sam new / essay

A Light Begins Inside Her Body

Between wooden floorboards, cigarette smoke rises from the pawn shop below, through years of pointe shoe rosin, sweat, and dirt. Pale yellow walls and paintings by Degas surround rusting ballet barres. She begins dancing at four years old. She spends thousands of hours in these rooms, remembering them as home. She grows. The studios warm with sun beaming in from long windows. Dance is the only thing that makes her feel she is living. It may be the tingling muscular thing she will always remember, even as she changes. Even as she moves on.

*

At sixteen, she leaves home to train at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy, alongside other hopefuls. She wants to be a prima ballerina, twirling like a tiny top, flowing like water, endlessly illuminated in a spotlight. She has this dream from the origins of memory. It was not so rare to have this dream. It was only rare to continue. 

She must learn discipline, not just any kind, but the diligence required for a technique developed by the elite in French courts—ballet. There are teachers who scare her into standing up straight with a single look. Teachers who, even as their bodies enter through studio doors, shock her into upright attention. Teachers who adjust with their hands. Some hands cold, shaky, and light. Others firm, uncomfortable. Peers cut the strings from her black wrap skirt. She feels naked when nothing holds her waistline. She doesn’t say anything. This, she understands, is part of the process. 

*

The mirror doesn’t see all angles. Studio mirrors are like the ones in funhouses warping starved muscles, thin waistlines, snappable wrists. Try to find her body in a photo with her standing in front of a theater wall. She’s almost all in shadow, except clavicle and shoulders in bright highlights. A bouquet of flowers looks heavy in her arms. She’s corseted daily as salads run through her. Teachers approach her, Are you eating? But really, they say, Where did you go? 

*

After high school, she moves from boarding school to the other side of the country to begin her career as a trainee with Nashville Ballet. This is her first introduction to the professional world of dance. She lives in a small room rented from a married couple, thirty-years of age, who dance with the company, as well as another male dancer roommate from Brazil. Soon, she needs to leave to live alone, closer to the studios. She sublets from a country music writer who left all her furniture other than a bed. The dancer rests her body each night on an air mattress. She cries herself to sleep. Every other day she pumps the air mattress with more air.

*

Lost in a corps de ballet, the dancer is expected to make herself visible if she wants to progress. The studio is filled with slim bodies and quiet enough to hear the paws of a cat strut across the floor. Warm-up begins, and she’s late, because she’s right on time. She slides into first position at barre, her dance bag still swinging heavy at her side. She tosses it at the wall. The director wears a scarf around his tight black turtleneck that, if caught on the right door frame, could choke him like how Isadora Duncan died; her scarf was caught in the rear passenger wheel of a convertible. 

Dressed in black from head to toe, the director glares from across the glossy-blue Marley floor with military intensity, five, and uh, six and uh, seven and uh, eight and uh, and uh one… He sings in time with the grand piano, conducting the pianist on tempo. Keep it light and easy. He looks around the room at the entire company. We’ve got a late arrival, he says, though his eyes don’t meet hers. He waltzes his way in a giant circle around the studio, stoically gliding like a swan on the water. 

*

The body of a dancer always remembers. 

It’s opening night. Lights dim behind red curtains. Faint whispers are heard in the wings. A man coughs and it echoes. A baby lets out a cry. Shhhh, the mother says, softly. A cellist takes a long bow stroke to vibrating strings. The curtain draws, and the dancer is blinded by a thousand tiny suns from all directions: some white, blue, red. 

Pointe shoes enter from the dark to scuff on stage. She tries not to trip over duct taped lines. Tries not to trip at all. Her body must expand through the entire room like sound as she pirouettes. Her arms glide through bright particles of dust and rosin kicked up, everything visible from the balcony.

She finds each arabesque. Finds the spotlight. Keeps searching for the origin, a light that begins from inside her body. The performance is over in seconds—moments which feel both eternal and vanishing. She takes a ballerina curtsy to each side—the top of her ankle scarred from re-opening a blister that always bled through pink tights. 

Applause roars to white noise. Then, everything is silent. 

She searches for breath inside a corseted tutu. Beads of sweat illuminate her face, and the lights dim to dark. In a graceful run, she exits with what feeling is left in her legs. Thirteen more shows to go. 

The director doesn’t look at her as she passes him. 

*

Somehow, she never came apart on stage, even when she ran out of breath. Breath was no longer just breath with limbs moving like they would through molasses. Breath had to be everything that would carry her through after the body became lost to numbness. 

*

Years after, this adrenaline still lives in her body. Her hands still tremble. There is a hole in her that will forever hold this trembling. Control is married with fluidity and elasticity of the body and the mind. Her body is an instrument that can both channel the sound of other instruments, of other dancers, and the sound of its own vibrations. She must learn to move notes across a room, across an auditorium, across the minds of the audience, so that it resonates even after the performance ends. 

*

After a year with the ballet, she begins college in the dance program at Butler University, excited to learn again, not to get too far behind her peers. She is smart and driven and knows this is the right path. She spends weekends driving back and forth, dodging social events and rehearsals to visit her boyfriend a few hours away in Illinois. She doesn’t try to stand out because she’s already distanced. She cuts her hair, and the boys stop checking her out when she walks around campus. She goes rogue—her dance friends say. 

*

The dancer spends rehearsals and performances, mostly backstage, waiting to march on as a soldier in The Nutcracker or as a flower spinning in the background of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Technique classes are challenging. Her body finds tension and pain in its lower lumbar, near the L5 joint, with overuse and tightness misaligning her pelvis. There is no moment of exact injury. No dramatic fall into the orchestra pit or slip during rehearsal—just years of unnatural body contortions, finally surfacing. 

She is twenty-one when the pain reaches its peak. After a summer of physical therapy, she returns to Butler, scared to begin her sophomore year with a body that cannot move as freely as it used to. Two weeks into the fall she drops out. She moves herself into the dorm room, then moves herself out. She visits every office on campus and gives some reason for asking for her money back. She needs a reason to leave that is better than, I need time. 

She fills her car with every piece of her and drives home.

*

Her mother stands at the front door, cradling herself in her own crossed arms. Blinded by late day sun, heavy tears overcome their eyes. The dancer is a shadow behind her dream. The shadow is moving. The sun sets behind them in the driveway. Her shadow consumes.

*

The basement of her parents’ house is no longer vacant. Moving boxes surround her as she sits uncomfortably on the rug below a single lamp. Her pelvis chronically misaligned. She uncovers dusty photo albums of images from her past. Things her mother chose to leave for her to see from early dancing days. There’s a tension in the dancer’s face and body that cannot be understood unless once felt. In the photos, she is never truly smiling. She is starving. She creates other worlds through movement even inside the static frame. She does not show you hunger. She does not show you the labor of building these worlds.

 She remembers training to be something, for someone to believe that what she created through movement was truly effortless. She accepts the gradual decline of her body—for some, not always gradual. She learns resilience to create the illusion of effortlessness. 

One photo she flips over and holds up to see in the light, reads the words written in cursive by her first dance teacher, Dance forever.

---

Sam New is a third-year MFA Poetry candidate at Old Dominion University. She received honorable mention for the 2023 ODU Poetry Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of Virginia. A Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Barely South Review, Reverie Magazine, Waccamaw Journal, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and Glassworks Magazine.