If You Don't Know What You're Doing, Make It Big
On ballet, "What are your goals?," and feeling like an elegant giant.
Years ago, I joined a gym in Chicago—the cheapest one I could find. The XSport Fitness Express, now shuttered, was located across the street from a discount store and an Aldi just off Interstate 90 in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where I paid $500 a month to rent a drafty top-floor room when I was in grad school.
I chose the XSport Fitness Express (saying its full name always made me chuckle) because it cost $10 a month, the Midwest winter had disrupted my running routine, and I have the kind of anxious brain that always feels settled when I move my body. Going without running wasn’t an option. But as the friendly young trainer doing my intake filled out paperwork among the protein powder vats and grunting men lifting weights, I felt like maybe I’d made a mistake.
“What are your goals?” he asked me.
“To run on a treadmill because it’s snowy outside,” I said.
He seemed confused by this answer, so he rephrased the question, as if I had simply misunderstood. “Okay, but are you working on any specific goals?” he asked. “Are there any body parts you want to work on?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to run and I can’t run outside right now.”
Throughout the winter, that was exactly what I did: I’d bundle up and walk from my little shared house, past the Virgins of Guadalupe behind chainlink fences and the Peruvian grocery store, and I’d sweat under fluorescent lights as snow fell outside, hearing the gentle cadence of my footstrikes on the moving belt of the treadmill, feeling at home in my body. After my workout, I’d walk home through the quiet neighborhood, chilled but invigorated and present to the ordinary beauty of my temporary city in a way I hadn’t been 30 minutes before.
This is a feeling probably any athlete understands, but it’s hard to explain to the upselling trainer. And yet every time in my adult life when I’ve joined a gym or signed up for a physical activity, someone has asked me the same question: “What are your goals?” It is too often another way of saying: “What would you like to change about your body?”
The answer to that question is nothing. The answer to that question is I’m not here to change my body. The answer to that question is I’m here to remember that I am in a body, and not simply a brain floating around in a jar of goo, observing the world but not participating in it.
So much of fitness culture is couched in aesthetic goals and narrow beauty standards, and I’m by no means impervious to these things—I am a woman with a body over age 35 who does ballet as a hobby; how could I be?—but they’re not why I work out, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I might answer that question when it inevitably comes up again—how I might explain that I’m less concerned about what my body looks like than how it feels to be in it, and what it can do.
I have found an answer in ballet, of all places. Stay with me! The body norms and white supremacist ideals of professional dance companies are horrific and well-documented. (Also Balanchine was a bad person! TEAR DOWN THE IDOL)
But the world of amateur dance is different. And this summer, I realized I had achieved a goal that, while aesthetic—because everything in ballet is aesthetic; it’s an art—has nothing to do with body weight, fat-to-muscle composition, or other traditional markers of “success” you find in gyms’ onboarding materials.
You can see it in these two photos, taken a year apart:
I want to talk about these two photos. I look basically the same in both, but in the second photo, you can see the progression of my ballet technique: My alignment is better, my ankles are strong enough to support my body en pointe without the barre, my hands aren’t breaking my line as much, my artistry and expression have more intention behind them, my posture is more upright and open, I haven’t forgotten about my shoulders and head (AKA épaulement, a struggle for me), and even though I look sort of annoyed, I also look much more confident, because I am.
When I look at this picture, I still see plenty of room for improvement: My hands aren’t in quite the right shape (hard to pull off, for me, without a mirror), I could probably be getting over the box of my pointe shoes a little more and my feet could be snugged a bit closer together (although maybe not on the mushy texture of the Salt Flats near Salt Lake City, where this was shot), my right arm could be a little less bent, and I have certainly forgotten to wear the “pleasant expression” prescribed by many a ballet teacher. As a friend I danced with in Salt Lake put it in describing her own photos: “Technique en pointe, face forgotten.” Welcome to ballet.
But what strikes me most about this photo is that—compared to the photo on the left, where my gaze is downcast and the swan arms make me look sort of like I’m shrinking—you can see I’m making myself bigger. It’s giving Myrtha*, not Odette**. I am using my ballet technique to be as solid and tall as I can be in my 5’6” frame***. I am reaching upward and outward as much as I possibly could in that moment, from every point on my body.
I chose this pose because when I go to pointe class, it’s the only time I get to feel like a giant, and I wanted to capture that feeling in an image, as well as one of my favorite things about ballet: that despite its rigid demands on the body, so much of it is actually about making yourself bigger and taking up more space. I mean, the very basis of ballet—turning out your legs from the hip, so your feet are in a V instead of parallel—is a way of appearing larger.
This even applies to performances. At the intensive where that photo was taken, I was in a grueling 10-minute piece with a droning score and an exhausting rehearsal process. Learning choreography is a difficult skill to master, especially if you didn’t grow up doing it, and my particular brain either picks up a new step immediately or it takes weeks. There is no middle ground, which means learning a whole piece in a week is a huge challenge. But the night we performed, I hit all the marks I needed to, made up the ones I forgot, and, in my best moments, made the choreography as big as possible.
When I watched the video back this week, I was satisfied with it. Learning that piece had been a struggle: I was in front lines, some very exposed sections, and a very speedy crossover****. Given all of this, I thought the final product was great. When I led a line onstage for the finale of the piece, I did it on time and got my row of dancers onto our mark, cuing off my friend leading her own line from the opposite direction. This is not something I had done very successfully in rehearsal.
“WE ENTERED ON TIME,” my friend texted after the video of our show was posted.
“GOOD JOB US,” I responded.
She also said that she’d noticed her dancing looked better when she was confident. I could see this in mine, too: For me, sometimes if I’m not feeling confident about a step, if I just make it as huge as possible, it sort of doesn’t matter. It looks better than a step that’s correct but timid. Even if you don’t do the choreography perfectly, no one will know as long as you don’t stop dancing.
Make it bigger, even when you’re feeling unsure. Commit to the movement, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Take up space. Be a giant. Find the confidence in your body and let it carry you through. These are the lessons ballet has taught me. And I wish the professional dance world would find in this the inspiration I do: that ballet can be a way to relax into movement, to lean into letting yourself be as big and dramatic as possible, and to celebrate what your body is capable of exactly as it is right now.
“What goals are you working on?” Well, my guy, I want to feel like I’m flying and also six feet tall. But I know you can’t help me with that.
*In Giselle, Myrtha is the queen of the Wilis—ghosts of young women who were betrayed by men and now stalk the forest at night forcing men to dance until they die. They also have cute little wings, because most classical ballets are like Disney movies with Norwegian black metal vibes.
**Odette is the swan queen in Swan Lake. She’s a beautiful princess and also a terrified bird (of course).
***5’7” with good posture.
****This is when you exit to one side of the stage but have your next entrance on the opposite side so you have to run in a circle when you’re already gassed from dancing. It’s… invigorating!
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Playing you out: The Beach Boys x Shelley Long masterpiece that is the opening credits to Troop Beverly Hills. Have a little faith in yourself!
Absolutely love this. And you! Yes to doing everything bigger!!!!!!!