Ballerina Patina

You know how a worn leather or bronze develops that oxidation layer which gives it a kind of three-dimensional, weathered beauty?

Well, sometimes I like to imagine that’s how my past dance classes settled into my body — a ballerina patina.

I will always be indebted to ballet for teaching me the silent language of body lines. Body lines were the reason we weren’t permitted to keep anything on our wrists in dance class. Even the innocent presence of a spare hair tie could break the line of our arms, one of the most important instruments of ballet storytelling. 

I wasn’t a particularly graceful student, but I learned by observation of these lines how to assemble myself in space in a way that reflected beauty and poise. 

When our teachers would waft about the room, tilting our chins, nudging our knees, and arranging our elbows just so, I was always astonished to feel a sense of gratitude for my body. I marveled at the lines it yielded, rather than pulling and plucking at what couldn’t be changed.

The dark side to dance of course is that it can make you *too* aware of your body. These days, as I bump up against my decades-older self in photographs like these ones, I’m inclined to notice other lines — burgeoning varicose veins and increasing forehead creases, to name a few.

But even alongside those, I catch sight of the beauty ballet taught me: the placement of twisted hair at just the right angle; the je ne sais crisscross of legs, arms, and fingers; the direction of my eye-line guiding yours through and off a page, a stage. How all these lines together create a web, build a dance, tell a story.