Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet Read Online Free

teacher, and many factors are considered. Is the dancer strong enough? Can she rise up on to the ball of her foot with her leg in proper alignment? Will her technical ability support this added level of difficulty? Dancing
en pointe
is entirely different from dancing in the soft pink ballet slippers, and many ballet steps have to be relearned. Ms. Shields had been watching all of us carefully, and she felt that it was time for us to start beginner pointe classes.
    She took us to the nearest ballet shop and fitted each one of us individually for pointe shoes. I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful. Ms. Shields sent us home with a stern warning not to wear our shoes in the house; we needed to be trained properly in how to go
en pointe
, otherwise we could twist an ankle. We were instructed to wait to put on our shoes until the next week, when we had our first pointe class.
    I compromised. I did not actually walk in the pointe shoes or go up
en pointe
in them, but I put them on my feet, lay back on my bed, and kicked them in the air, marveling at how wonderful these mysterious shoes were. I couldn’t wait until our first class!
    My first experience
en pointe
was not exactly what I imagined. It felt weird, as if my toes were inside bricks, and standing on my toes, though thrilling at first, was decidedly uncomfortable by the end of class. Ms. Shields had taught us how to put lamb’s wool around our toes to cushion them, but during the class the lamb’s wool had shifted around and holes had formed that left my tender skin unprotected. I got blisters.
    Later, I learned that dancers actually taped their toes with masking tape to prevent blisters. But for now, I was a ballerina with blisters on her feet! From her pointe shoes! How wonderfully thrilling.
    A number of us were ahead of the other students, and when Ms. Shields decided we had progressed far enough, she started an actual little performance company that she called the South Carolina Children’s Ballet Theatre. This was exciting for all of us, because it meant we were going to put on real productions in a real theater. Ms. Shields rented a small auditorium, and rehearsals began for our first show; we would be dancing a mixed bill of choreography Ms. Shields made for us. As exciting as it was, however, suddenly there was a new element of pressure and competition in the ballet studio. It became apparent that now all the girls would not be treated equally on the stage. In class, we all danced together, but for the performances, some girls were being given special featured parts, and some were not. The stakes were being raised for everyone: Ms. Shields was very demanding. She had high expectations for the performance, and would sometimes become short-tempered. Since she was choreographing, producing, and designing the entire production by herself, she was under a lot of stress as well.
    I knew that I was one of the better girls in the class, and I desperately wanted a special part, so I was anxious about the rehearsals. Ms. Shields became even more demanding in classes and occasionally lost her patience with me.
    “What are you doing over there, Jenny?” she would ask me, her eyes on fire. “You are too lazy. You think ballet is always going to come easily to you. It’s not! It takes constant hard work. You can’t let up for a minute!”
    After lectures like that, given before the entire class, I would cry all the way home. But it never stopped me from coming, and besides, she was right: I was certainly lazy at times. I liked to daydream, and not just in right field—I’d find myself drifting away during the less interesting parts of ballet class, like the barre work. I was used to not having to try very hard for things, and while I was learning discipline, I also relied to a large degree on my natural abilities. There was a complacent part of me that thought ballet would just be something else I was good at and that I wouldn’t really have to try that