The Studio

ACT I

It smells different. My first thought, despite all the obvious changes, is that the smell is unfamiliar. Not the vaguely sterile, somewhat floral, heavily human scent of my childhood in the studio, but rather the generic smell of large chain retail stores - new, clean, impersonal.

The clothing store sits in a strip mall, wedged between a pharmacy and pet supply shop, its display windows advertising an array of linen pieces in unobtrusive, mostly beige colors. The mannequins modelling the clothes are so foreign to me that when I spied them from the post office across the street, I did a double take to verify that they were indeed fake figures and not a trick of my imagination.

For years this space sat empty, and the surprise of seeing it suddenly filled is enough to bring me back through its doors, some ten years later.

It’s not like stepping into a time machine. Nothing is the same. There are walls where there once was open space, and racks of clothing where there used to be barres.

And the smell.

In all my memories, now blurry with age and avoidance, the smell has always remained, the one enduring feature of my time here. It was the first thing that struck me when I walked in as a seven year old - the unnamable, utterly unique scent of bodies breathing, sweating, and moving through space. I had stepped over the threshold and watched through an interior window as dancers lithely folded their torsos over their legs, their arms tracing invisible patterns in the air, endlessly graceful even as they warmed up.

I wanted to be like them, to move with elegance and perceived ease. It was mesmerizing to watch their bodies torque and turn, when all I’d known up to that point was my own young body, clumsy and unwieldy. It was born then, this yearning to dance like that, to express and emote and expose. I saw at once my future, a Degas painting in high definition sprawled before me, awaiting, if only I could reach it.

Now all that sprawls before me are racks of blouses, some pants, and a paltry collection of blazers dangling limply on their hangers.

“Is there anything I can help you find?” A sales attendant asks from behind me. The sound startles me and I whip towards her voice. My eyes trace the edges of the room as I go, searching for signs of what once was, perhaps a fault line that would reveal a hint of history, or some mark that would confirm I was here. But I find nothing other than an older woman dressed similarly to the clothes surrounding us, head bent imploringly.

“No,” I say. “Just looking.”

“Well, let me know if you find anything. Dressing rooms are in the back.” She gestures vaguely to the area behind me. I nod vacantly and grab the first piece of clothing within my reach, a long, stiff skirt that is very clearly too big for me. As my fingers stroke the fabric, I imagine it’s tulle, like one of the practice tutus we used to wear for rehearsal. We’d don the gauzy skirts and rehearse for hours, drilling choreography into our bodies and brains until it was second nature, until the movements were muscle memory and could be conjured in less than a heartbeat.

I spent ages, years, practicing and perfecting myself for ballet. When I started, nothing was natural about it - the strength and flexibility it required, the discipline and dedication, the time - it was all alien to me. I possessed none of the qualities needed to succeed besides one, and that was my own stubbornness. I wanted to be a ballerina and I was going to be one, everything else be damned.

I fought tooth and nail to wrangle my hips into submission, to contort my spine and strengthen my calves and suck in my stomach and do all the things that make for a great dancer. I showed up early and stayed late. I lived in the studio, taking my meals between classes, rushing homework while I stretched before rehearsal, one leg running the length of my algebra textbook and the other extended behind me. And the thing was, I loved it. When I started, I was hungry, starving, to improve and catch up to the older girls. I gained my strength and flexibility, I learned and excelled in my discipline and grew my dedication, and time became nothing more than opportunity. To better myself. To advance, develop, progress. It was exhilarating and euphoric, this feeling of actually becoming something. It was within these walls that I became a dancer. It was within these walls that I fell in love.

These walls are now painted a muted yellow. Macrame tapestries collect dust in the stillness. There is little movement here. I remember how I used to span across this floor, turning, leaping, nearly levitating above the ground. It gives me a feeling of vertigo so swift I end up fisting the skirt and pulling it from the hanger. The shop attendant looks up, surprised by the flurry of activity in the otherwise quiet shop.

“Actually,” I say to her, brandishing the skirt in front of me, “I think I found something.” In reality I have no interest in the skirt. In fact, I’m almost certain that it’s not my size, but suddenly I need a sense of grounding. I want to see myself in this space again, my reflection staring back at me the way it did when I was young. I want to be transported.

“Can I try it on?”

ACT II

To her credit, the sales attendant says nothing about my strange behavior and my apparent lack of body awareness, if the sail of a skirt I’m carrying is anything to go by.

Instead she politely says, “Absolutely!” and leads me to the dressing rooms in the back. “Call out if you need any help. My name’s Alice,” she says as she gestures to the center door.

I thank her quickly and slip into the tiny room, leaning my forehead against the cool wood as soon as it shuts. I pull in a deep inhale and am once again surprised that I don’t catch a hint of that studio smell, of my own sweat mixed with hairspray and the disinfectant wipes we used to use on the barres. I close my eyes before turning to the mirror. I don’t want to see myself yet. When the studio was still the studio, the back wall consisted of a floor to ceiling mirror, where we’d stare with unflinching gazes, scrutinizing our every inch. The placement of the dressing rooms now means that the tiny mirror across from me is in the same place the original once stood, a slice of the past, reflecting the present.

The low hum of anxiety that lives in my chest ramps up, a swarm of bees buzzing through my center. I’m scared of what I’ll see, terrified of what I won’t. I’m not the same girl who stood before this mirror all those years ago. I’m not even a dancer. A sense of shame rackets through me, and I squeeze my eyes tighter, praying for a few more seconds of calm in this space between memory and reality.

As always happens in moments of weakness, memory finds me first. Flashes of combinations and choreography streak through my mind, a rolodex of ballets and pieces practiced and performed across the years.

The bulk of it is from my early teens, when I got good. Really good. Suddenly I wasn’t that clumsy, unwieldy child anymore but a proper dancer, with long limbs and poise. All that energy I had in the beginning, the passion and stubbornness, funneled into a devotion and work ethic that set me apart. I was moved to the advanced class early. I was cast in solo roles, and then partnered ones. I was trained like a professional because I was on a trajectory to be a professional, and it was intoxicating.

Being talented, being loved, being celebrated and recognized and promoted over and over was the greatest feeling in the world, and I was only fifteen. It was like I was unstoppable; there was nothing that could slow me down. I’d made it.

Back in the dressing room now, I open my eyes, finally, and I’m met with my adult face. My adult body. I feel large in the tiny room and I yearn for the open studio with its smooth marley floors and ample space to soar. I miss it. For the first time since I’ve walked in, I have a feeling of homesickness.

I begin to lift my right arm, then my left, sweeping them out to the sides of me to meet above my head in a halo. They barely kiss before blooming open again, my chest lifting and chin tilting up, a flower blossoming towards the sun. I tuck a leg behind me, foot pointed, and bend my other leg. My head and chest follow, just slightly. A deep curtsy. The kind I used to give away like secrets at the end of particularly grueling variations.

I feel a momentary rush, a headiness of just being here, of moving. I try to lift my back leg just slightly, and immediately I feel a sharp pang in my back before my foot knocks into the dressing room wall. All that headiness drains from my body in a deluge and is swiftly replaced with sorrow.

I can picture who I was here and how I looked. I can conjure the image of myself performing these steps and positions, here, in this room, but it’s not the same. My brain remembers but my body can’t replicate it. I’ve gone soft in most parts and hard in all the others. My joints feel calcified - I am nothing reminiscent of the well oiled machine of my youth and it breaks my heart.

By sixteen I knew I was going to be a professional. After all the work I’d put in, it felt inevitable. I was tired, of course, but I was happy. The exhaustion was worth it when I was dancing like it was my calling, like I was made for it. Ballet was my entire identity, my true love, my future. It was everything. And then the first break happened.

ACT III

I want to get out of this dressing room. I fumble with the lock, my fingers slipping uselessly over the cool metal before I manage to swing the door open. Alice stands a little ways away, folding stock at a low table.

“Did it work?” She asks, abandoning the shirt in her hands.

“Did what work?” I’m momentarily confused by her question, like she somehow knows my trip to the dressing room was actually a trip down memory lane, and she’s asking whether or not I’m recovered from whatever demons were haunting me when I walked in.

But then she glances behind me, to the skirt still hanging on the hanger, and I reply, belatedly, “The skirt! No, no it didn’t really fit.”

“Shame,” she replies, “I thought it suited you.”

I don’t see how she could think that when all I can feel is completely out of place. Nothing in here was ever going to change the fact that I no longer belong. The studio is gone, and so is the dancer I was or thought I’d be. Any last vestiges of that identity have disappeared, buried now under ugly beige linen.

“Well,” Alice continues, not unkindly, “Maybe we can find you something else.”

Something else. Hasn’t that been my mantra since I was eighteen? I’ve been searching for something else for the last ten years. I haven’t found it, and I’m pretty confident I’m not going to find it here, when here was the very thing I was avoiding.

It started in my foot. A pain that was negligible at first and then grew and grew until it was excruciating. Clean break, the doctor said. Eight weeks off, and then I could begin physical therapy. Eight weeks was a lifetime in the ballet world. Since I’d started dancing nine years earlier, I’d never taken more than three weeks off. I thought I was going to lose my mind.

But something else happened. The time off was almost…nice. I was tired, and it was the first break I’d had in years. I relished the first few weeks of stillness, catching up on television and books. And then I started itching for ballet again. I was bored of being stagnant and I wanted to be on the stage. I was worried how this injury would set me back; I needed to start auditioning for companies soon and needed to be in top shape. Once the cast came off I devoted myself to therapy, determined to come back better than before.

It worked, for a bit, but my foot was always a little off. Weaker, harder to balance on, forever causing me little twinges of pain no matter how much time I spent icing or massaging it.

Then came the knee injury. Not as dramatic, but I still had to take time off. I was frustrated and in pain, and I couldn’t understand why all the sudden my body was failing me. What had I done to elicit these reactions? I gave everything to ballet and now I felt betrayed and resentful. Every time I had to take time off for one thing, another ailment would crop up. A muscle that was out of work during recovery suddenly overworked and pulled once I was back in the studio. My foot and knee giving out spontaneously despite all my rehabilitation. My ironclad determination wavering, self-doubt replacing my self-confidence.

My technique took a dive. I was no longer untouchable, and companies could see that. I auditioned and was rejected - once, twice, five times. Never before had I known failure like this, and it was crushing. My love for ballet transformed into something bitter, and by the time I was eighteen, I was not only not in a company, but I was barely even in the studio.

I look over the racks of clothing now. I can’t remember the last time I was here. The end is kind of blurry, and I avoid thinking about it out of shame and a twisted sense of remorse. It is agonizing, to think back on your life and realize the one thing you truly loved was lost to you before you even became an adult. But my body was breaking down, and with it, all that mental fortitude I had prided myself on for so long. It was too painful to not be able to dance the way I wanted to, the way I had been capable of only two years earlier.

My breakup with ballet was slow. I started taking less classes. I stopped pushing myself. I never went to another audition. I was tired, burnt out, and exhausted with my decline. Eventually I just petered out. Life took center stage for the first time. Family. Friends. College.

I moved away and heard that the studio had closed down. I didn’t think about it. Too much grief, like that chapter of my life would officially close if I acknowledged its demise, and I wasn’t quite ready for it to be over.

But I’m here now, in the place I thought I’d never return to, at least not like this. When I was young I had visions of coming back to teach classes as a guest artist on my off seasons, of signing autographs for the young dancers and mentoring the older ones. Now I just hang the skirt back onto its rack, a stranger in a strange place.

Like my body, only a shell of what it was years ago, this place is just a carcass. The studio no longer exists, and neither does the dancer I once was. It is time to face those facts head on. I’ve been mourning ballet for nearly as long as I was living it. And it has been my own stubbornness, which once propelled me to success, that’s been holding me back. The last grace I can grant myself, my final act before the curtains close, will be to let it go.

I look to Alice as I walk towards the door. “Thank you,” I say, “For everything.”

“Of course, dear,” she replies. “I’m sorry you couldn’t find what you were looking for.”

I nod and grab the door handle. What I don’t say is that I found something else. A sense of closure, or the beginnings of one, at least.

I take a deep breath. The smell is unfamiliar. I think, maybe, finally, it’s the smell of a new beginning.