Finding the Coin

On the inexplicable obsession with the perfect ballet dancer.

By Magda Lena Griffel

Illustration by Iris Pope

As a child, Grace Li, CC ’28, was transfixed by the role of Clara in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. For Fiona Witty-Daughtery CC ’28, it was the older dancers at her first summer intensive. For the late ballerina Michaela Mabinty DePrince, it was a magazine cover of a prima ballerina that flew to the gate of her orphanage when she was four. She joined ballet classes as soon as she was adopted, eventually becoming the youngest-ever principal dancer with Dance Theater of Harlem.

I have my own origin story, but it’s incomplete. At 6 years old, my ballet teacher took us on a field trip to the big city, and from a booster seat on the balcony at Lincoln Center I watched Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty for the first time. I remember her shimmering tutu, her actual tiara, the way she flew across the stage in a grand jeté. As a little knobbly-kneed ballerina, I dreamed of touching the soft sheen of those pointe shoes as I stared at this woman in complete awe. I didn’t know humans could fly.

Now, I am an unathletic 19-year-old with a strange posture and no upper or lower-body strength to speak of. I quit ballet at nine years old, thinking I’d become an Olympic swimmer and still consider it one of the dumbest decisions of my life (I did not become an Olympic swimmer). Through middle and high school, ballet became a whimsical figment of a potential parallel universe; like a lost lover you’re grateful to have had, but have a feeling you’ll never see again.

Finally, in college, the golden opportunity presented itself: Ballet I with Professor Katie Glasner. Twenty-six of us flock behind our professor from one end of the studio to the other, dodging each other’s outstretched limbs. Professor Glasner danced with Twyla Tharp in the ’70s, on Broadway in the ’80s, and has been teaching at Barnard since the ’90s. She commands the room with endearing, vaguely threatening assurances (don’t worry, I won’t eat you—I’ve already had my breakfast…) and blinding white sneakers. Before every combination, she instructs us to imagine a coin in between our butt cheeks. It sits low, not at the top of the crack, but closer to the base. Standing with our feet parallel, knees bent, clench it—don’t tuck your pelvis, don’t stop breathing. Engage your deep outward lateral rotators, find the coin, then turn out your feet into first position.

Muscle memory, it turns out, doesn’t make it through puberty. Nothing came naturally to me. I stared at my flat, uneven feet with disdain. In class, I feel like a leggy foal struggling to stand, not in any cute way, but still smeared in afterbirth as the floor slips beneath me. My lost lover had forsaken me.

So, I trained. I trained with the kind of zeal that surely demands a movie montage. I was Billy Elliot with a Charli xcx track, practicing pirouettes in his bathroom mirror (although admittedly I’m not quite at pirouettes yet.) I relevé-ed on subway platforms. I analyzed my tendus from every angle. I bought a Theraband. I pointed and flexed, heel-ball-toe, toe-ball heel, again and again and again. In the evenings, I’d summon my roommate to scrutinize the arches of my feet. Do they look higher than in the summer? Yes, Magda, probably. Doesn’t the left arch look different? What? No, see, there, the toe doesn’t point as much. She would peer closely. A centimeter’s difference, she’d say. I’d sigh, flex my feet, tug on my Theraband, and point again until they cramp.

All the while, I watched ballet YouTubers like Madeline Woo and Isabella Boylston, films like First Position and Leap, heard stories about training at ballet academies and competitions. I stare at their feet with the intensity of a fetishist. These dancers break in their pointe shoes like it’s second nature and casually développé over subway turnstiles. What’s tugging me toward this life isn’t just admiration, it’s obsession, it’s childlike self-indulgence. I am actively fantasizing about what kind of dancer I would be if I hadn’t stopped when I was young. How my muscles would move, how every incremental change in position would feel in my body. How deep my split would be, how many successive pirouettes I could do. I want to be these miraculous creatures—desperately.

…

“I feel like my heart is always with ballet,” Fiona, an undergraduate ballerina who is leagues beyond whatever’s happening in Ballet I, told me. Growing up in Alaska, she’s been dancing since she was four, but began moving all around the country when she started training at dance academies. Fiona loves ballet as a space of wordless expression, an art form that suits her shyness, but is also drawn to the tradition’s constant emphasis on improvement. “It’s this art where you have endless things to work on,” she told me. “Which is daunting, but also kind of inspiring.” 

Grace, a sophomore who dances alongside Fiona in Columbia Repertory Ballet and Columbia Ballet Collaborative, articulated something similar. “I'm always trying to be better,” she explained. “That’s the whole point—no one’s actually perfect, but you’re always trying to get a little bit closer to that.” Grace started dancing back in preschool, but she didn’t take it seriously until her tweens. Once she got a taste of the feeling of being onstage, the aesthetic and energy emanating off the audience, she started training hard. She eventually became a member of the graduate program at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater before deciding to go to college. “Being on stage … those costumes and the lights and the sets and everything, performing for thousands of people is a feeling that you can’t really recreate anywhere else,” she gushed. As incredible and constraining as the art form is, Grace said, “you get to be free.”

At the same time, classical ballet, perhaps more than any other activity, is hyper-focused on an unattainable ideal. In the bleakest terms, there is exactly one template, and you have to sacrifice your whole body to squeeze into it. “The more you improve, the more you realize you have even more to work on. It’s a never-ending cycle,” says Grace. “Some people like that. I think that draws a lot of people in.” It’s an indescribable, counter-intuitive feeling. We dance to get closer to an immaculate, impossible(!), almost platonic, ideal. We will never, ever be satisfied. 

…

Every dancer dances in spite of something, and in ballet, the stakes are extreme. The pursuit for perfection relies on the dancer’s physical limits. Dancers bend and stretch their bodies, their life-sustaining essence, into a mold. At worst, the consequences are life-threatening eating disorders or career-ending injuries. Though the professionals make their performances look effortless, the degree of grace presented corresponds with the level of physical and mental exertion. Dancing in Pittsburgh, Grace gave at least 40 hours to dance each week. At academies, Fiona would dance all day, six days a week. In addition, ballet dancers often cross-train in another sport to improve flexibility and build strength. Sore spots, sprains, fractures, and breaks are incredibly common, not just to those who aren’t used to training. I remember a moment in the documentary First Position where 13-year-old DePrince, the future DTH dancer, injured her Achilles tendon ahead of the Grand Prix, the world’s most prestigious ballet competition. As she walked backstage, she winced with every step. But she had no choice but to perform, hop on point, and balance all her weight on that one ankle. And somehow, despite it all, she still danced with utter grace. 

When I think of myself as a dancer, I’m not wearing pyjama shorts in a crowded Barnard studio on a Monday morning. I see the future Magda Lena: strong legs, high arches, cheekbones flashing, flying through the air. I won’t ever get there—I doubt I’ll ever wear those satin pointe shoes. Ballet is a never-ending deferral of strength, stability, fulfillment, and success into a future self. At its worst, it’s a deferral of love; at best, an inexplicable motivator. In either case, it’s toxic and restrictive—is there a way to, as Grace describes it, become free? 

…

At an American Ballet Theater show in October, the company performed “The Kingdom of the Shades” from Marcus Petipa’s ballet La Bayadère. It’s a dance famous for its meticulously synchronized, elegant execution: 27 dancers take three gentle steps forward, then extend an arm and leg out into a solemn, controlled arabesque. They repeat for at least 10 minutes, until the first ballerina reaches the downstage left edge of the stage. To ensure the dancers don’t lose their focus, “nobody,” ABT’s artistic director Susan Jaffe said before the show, “is allowed in the wings during this entrance.” 

So on that night, one behind the other, the ballerinas appeared upstage left and began their slow descent. But as they extended each limb, weaving a zig-zag across the stage, they wobbled. Their arabesques weren’t quite in sync. The first dancer would lift her leg, then the rest followed in jumbled order. The piece, performed by the leading ballet company in the U.S., was deeply imperfect. Some people cringed, the grumpy woman behind me sucked her teeth, and I was fascinated. Even from my seat high up in Lincoln Center, I could see the intensity of their concentration, the shortness of their breath, and the nerves bubbling inside them so hard that they swayed on stage. They all tried in vain, like me, to reach an ideal, and they all failed, like me, to attain it. That perfect self is an illusion, and the dancers on this stage—this symbol of success—were suddenly making it more obvious than ever. With every wobble, I watched each of them fall short of perfection, and I smiled. I can do that.

At the barre in class a few days later, I side-eye myself in the mirror. Among many leggy foals, I single myself out—you, yes, you. Watching closely, I bend my knees in parallel, I check that my body is perfectly aligned, knees over toes, hips squared, chin up, arms en bas. And for the first time—in the way that you know that all other previous times you’ve thought you’ve achieved it were never quite right until now—I find it. The coin. It’s right there. My feet turn out, and I start in first position.