REDEFINING THE BALLET BODY

YOU know why I called you in here, don’t you?”

I was 23. She was the artistic director.

I didn’t know, but she held the inadequacies of my body to be so self-evident that it didn’t need explaining.

“We want you to be leaner. More muscular.”

I looked down at the muscles stretching across my tight abdomen, my calves so strong that they defied confinement by even the most lenient of knee high