’s repertory class may eventually expand into a larger dance curriculum at Yale, which currently has no dance department.
For Coates, the key is to remain open to new ideas and always question your own beliefs.
“I think young students who are immersed in studying ballet need to trust their instincts and be true to themselves,” says Coates. “In any given environment or community, you can find certain prejudices and you need to question those prejudices. In the ballet world you can find a certain prejudice against college and anti-intellectualism. You can also often find a prejudice against modern dance. You need to interrogate the prejudices of your community in order to figure out what you really think about things. You only hold yourself back by swallowing wholesale the thoughts of a community without knowing what you think yourself.”
Overall, the rigors of academic life were not that different from those in the studio. It was just that here Coates was exercising her mind rather than her body.
“I was spending focused time cultivating critical thinking skills and cultivating speaking skills, which aren’t necessarily at the forefront in a dance studio,” says Coates. “Writing was the creative outlet that in some ways stood in for dance during that time. I had a firm belief that I’d become a better dancer by taking this time away from dancing full-time. Not everyone understood that because you have to move to be good dancer, but in my eyes I was broadening myself as an artist.”
For Coates and others, ballet and academic studies can support and enhance each other.