By Janine Kovac
Last week, following a book event in my hometown for my memoir ‘The Nutcracker Chronicles‘, I received a phone call from someone who’d known me in my youth. Although she was several years older than I, we’d gone to the same ballet school. Over the years she’d watched me progress from a gangly tween to a ballerina who danced in Iceland, Italy, and San Francisco.
“I just finished your book,” she said. “And well…just. Wow.”
My heart buzzed with the compliment. This was exactly the kind of response I was hoping to elicit from readers who knew the ballet world. I thanked her, flattered that she would make the effort to let me know. Of course, she added, pausing just long enough for me to fill the lull with the anticipation of more praise, she liked my first book better. Slam!
Perhaps it was from the years in the ballet studio listening to teachers compare my dancing to my future unrealized potential. Or from learning to ignore choreographers as they critiqued a performance that only lived in our collective memories. Or perhaps it was because I have spent a lifetime listening to backhanded compliments. Regardless of the root, I have been rehearsing and perfecting my response for years.
In my mind’s eye, I held up a hand and turned my head away. I flipped my heart from “flutter” to “shut.” As this old acquaintance chatted on, I pictured a tiny tape machine rolling, recording her words as if they were a voice mail, creating distance between her comments and my brain. How would my seventeen-year-old daughter, also an aspiring ballerina, feel if someone snubbed her this way? How would I comfort her?
“You never fit in,” the caller continued. “You always struggled.” Her voice was triumphant, as if declaring “checkmate.” Always struggled? Never fit in? I didn’t think so.
Granted, there were obstacles. Raised in El Paso, Texas by a single mother, I didn’t always have the fancy pointe shoes like the ones the dancers in California had. I attempted (and failed) to establish myself in New York. There were the requisite blisters, broken bones, and countless auditions. As a ballet student and later as a professional dancer, there were steps that were hard to learn and roles that were challenging to perform.
But there were also victories. I left home at age fifteen to study on scholarship at San Francisco Ballet. Two years later, I danced at the Kennedy Center. After a successful career in Europe, I married my pas de deux partner, had three kids, wrote two books, and was now part of a thriving literary community in San Francisco.
Through it all—and this was the point of my memoir—I always tried to listen to the voice inside that reminded me how much I loved to dance, amplifying the message until it sang louder than the outside chatter that told me otherwise.
The real struggle, I thought, is ignoring the voices that whisper from the wings, “You are not enough.” Or more insidiously: “You are not as good as you think you are. How dare you feel good about yourself!”
Sometimes the voice is your own. Sometimes it is your mind projecting what other people might think about your dancing, your writing, your life choices. And sometimes it comes from those who claim to know you best, syrup-ily delivered over the phone under the guise of praise. I resisted the urge to correct the caller. She’d just read my book. If she couldn’t be swayed by 200 pages of my life story, what could I possibly say over the phone?
Instead, I imagined the tiny cassette tape rolling, recording my silence the same way it recorded her assumptions. Meanwhile, the caller gabbed on about her own relationship to ballet. How she personally had never wanted to dance. How the director who had been such a tyrant never forgot her birthday. I said nothing. I was too busy imagining recounting the story later to my daughter, marking the clues in the conversation that indicated that the barbs might be directed at me but they weren’t about me.
Because there is so much real work to do. There are feet that need soaking and toes that need taping. Ribbons need to be sewn on pointe shoes. Muscles need to be stretched. Auditions need to be scheduled. There are also decisions that need to be made: balance longer on the passé or the piqué arabesque? Should the Sugar Plum Fairy be regal or spunky?
This is the work of the artist. We don’t have time for the voices that denigrate us. I pictured removing the tiny hypothetical cassette tape from its tiny hypothetical cassette player. I flicked it into a pile of other recorded voices I choose to ignore—every friend who ever moaned, “I’m sooooo fat.” Every dancer who declared, “I suck.”
The tape lands with a clatter. A spider scurries from the clutter. Some of the tapes are very old. Thin ribbons from their tiny plastic reels lie unspooled in a tangle. In the pile is the voice of my old director, lamenting that I never danced like a pretty girl. It sits alongside the raspy bellows of my daughter’s eighth-grade teacher, who, during the pandemic, never grasped the mysteries of Zoom and Wi-Fi limitations on his ballet classes and penalized his dancers with failing grades.
On the other side of the room, there is a window. Sunlight streams through and dust motes dance. In the sunbeams are other shared memories my daughter and I hold. There is the tender massage that nursed a sore foot back to health. The external validation of signing her first contract with a professional ballet company alongside the warm fuzzy thrill of landing a perfect double pirouette onstage. There are pre-performance hugs and post-performance flowers.
My daughter and I sit on the floor, sun on our faces, basking in the glow that is our love of dance.
Janine Kovac enjoyed a twelve-year career as a professional ballet dancer in Iceland, Italy, San Francisco, and her hometown of El Paso, Texas. Outside of the ballet world, her distinctions include U.C. Berkeley’s Glushko Award for Distinguished Research in Cognitive Science, an Elizabeth George Foundation Fellowship from Hedgbrook, and the Calderwood Fellowship for Journalism from MacDowell. Janine is the author of “Brain Changer: A Mother’s Guide to Cognitive Science” and “Spinning: Choreography for Coming Home,” which received a National Indie Excellence Award. She lives in Oakland, California. Learn more about her life and work on her website, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
